The New York Times laid out its arguments on Friday in a lawsuit against the European Commission for the release of text messages exchanged between the European Union’s top official and Pfizer’s chief executive as they negotiated a multibillion-euro Covid-19 vaccine deal.
At the heart of the case is whether the text messages qualify as documents subject to transparency laws. It could set a legal precedent on what is considered an official document in the European Union.
“Transparency and public access to government documents play a vital role in democratic oversight,” Bondine Kloostra, a lawyer for The Times, said in her opening argument. “This case presents a very important issue: whether officials may evade public transparency by communicating via text messages rather than more traditional means.”
The Times sued the European Commission last year as part of a freedom of information request that sought access to text messages between Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission’s president, who led the European Union’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, and the chief executive of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, as they negotiated a deal for Covid vaccines.
The European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, said in 2022 that it could not find the relevant text messages. It also said that text messages did not need to be registered and stored, because they were treated as “ephemeral” documents. The Commission has not said whether it searched Ms. von der Leyen’s phone for the messages.
Paolo Stancanelli, a lawyer representing the European Commission, said in his opening argument on Friday that if substantive text messages between Ms. von der Leyen and Mr. Bourla had existed, they would have been registered as documents. He said that Ms. von der Leyen and Dr. Bourla did not negotiate the Covid vaccine contract by text.
The case is being heard by 15 judges at the General Court in Luxembourg, the second-highest court in the bloc. A decision is not expected for several months.
Not sharing details of the text messages has opened the European Commission up to criticism over transparency in a vaccine agreement that involved large sums of public money. The Commission has published redacted purchasing agreements but has not disclosed the full terms of the contracts it secured for Covid vaccines.
It has said that it needs to strike a balance between giving the public and members of the European Parliament access to information and satisfying the legal requirements of the vaccine contracts. The Commission has also said that it provided the European Parliament “full information” on the vaccine contracts.
But concerns about transparency on the vaccine contracts have contributed to suspicion among the public about how officials have spent taxpayer money. Other institutions, including members of the European Parliament, have also sought to gain access to the contracts and terms that the Commission negotiated with vaccine manufacturers.
Ms. Kloostra, the Times lawyer, said in court that the European Commission had disclosed that it actively encouraged its staff members to use disappearing text messages in communication.
The Times reported in April 2021 that Ms. von der Leyen had been exchanging texts and calls with Dr. Bourla for a month as they were negotiating a vaccine contract.
The personal diplomacy between the two played a role in finalizing the deal in which the European Union bought 1.8 billion vaccine doses from Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech.
At the time the deal was finalized, much of Europe was under pandemic restrictions, and the bloc’s vaccine campaign was marred by a slow start. Ms. von der Leyen was facing intense criticism for mishandling the crisis: Just 22 percent of people in the bloc had received at least one vaccine dose, compared with half of Britain’s population and 42 percent of people in the United States, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.
Ms. von der Leyen’s Pfizer deal was hailed as a breakthrough. With those vaccine doses, the European Union later caught up and even surpassed other countries on vaccination rates, and she was praised for her response.
But she has since been met with scrutiny over the vaccine contracts, an issue that has been one of the most serious marks against her first term as European Commission president. The European Ombudsman, the E.U.’s watchdog, issued a rebuke of the Commission in 2021, finding that it had engaged in maladministration by not adequately searching for the text messages in response to The Times’s freedom of information request.
The post New York Times Takes European Commission to Court Over Covid Vaccine Deal appeared first on New York Times.
