Stakeholder contacts and communication, EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA)
Dear Trade,
Under the right of access to documents in the EU treaties, as developed in Regulation 1049/2001, I am requesting documents which contain the following information:
1. A list of all meetings between DG Trade officials (and/or representatives, including the Commissioner and the Cabinet) and stakeholders, including trade unions, civil society groups and representatives of individual companies, industry associations, law firms, public consultancies and think tanks, in which the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) was discussed, from the beginning of negotiations until today.
2. Minutes and other reports of the meetings listed in point 1.
3. All correspondence (including emails, faxes and letters) between DG Trade officials (and/or representatives, including the Commissioner and the Cabinet) and stakeholders, including trade unions, civil society groups and representatives of individual companies, industry associations, law firms, public consultancies and think tanks, regarding the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), from the beginning of negotiations until today.
I would appreciate if you could take the Code of Good Administrational Behaviour into ac-count when considering this request.
Yours faithfully,
Kristoffer Marslev
Researcher on the project “Labour Governance in Global Production Networks”
Department of Development Studies, University of Vienna
Dear Mr. Marslev,
Thank you for your request for access to documents.
Unfortunately you have not indicated your postal address that is required for registering and handling your request in line with the procedural requirements. Please send us your full postal address at your earliest convenience. Pending your reply, we reserve the right to refuse the registration of your request.
You may, of course, use directly the electronic form for entering your request:
http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/...
Best regards,
TRADE ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS
Dear Trade,
Thank you for the quick reply and sorry for not including a postal address as required. Here it is:
Kristoffer Marslev
Department of Development Studies
Sensengasse 3/2/2
A-1090 Vienna (Austria)
I apologise for the inconvenience and look forward to your reply.
Yours faithfully,
Kristoffer Marslev
Dear Mr Marslev,
Thank you for your e-mail dated 3 October 2019. We hereby acknowledge receipt of your application for access to documents, which was registered on the same day under reference number GestDem 2019/5607
In accordance with Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents, your application will be handled within 15 working days. The time limit will expire on 24 October 20019. In case this time limit needs to be extended, you will be informed in due course.
You have lodged your application via the AsktheEU.org website. Please note that this is a private third-party website which has no link with any institution of the European Union. Therefore, the European Commission cannot be held accountable for any technical issues or problems linked to the use of this system.
Please note that the private third party running the AsktheEU.org website is responsible and accountable for the processing of your personal data via that website, and not the European Commission. For further information on your rights, please refer to the third party’s privacy policy.
We understand that the third party running that website usually publishes the content of applicants’ correspondence with the European Commission on that website. This includes the personal data that you may have communicated to the European Commission (e.g. your private postal address).
Similarly, the third party publishes on that website any reply that the Commission will send to the email address of the applicants generated by the AsktheEU.org website.
If you do not wish your correspondence with the European Commission to be published on the AsktheEU.org website, you can provide us with an alternative, private e-mail address for further correspondence. In that case, the European Commission will send all future electronic correspondence addressed to you only to that private address.
Yours faithfully,
TRADE ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS
Dear Mr Marslev,
We refer to your request for access to documents, registered under the
above-mentioned reference number.
Your application concerns a very large number of documents, which need to
be assessed individually. Such a detailed analysis cannot be carried out
within the normal time limits set out in Article 7 of Regulation (EC) No
1049/2001. In addition, it could be that for documents originating from
third parties, these third parties need to be consulted.
However, the Regulation also provides for a possibility to confer with
applicants in order to find a fair solution when an application relates to
a very large number of documents. Article 6(3) provides that in the event
of such an application, the institution concerned may confer with the
applicant informally, with a view to finding a fair solution. In
accordance with the case law of the EU Courts, such a solution can only
concern the content or the number of documents applied for, not the
deadline for replying. This means that the scope of the request must be
reduced in a way that would enable its treatment within the extended
deadline of 15 + 15 working days.
You are kindly requested to narrow down the scope of your request (i.e.
the subject matters and/or timeframe covered), or indicate a specific
perspective or aspect, so as to reduce it to a manageable amount of
documents. In order to treat correctly your request, we would like to
better understand what documents you are interested in. We were informed
by our unit dealing with Vietnam that you already requested a meeting with
them. Since they will also deal with your present access to documents
request, they are happy to discuss this issue with you in more detail.
