The European Commission was wrong to redact details of multi-billion-euro deals it struck to secure Covid vaccines during the coronavirus pandemic, an EU court said on Wednesday.
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The commission failed to show how divulging indemnification details would harm the commercial interests of the pharmaceutical groups supplying the vaccines, the EU General Court ruled.
It also failed a “public interest” test by keeping secret the names of the EU officials involved, the court said.
The ruling hands a victory to EU lawmakers and individuals who had requested the details from 2.7 billion euros’ ($2.95 billion)) worth of Covid vaccine purchase agreements the commission had negotiated in 2020-2021.
The commission — run by President Ursula von der Leyen, who is in trouble separately for allegedly keeping secret and deleting text messages with the boss of Pfizer over vaccine purchases — had offered only redacted versions of the contracts it had signed.
It argued that releasing the blacked-out details would jeopardise the commercial relationships with the pharmaceutical companies, notably where it came to liability and indemnification in the event of vaccine defects.
The commission had also argued that it needed to keep private the identities and words used by members of its team who negotiated the deals.
But the EU court upheld “in part” the lawsuits lodged by those seeking access to those details “and annuls the Commission’s decisions in so far as they contain irregularities”.
“The Commission did not demonstrate that wider access to those clauses would actually undermine the commercial interests of those undertakings,” it said.
Also, it found that those behind the lawsuit had demonstrated the public interest of having access to the personal details of the commission’s vaccine-negotiating team.
“It was only by having the names, surnames and details of the professional or institutional role of the members of the team in question that they could have ascertained whether or not the members of that team had a conflict of interests,” the court said.
The commission has until late September to lodge an appeal before the European Court of Justice if it wants to challenge the ruling of the General Court.
In a statement, the commission reacted by saying it would “carefully study” the court decision.
The ruling “only partially upheld the legal action on two points” and the court “follows the Commission on many claims,” it said.
The EU executive argued it “needed to strike a difficult balance between the right of the public… to information, and the legal requirements emanating from the COVID-19 contracts themselves, which could result in claims for damages at the cost of taxpayers’ money”.
“At this stage, the Commission reserves its legal options,” it said.
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