Few disputes have tested the boundary between EU transparency law and data protection as directly as the litigation over the allowances of Members of the European Parliament. Journalists from every EU member state asked the Parliament to show how its members spend public money; the Parliament refused; and on 25 September 2018 the EU General Court largely upheld that refusal. The case remains the standard reference for what happens when an access request collides with personal-data rules.
The requests and the refusal
In 2015, journalists from across the Union filed parallel requests under Regulation 1049/2001, each asking the European Parliament for documents showing how the members elected in their country had used their allowances: the general expenditure allowance, travel reimbursements, daily subsistence payments and the budget for parliamentary assistants. The coordinated initiative, and the decision to take the Parliament to court when the requests failed, was reported at the time in the account of journalists taking the Parliament to court.
The Parliament's answer rested on two grounds. First, the documents contained personal data of identified individuals — the members — so disclosure was governed by the EU's data-protection rules, then Regulation 45/2001. Second, for the general expenditure allowance, a monthly lump sum paid to every member for office costs, the Parliament stated that it simply held no documents recording how the money was spent, because members were not required to account for it.
The judgment of 25 September 2018
The General Court decided the joined cases — Psara and Others v Parliament, T-639/15 to T-666/15 and T-94/16 — against the journalists on essentially every point. Its reasoning followed the line the Court of Justice had drawn in the Bavarian Lager case: where requested documents contain personal data, the data-protection regulation applies in full, and personal data may only be transferred to a requester who establishes that the transfer is necessary and that there is no reason to assume the data subjects' legitimate interests might be prejudiced.
The journalists argued that scrutiny of how elected representatives spend public funds was precisely such a necessity. The Court held that the aim of informing public debate, stated in general terms, did not satisfy the necessity test. It also rejected the fallback proposal to release the documents with personal data redacted: since the requests were aimed at the spending of named members, stripping out everything that identified them would have deprived access of any useful effect. Finally, on the general expenditure allowance, the Court restated that the right of access applies only to existing documents — an institution cannot be ordered to create records it does not keep. The full text of the judgment is available through the Court's database at curia.europa.eu.
What the case shows
The litigation exposed a structural feature of the EU access regime rather than a quirk of one institution. Article 4(1)(b) of Regulation 1049/2001, the privacy exception, operates as a gateway into data-protection law, and the necessity test that law imposes places the burden on the requester — even where the data subjects are elected officials and the data concern the use of public funds. Critics of the judgment argued that this inverts the logic of transparency for public office-holders; the Court answered that the legislature, not the judiciary, would have to change that balance. The same architecture was carried forward when Regulation 2018/1725 replaced the older data-protection rules, so the tension the case crystallised persists.
The case also showed the practical consequence of record-keeping choices. Where an institution keeps no records of how a lump sum is spent, there is nothing for an access request to reach, and no court order can conjure the documents into existence. Debate about reforming the general expenditure allowance — including whether members should be required to keep and publish accounts — continued inside the Parliament long after the judgment, which is a large part of why the case is still cited whenever transparency and data protection pull in opposite directions.