We asked for transparency on EU-funded projects in border security. We learned that we literally asked too much, and got a bureaucratic lesson in when “too much” starts.
Over the last year and a half, we sent a number of access to information requests to the EU Commission’s Research Executive Agency (REA) to unearth some of the many Horizon 2020- and Horizon Europe-funded project deliverables that are still not available to the public.
We were met with an obstacle that we had not anticipated – the question of what number of documents has to be considered “very large.” In an attempt to reach a “fair solution” and make our requests “manageable,” REA proposed a take-it-or-leave-it kind of deal: We could either agree within three working days to reduce the scope of each of our access to information requests to a maximum of 10 documents per request, or let the REA restrict our requests as they seem fit. This was not much a of a deal for us either way.
Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 does provide “for a possibility to confer with applicants in order to find a fair solution when an application concerns a very large number of documents.” But REA is entitled to arbitrarily decide what a “very large number” is. This enables REA to turn a transparency tool into a tool to further keep away EU border security projects from public scrutiny.
This happened when requesting access to documents concerning the NESTOR project, and the projects EURMARS, iMARS, and FLEXI-cross.
Our NESTOR request pertained a total of 88 documents, 40 of them labeled “non-public.” According to REA, each of them has a length spanning “from 10 to around 380 pages,” so the agency applied said “very large number” rule that allows for reducing the requests’ scope and therefore reducing the workload for REA. Our request was reduced to a maximum of 10 documents, which meant that we would have no chance to make REA disclose the remaining 78.
It could be worse, as it turned out. We sent three separate access to information requests for the current projects EURMARS, iMARS, and FLEXI-cross. They concerned not only the deliverables produced so far. We were curious to know why several project documents that should have already been available to the public according to the projects’ own schedules actually were not.
REA “combined” our three individual requests into a single one in applying the “very large number of documents” rule, even though the total number of requested documents in all three projects only amounted to 20.
If 20 documents for three projects already is a “very large number” to manage, when is a number just “large,” or even “adequate” and insofar manageable? The answer is: 3 requestable deliverables per project, if bundled.
This arbitrariness ultimately limits transparency to the public.
After a written counter-reply to REA, we learned that this was an established “practice” adopted by the agency due to time and capacity constraints. “We have the practice to group the requests when they are submitted by the same applicant,” wrote REA. Oddly enough, this had never happened before when we had repeatedly sent out requests to the agency.
The agency justified this grouping with “a notable increase” in access requests “during the last months.” Their staff were already overburdened, given that they had to handle several requests at a time.
REA boasts on its official site to be managing “more than 1,000 projects with a focus on AI or that use AI tools,” totaling more than 1,7 billion euros in funding (for both Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects). Since 2014, the number of projects managed by REA “linked to AI” had “increased every year.”
Apparently, the agency’s manpower capacity has not increased proportionally.
Want to learn more about EU-funded experiments at our borders? Read our long-read article:
Read more on our policy & advocacy work on ADM and People on the Move.
