The European Ombudsman strongly regrets the European Commission’s refusal to follow her recommendation to give greater public access to four documents related to the drawing up of proposed legislation to combat child sexual abuse.

The documents were requested by a journalist and concern meetings the Commission held with Thorn—a self-described non-governmental organisation that has developed and sells tools for detecting child sexual abuse material online.

The Ombudsman found that the Commission should have disclosed the documents to enable the public to scrutinise how stakeholder input had informed its legislative proposal and to verify that it had acted independently and exclusively in the public interest.

Confirming her finding of maladministration, the Ombudsman criticised the Commission’s view that there was no overriding public interest in disclosure because Thorn had only provided its expertise and had not attempted to influence the Commission’s proposal. The inquiry showed that this claim is at odds with the Commission’s own description of the documents, which states that they ‘concern business strategy on deployment of Thorn products, as well as Thorn’s views on legislation and regulation’.

The Ombudsman also criticised the Commission’s invocation of the protection of commercial interests as a reason to deny access given that large parts of the information was of a general nature or had been published by the organisation itself. She further questioned how the Commission could maintain the view that disclosure would undermine Thorn’s commercial interests when national authorities have since disclosed the documents under their own freedom of information rules.