EU court orders wider access to business-tax Code of Conduct papers

The Commission wrongly fenced a researcher's request for papers on the EU business-taxation Code of Conduct into 31 documentsEuropa and must give fuller access to three meeting reportsEuropa. On 11 November 2026 the General Court partly annulledEuropa the Commission's 28 November 2024 refusal decisionEuropa in Case T-132/25Europa, while upholding the blacking-out of member-state acronyms in the remaining 'flash' meeting reportsEuropa.

The applicant, an Amsterdam professor researching the Code of Conduct, asked on 30 May 2023 for all 2019–2023 Commission documents in four batches: the Code's reform and its supervisory group; guidance notes; foreign-source income exemption regimes; and flash reports of the Code of Conduct Group, the direct-tax working party and the high-level group. After exchanges about a fair solution under Article 6(3) of the access-to-documents regulation, the Commission processed only the reform batchEuropa — 31 documents, 30 disclosed and one refused outrightEuropaEuropa, with member-state acronyms blanked in the flash reportsEuropa. The confirmatory decision of November 2024 maintained that line.

Starting with one batch is not consent to drop the rest, the Court heldEuropa: the applicant repeatedly sought a consultation meeting and refused to cut 31 documents to 22, and silence in reply to the Commission's 7 July 2023 email could not count as tacit acceptanceEuropa — Article 6(3) requires a real bilateral exchangeEuropa and provides no tacit-acceptance mechanismEuropa. Nor could the Commission limit the request unilaterallyEuropa: the third of the three cumulative conditions failedEuropa, because the decision never explained why the 31-document cap was the option that, without imposing an unreasonable workload, remained most favourable to the applicantEuropa. Telling an applicant to file fresh requests for the rest is not such an alternativeEuropa — it adds steps and stretches the mandatory decision time-limits — and earlier requests are irrelevant to assessing the current one. The 30 disclosed documents ran to 127 pages, a limited daily examination load, and the Commission quantified neither the withheld document nor the third-party consultations and internal steps it invoked.

On the acronyms, the Court sided with the Commission for most reports.Europa Attributing positions to member states would let taxpayers map convergences and divergences on direct-tax cooperation and adapt — including by relocating — and could freeze the group's anti-harmful-tax-competition work. The Court upheld the refusal on that basis.Europa Under the financial and economic policy exception the institution enjoys wide discretion subject only to limited review.Europa But three reports — the 24 October 2022 subgroup and group meetings, the 25 November 2021 high-level videoconference and the 22 November 2021 group videoconferenceEuropa — contain only general transparency and transition remarksEuropa, so the Court held the Commission wrong to invoke the exception for those documentsEuropa. Partial disclosure of just the consenting states was rightly refusedEuropa: all 27 states took partEuropa, so publishing 24 acronyms would indirectly unmask the three objectorsEuropa.

The 2024 decision is annulled for the scope limitation and for the refusal of full access to the three reportsEuropa, and the action is dismissed for the restEuropa; the Commission bears its own costs and half of the applicant's. The case was decided without an oral hearing, with Dutch as the language of the case.

Legal basis: judgment of the General Court of 11 November 2026, Nouwen v Commission, T-132/25Europa, on Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 regarding public access to documentsEuropa.