The complainants are non-governmental organisations, which are concerned about the practice of the European External Action Service (EEAS) to provide assistance to non-EU countries to develop surveillance capabilities. In particular, the complainants consider that the EEAS failed to properly assess the potential human rights risk or carry out impact assessments, taking into account privacy concerns, before providing such assistance.

The Ombudsman opened an inquiry, and asked the EEAS to reply to a set of questions and sought to inspect certain documents related to the case.