The complainant asked the European Commission to grant public access to documents relating to the preparation of the meeting of the Commission President, the Italian and Dutch Prime Ministers, and the President of Tunisia on 11 June 2023, and the resulting political agreement (the ‘five-pillar package’), which led to the conclusion of a 'memorandum of understanding' in July 2023.

The Commission replied that it could not identify any documents within the scope of the request. The complainant asked the Commission to review its decision by submitting a ‘confirmatory application’ and, as the Commission failed to reply within the applicable time limits, turned to the Ombudsman.

Based on the inspection of documents that the Commission provisionally identified while it was still working on a reply to the confirmatory application, the Ombudsman shared her preliminary views with the Commission. She noted that the preparation of such a high-level meeting and the resulting political agreement would necessarily have required prior exchanges within the Commission, and between the Commission and national authorities in the Member States. However, the documents inspected did not include any such exchanges prior to the June 2023 meeting. The Ombudsman thus invited the Commission to take account of her views when conducting its renewed search for documents.

Almost a year after the complainant’s confirmatory application, the Commission issued its decision identifying 13 documents.

After reviewing these documents, the Ombudsman considered that the outcome of the renewed search was still unsatisfactory, and that the Commission did not provide any reasonable explanations regarding the absence of any exchanges within the Commission and with Member States prior to the June 2023 meeting. The Ombudsman closed the case, finding that how the Commission handled the public access request constituted maladministration.