The Ombudsman opened an own-initiative inquiry to look into how the European Commission deals with requests for public access to documents. In particular, the inquiry is aiming to assess how the Commission complies with the time limits for dealing with requests, which are set out in the EU legislation on public access to documents (Regulation 1049/2001).

The Ombudsman asked the Commission to reply to a set of questions and, subsequently, sought to inspect a selection of files representing different situations of how the Commission dealt with access to document requests.