President European Commission

 

Dear President,

Thank you for the Commission’s reply in the above case on how the Commission prepared a proposal to amend legislation related to the Common Agricultural Policy. Please find enclosed, for your information, the complainant’s comments on the Commission’s reply.

I now consider it necessary for my inquiry team to meet with representatives of the Commission to discuss the complaint and the Commission’s written reply. The annex to this letter contains a list of questions to be discussed during that meeting.

I would be grateful if your staff could contact Mr Michał Krajewski who is responsible for this inquiry, to arrange for the meeting to take place before 8 July 2025.

In addition, I have decided that it is necessary to inspect the following documents:

• any documentation of the Commission’s internal decision-making process leading to the decision to derogate from the requirements of the Better Regulation Guidance and Toolbox in this case, including any formal or informal approvals granted by the Members of the Commission, its Secretariat-General or individual officials, other departments, or any other persons involved in the decision-making process,
• any documentation relating to the validation of the inter-service consultation,
• any documentation relating to the climate consistency assessment of this legislative proposal (Article 6(4) of the European Climate Law),
• any documentation relating to the decision not to organise a public consultation and to organise instead a targeted consultation with the main EU-level farming organisations, as well as relating to how these organisations were selected,
• any documentation regarding the time line for the preparation and publication of the Staff Working Document SWD(2024) 360 final.

I would be grateful if the above documents could be provided to my Office, preferably in electronic format through encrypted email, prior to the meeting and by 3 July at the latest. Information or documents that your institution considers to be confidential will not be disclosed to the complainants or any other person without the prior agreement of the Commission.^[1]

Yours sincerely, 

Teresa Anjinho
European Ombudsman

Strasbourg, 19/06/2025

Annex: List of questions for the meeting

1) According to case law, “internal measures adopted by the administration (...) although those measures may not be regarded as rules of law which the administration is always bound to observe, they nevertheless form rules of practice from which the administration may not depart in an individual case without giving reasons...”.[2]

In the explanatory memorandum accompanying its legislative proposal, the Commission said that the reason for derogating from the impact assessment and public consultation requirement was “political urgency” due to “a crisis situation in EU agriculture”. The Commission also said that it had proposed only “certain limited adjustments of the Union legal framework for the CAP” based on the impact assessment of 2018 underpinning its proposal for a reform of CAP adopted in 2021.

Beyond these explanations, did the Commission further justify its decision to derogate from certain requirements of the Better Regulation Guidelines and Toolbox in any other document or communication?

2) In its written reply, the Commission explained that “in the present case there was no planning of the initiative due to urgency and there was no formal request for a derogation”.

In view of this, was the decision to derogate from certain requirements of the Better Regulation Guidelines and Toolbox considered to be taken before or after the political validation of the initiative? Accordingly, who was formally authorised to grant derogations in this particular case, in line with the applicable internal rules, and who actually granted the derogations?

3) The Commission said in its written reply that: “The delay with respect to the date of adoption of the Staff Working Document was due to a thorough review and assessment of all simplification suggestions put forward by Member States, the European Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development and stakeholders.”

To what extent did this analysis inform the legislative decision-making process, if, as it seems, it was largely conducted ex post? In the Commission’s understanding, should analytical documents substituting impact assessments be published, in principle, before the adoption of the relevant legislative act by the co-legislators?

4) According to Article 6(4) of European Climate Law[3], before adopting its legislative proposals, the Commission shall assess their consistency with the EU climate-neutrality objective.

To what extent does the Staff Working Document SWD(2024) 360 final consider this consistency and how exactly? Please refer to specific passages in the Staff Working Document.

5) What are the reasons for the Regulatory Scrutiny Board to consider the Commission’s climate consistency assessments as insufficient in many cases?[4] Are there any up-to-date statistics in this regard?

6) The Commission said that, due to urgency, it opted for a targeted consultation process and consulted only farmers’ organisations “as they have the most hands-on and up-to-date knowledge of farmers’ concerns and their practical problems when implementing the CAP, including in terms of administrative burden”. The Commission also said that “given the need for urgent action, there was no time to carry out a broader consultation of a wider stakeholder group”.

Considering the environmental concerns to which this proposal was likely to give rise, why did the Commission decide not to consult, within the same timeframe, other selected stakeholders, such as environmental organisations?

 

[1] If you wish to submit documents or information that you consider to be confidential, and which should not be disclosed to the complainant or published on the Ombudsman’s website, please mark them ‘Confidential’. Encrypted emails can be sent to our dedicated mailbox. Information and documents of this kind will be deleted from the European Ombudsman’s files shortly after the inquiry has ended.

[2] Joined Cases C-189/02 P, C-202/02 P, C‑205/02 P to C‑208/02 P and C‑213/02 P, Dansk Rørindustri A/S v Commission, paragraphs 209-211.

[3] Regulation 2021/1119 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 June 2021 establishing the framework for achieving climate neutrality (...) (‘European Climate Law’), OJ L 243/1, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32021R1119.

[4] According to the information on p. 26 of the annual report of the Regulatory Scrutiny Board for 2023: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/caa20c82-6b3f-4d83-90bc-79e4e5af242a_en?filename=RSB_Report_2023-WEB.pdf