EUROPEAN POLITICS FUNDAMENTALS — Chapter 6, Exercise 3
The Transparency Tension
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QUESTION:
Explain, using the European Ombudsman's real 2015 investigation, why
the very mechanism that makes EU lawmaking efficient (trilogues) is
also the mechanism most criticized for lacking democratic
transparency.

SOLUTION:

Trilogues make EU lawmaking efficient precisely because they are
informal and flexible — small groups of representatives from
Parliament, the Council, and the Commission can negotiate a
compromise quickly, without being bound by the formal, multi-month
reading-by-reading procedure described earlier in this chapter. This
informality is what lets more than 85% of files get resolved at
first reading instead of dragging through a second or third reading.

But that same informality is exactly what the European Ombudsman's
2015 investigation identified as a real transparency problem. Because
trilogues are not part of the formal, publicly recorded reading
process, they have no equivalent requirement to be publicly announced
or documented. Emily O'Reilly's investigation found a severe lack of
public access to who actually attends these meetings, what agendas
are being worked through, and what working documents (where the real
compromises and trade-offs are actually made) exist — even though
trilogues now decide the substance of most EU legislation before it
ever reaches a public vote.

In short: the efficiency comes FROM the informality, and the
transparency problem comes from that exact same informality — they
are two sides of the same real design choice, not two separate,
unrelated issues.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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The strongest answers identify that efficiency and the transparency
problem share a single root cause (the informal, unregulated nature
of trilogue meetings) rather than treating them as two coincidentally
related facts. This shows genuine understanding of the real tradeoff
at the heart of how EU legislation actually gets made, rather than
just reciting the Ombudsman's findings in isolation.