The European Ombudsman has given EU Commission President Jose Barroso until 30 September 2014 to reply to a complaint that the EU executive failed to publish online lists of all meetings with tobacco industry representatives and minutes of such meetings.

The Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, questions whether Mr Barroso applied the World Health Organisation’s framework convention on tobacco control, which regulated the tobacco industry’s influence over public health policy.

Emily O’Reilly

Euractiv reports that the Ombudsman’s investigations followed a complaint by the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), which said it founds “mismatches” between the arguments invoked by the Commission to oust the EU’s former health Commissioner John Dalli, and its own conduct.

“When the Commission was asked why Dalli was forced to resign, there was a mention of UN rules on tobacco [the WHO framework convention on tobacco control] and that Dalli had not disclosed meetings he had had with lobbyists,” Euractiv quotes Olivier Hoedeman, a researcher at the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), as saying.

The UN rules state that all meetings with the tobacco lobby have to be made public in order to limit influence over health policy-making.

Seeing that the EU Commission is a signatory of the UN treaty, it was expected “to take these rules more seriously,” Mr Hoedeman told Euractiv.

Except for the Commission's health and consumers directorate general (DG SANCO), no information on the meetings and minutes with the industry were made available.

“So, we used the freedom of information rules to get an overview of what kinds between the industry and the Commission had taken place, and found out that there were undisclosed meetings including with Barroso’s cabinet and the secretary general [of the Commission]," Hoedeman says.

"Those were meetings at the highest level and very high ranking officials would have had to resign in the wake of the 'Dalligate',” he continues on Euractiv.