Thread by @LudekStavinoha

1/ Earlier this year, I filed a complaint to the
@EUombudsman over @EUHomeAffairs handling of my #FOIA request. The verdict is now in: the European Commission committed an act of maladministration.

But this is a bittersweet victory.
ombudsman.europa.eu/en/decision/en…

2/Why? Because the entire record is gone. Since 2015, Commission representatives stationed on Greek islands have been sending daily updates to Brussels about the situation in EU hotspots. The emails are the principal source of information for relevant policymakers & bureaucrats.

3/ Little is known about these officials; their names are hard to track down; they never appear in the press. Yet, they are the COM’s eyes on the ground. They walk around the camps, attend meetings with authorities, they schmooze with colleagues from Frontex, EASO, Europol.

4/ I interviewed one a few years ago. It was a brutally frank conversation. When I asked about the abominable conditions and recent NGO reports about the psychological violence inflicted on children contained in the EU-funded camps, they brushed it aside: “kids adapt”.

5/ I requested access to these emails these officials are sending back to HQ on the basis that citizens have the right to know what information is feeding the technocratic imaginaries of control inside the corridors of power; that these emails are a matter of public record.

6/ COM disagreed: the emails were too “short-lived” or “trivial” to even be considered “documents”; their disclosure would have “no added value for the public”. And anyway, most emails are deleted after 6 months. In fact, it even deleted some emails *after* I filed my request.

7/ The @EUombudsman was not impressed. The emails do constitute “documents”. And EU bodies “should not delete a document that is subject to a request for public access until the process of challenging a refusal to grant access is completed.” The COM violated this obligation.

8/ But the record is now irretrievably gone. The emails detailing the day-to-day implementation of the EU hotspot regime since 2015 - that colossal shitshow that has cost >€3 billion and plunged thousands of people into a vortex of violence and indignity – have been erased.

9/ The good news is that at least the Commission must from now on “identify and assess” the disclosure of these emails when requested in the future.

10/ This is the 2nd time the Ombudsman has found DG HOME guilty of violating its transparency obligations. Last time it chose to prioritise the interests of McKinsey, when @Balkanizator and I exposed a dodgy €1 million contract: balkaninsight.com/2020/06/22/asy…

11/ #FOIAs are sometimes thought of as mere tools to open up records of the past; to find scoops buried amidst the tedium of bureaucratic correspondence. But the struggle for transparency is about much more than obtaining specific documents.

12/ They are key to building more democratic and just futures. For it is only through systematic opacity that the Commission can keep washing its hands of the crimes committed at Europe’s borders under the sanitised notion of ‘migration management’.