EU court keeps Czech lawmakers’ travel and daily allowance figures under wraps

(CN) — Trying to judge lawmakers by their travel bills is not reason enough to unlock private expense records, Europe’s second-highest court ruled Wednesday.

The General Court of the European Union rejected a challenge by Kverulant.org, a Prague nonprofit that monitors public spending, to the European Parliament’s refusal to disclose separate annual totals for travel reimbursements and daily subsistence allowances paid to named Czech lawmakers between 2019 and 2023. The group sought to overturn a 2024 decision releasing only the combined total of those payments for each lawmaker.

Kverulant.org said the figures would help voters judge whether Czech members of the European Parliament were using public money responsibly and whether lawmakers collecting generous allowances were doing enough parliamentary work.

The judges accepted that those were legitimate public interest goals. “The objectives pursued by the applicant, namely ensuring oversight of European Union funds and informing the public, thereby contributing to public debate on how Czech members of the European Parliament represent voters, must be regarded as specific objectives in the public interest,” they wrote.

The request still failed because the nonprofit never showed why releasing the personal payment data was actually necessary.

Judges said Kverulant.org pointed to no concrete evidence of serious irregularities involving the Czech members of the European Parliament covered by its request. Its examples instead relied on unrelated controversies involving Czech national lawmakers, including six who reportedly attended only half of parliamentary meetings while still collecting their full pay and allowances.

Nor was the court persuaded by an unsubstantiated claim that one unnamed European lawmaker improperly received a daily allowance in 2013.

The judges also found Parliament’s existing oversight system, including audits by the European Court of Auditors, provides a more appropriate and less intrusive way to detect improper payments. They noted that one of the audits cited by Kverulant.org had already uncovered a daily allowance paid in error because of an incorrect attendance list, underscoring that the existing safeguards were already catching mistakes.

The panel also questioned whether the figures could say much about how lawmakers actually perform their jobs. Travel reimbursements simply cover documented travel costs, while the daily allowance is a flat payment tied largely to attendance rather than parliamentary output.

“It has not been established that simply disclosing the specific amounts reimbursed by Parliament for travel expenses and daily subsistence allowances to Czech members of the European Parliament during the ninth parliamentary term would, by itself, provide a meaningful indicator of how those lawmakers perform their parliamentary duties,” the judges wrote.

The court also noted that Kverulant.org had already published its own rankings of Czech lawmakers using publicly available records of speeches, questions, reports, resolutions and attendance, making the requested payment data unnecessary for evaluating their work.

European lawmakers are reimbursed for official travel and receive a flat daily allowance to cover accommodation, meals and other expenses while carrying out parliamentary business. Parliament publishes the payment rules and general allowance scheme, but not each lawmaker’s individual claims.

The European Parliament Press Services said the institution “takes note of the judgement” and that the relevant departments are analyzing it. “We cannot comment further at this stage,” the service said.

Meanwhile, Kverulant.org said it was “very unpleasantly surprised” by the ruling, arguing that it had hoped “the transparency so often proclaimed in EU documents would eventually prevail over institutional arrogance.”

Vojtěch Razima, the nonprofit’s director, also called the order requiring Kverulant.org to pay the Parliament’s legal costs particularly painful, saying the case was about public oversight of how members of the European Parliament handle public money. He argued the judgment exposed broader shortcomings in the European Union’s access-to-documents rules, which he said are less effective in practice than the Czech Republic’s freedom of information law.

The nonprofit was ordered to pay the Parliament’s legal costs. An appeal, limited to points of law, may be brought before the Court of Justice of the European Union within two months and 10 days of notification of the judgment. Until then, the individual travel and daily allowance figures will remain blacked out.

Courthouse News reporter Eunseo Hong is based in the Netherlands.