Empty Democracy: The Law and Politics of Secrecy in the European Union

Control over secrecy and openness gives power: it influences what others know and thus what they choose to do. Does secrecy matter in the context of the European Union? What is its role, regulation and practice? This paper looks at how a variety of executive actors at the European and national levels –diplomats, bankers, scientists - develop rules and practices that may have the effect of reducing publicity and general public space for contestation and deliberation. This may have particular effects in the realm of democratic accountability and in particular the role of  (multi-level) parliaments in being able on the basis of full and adequate information to engage in a practice of public accountability. At the same time parliaments –and indeed increasingly courts too- are engaging in institutional and legal practices that ensure that they are provided with privileged information from certain categories of executive actors in defined circumstances provided that that information is not made public by them but treated confidentially. This idea of a privileged or confidential ‘democracy’ if it assumes significant proportions empties bit by bit more robust notions of publicity and public space in democracy, both national and European. Do rules and practices of secrecy reduce the scope of public accountability processes of executive activity in the context of the European Union and does it matter from a democratic perspective?