Jul 2009 03

Revealed! The New Draft Code of Conduct for European Commissioners0

It is unlikely that members of the public, or indeed media, will have seen this yet, as the proposals seem limited to floating around a Brussels intranet. The Policy Department for the Budgetary Affairs wing of the European Commission’s Internal Policies Directorate has come up with a 118 page document that looks set – potentially – to radically shake up the highest levels of the Commission.

It’s an external study, dated 12 May. Citing the Cresson case as a PR disaster, it observes that "Standing still on ethics implies exposure to a significant risk," and proposes a number of reforms to address this;

    Major reform of the Commissioners’ declaration of interests,

    Limiting the Commissioners’ national political activity (individuals are, after all, supposed to be loyal to the Commission instead),

    Toughening up deconfliction of Commissioners’ employment after they leave their jobs,

    Transparency on Commissioner travel, currently obfuscated

    Strengthening the policy on the acceptance of gifts, as donors are presently hidden, and half of them are EU citizens,

    Providing for a mechanism to address conflicts of interest arising in office,

    Introducing monitoring and evaluation,

    Ensuring oversight of the President of the Commission,

    Providing for sanctions of minor Code of Conduct infringements.

The UK was one of three states used as a comparison model in the study of political ethics: that decision of itself might require something of a review.

The section looking at past declarations of interest is of especial interest. Some clearly didn’t understand the forms they were filling out; one Commission Vice-President put his own job down as an outside interest. Several Commissioners filed incomplete or maintained out of date information on their shares holdings. Two thirds of Commissioners’ financial declarations were considered deficient.

Meanwhile, gifts also come under some scrutiny. The current limit requiring registration is €150; but names while recorded are not actually made public for "considerations of diplomacy" – in other words, specifically to avoid embarrassing those people who didn’t give a gift! This also is deemed a major failure in the current system by the report. Of note we learn;

The current public register notes a total of 232 gifts worth more than €150 for the period November 2004 to October 2008. 72% of donors are from the public and 25% from the private sector. The large majority of gifts are presented to a small number of Commissioners with the President in the lead, followed by the portfolios for competition and enlargement; seven Commissioners have received no gifts; and 17 Commissioners have received between one and five gifts.

This is an intriguing trail, not least given that over a four year period seven Commissioners received no gifts over the value, while one received 91-100 – most likely the Commission President.

Credit here to the London office of the Commission, which quickly pointed us to what is online. If you review http://ec.europa.eu/commission_barroso/gifts/gifts_fr.pdf, you can at least get some idea of the nature of the present and who provided it, even if the value is hidden, and provided you speak French. Some are bizarre (geological rock, traditional woollen jacket, silver fig leaf, a fossil Nautilus); others intriguing (a dagger, theatre glasses); some questionable (jewellery, silverware, fine carpentry, antique embroidery, a cheque that ended up in a charity). But the failure to be open inevitably creates suspicion where the gifts come from non-state sources.

Back to the report. With respect to the policy on questionable holiday interventions, Mandelson meanwhile appears to get something of a surreptitious rebuke for interpreting his controversial holiday hospitality differently than other Commissioners.

There are also some insightful comments on the problems inherent with a system where colleagues pass judgment on each other that are rather pertinent to the current debate in Parliament on monitoring ethics.

The document is only a set of proposals, but it’s extremely significant for three reasons. In the first place, it provides an interesting academic study to compare with the changes proposed at Westminster. In the second, it categorically identifies massive failings in recent Commissions. Above all, however, it now provides a template to measure any subsequent moves at reform.

The new Commission has a scorecard; will it make the attempt at reform, or will it bottle it?

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