Agricultural transparency overruled

The European Court of Justice ruled in favour of an appeal by two German farmers who objected to their names being published as recipients of EU funds under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

“The obligation to publish the names of natural persons who are beneficiaries of such aid and the exact amounts which they have received constitutes, with regard to the objective of transparency, a disproportionate measure,” the court said in a statement.

Jack Thurston, Co-Founder of FarmSubsidy.org, a Non Government Organisation that investigates the flow of money under CAP, called it a “defeat for advocates of budget transparency.”

“Disclosure of information is an important check against fraud and abuse,” he said.

The ruling, made on November 9, 2010, challenges a 2007 European law that obliged member states to disclose the names of recipients under CAP and the amount they received.

As a result German and Irish officials have taken down official websites with this information. FarmSubsidy.org said that “all the data is still on farmsubsidy.org ” but the organisation confessed it was unsure what the ruling will mean for the future of the project.

The ruling came the same day that the European Court of Auditors (ECA) released a negative annual report on the EU’s budget. According to the report in 2009 the EU spent €55.9 billion on agriculture programmes under the CAP and 27 per cent of the money spent was “affected by error.”

Speaking generally about the results of the report Stephen Booth, spokes person for OpenEurope, a transparency group, said “this year we have seen improvements in some areas, which should be welcomed, but also worrying steps backwards.”

The report found that a growing number of people claimed payments for “ineligible” land and in one Italian case “the same sheep were counted for two different farmers.”

In 2008 German farming partners Volker and Markus Schecke and the German farmer Hartmut Eifert went to court over their objections to the publication of their personal information on a regional government website that monitors CAP payments, under CAP they were granted €64,623.65 and €6,110.01 respectively.