They will be in touch with you to schedule this meeting and after we can
see how to proceed with your access to documents request.
We have extended the deadline to 15 November.
Yours sincerely,
Access to Documents Team
European Commission
DG TRADE
Dear Trade,
Thank you very much for your reply. We acknowledge and now realise that we have requested a large amount of documents. I have discussed this amongst the research project investigators and have significantly narrowed down our request in light of our research questions. We would now like to revise our request to include just the first point of the original request, but broken into a point on the EVFTA in general (1a) and a point on the TSD chapter of the EVFTA, in particular (1b). The revised request reads:
1a. A list of all meetings between DG Trade officials (and/or representatives, including the Commissioner and the Cabinet) and stakeholders, including trade unions, civil society groups and representatives of individual companies, industry associations, law firms, public consultancies and think tanks, in which the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) was discussed, from the beginning of negotiations until today.
1b. A list of all meetings between DG Trade officials (and/or representatives, including the Commissioner and the Cabinet) and stakeholders, including trade unions, civil society groups and representatives of individual companies, industry associations, law firms, public consultancies and think tanks, in which the Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapter of the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) was discussed, from the beginning of negotiations until today.
This request is being made in light of a research project on “Labour Governance in Global Production Networks: Assessing labour standards in a new generation of public procurement legislation and trade agreements linked to market access into the European Union”. This is a research project jointly funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The research investigators are Cornelia Staritz at the University of Vienna, Leonhard Plank at the Technical University of Vienna, and Gale Raj-Reichert at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). The research project is interested in learning about the TSD provisions in the EVFTA with the aim of understanding how these relatively new approaches can improve labour standards in partner developing countries, in particular Vietnam as a key production site in global production networks. In this context we are interested in learning more about which actors have been involved in the negotiation process of the EVFTA and particularly in discussions around the TSD chapter, to assist us further in our research.
We thank you very much for your assistance with the information request.
Yours faithfully,
Kristoffer Marslev
Dear Mr. Marslev,
We received notification that your email address at Wien University no
longer exists (see attached).
In hope that you will now receive it, I forward Mr Berz’s below email to
the email address from which you encoded initial access to documents
request: [1][FOI #7348 email].
Best regards,
Svetlana SRDIC TRAPECAR
Secretary to the Acting Director
[2]http://ec.europa.eu/trade/images/ec-logo...
European Commission
DG TRADE
Directorate C (Asia and Latin America)
CHAR 08/247
Rue de la Loi 170
B-1049 Brussels/Belgium
+32-2-29.80755
[3][email address]
From: SRDIC TRAPECAR Svetlana (TRADE) <[email address]> On
Behalf Of BERZ Peter (TRADE)
Sent: Monday, May 25, 2020 1:52 PM
To: '[email address]' <[email address]>
Cc: '[email address]' <[email address]>; BERZ
Peter (TRADE) <[email address]>; DERAEDT Filip (TRADE)
<[email address]>; GARCIA FERRER Miriam (TRADE)
<[email address]>; TRADE DIR C2
<[email address]>; TRADE ACCES DOCUMENTS
<[DG TRADE request email]>
Subject: RE: Access to information request linked to AtD request GestDem
2019/5607 EU-Vietnam FTA
Dear Mr. Marslev,
Thank you again for the interesting meeting we had and your latest
message. Please accept my apologies for the delay in replying. Compiling
the requested information has required some time and the Covid-related
confinement has not helped.
The attached list of meetings will provide you with an overview of the
interaction we have had with a range of stakeholders on the EU-Vietnam FTA
since the start of negotiations in June 2012 up to our meeting in November
2019. As discussed, this information would assist you better in your
research than individual reports of such meetings. In the annex you will
this find an excel sheet containing the following tabsheets:
- List of meetings with individual stakeholders met over the period
(144 in total)
- Overview of stakeholders met over the period (73 in total)
- List of meetings of the DG TRADE Civil Society Dialogues where
the EU-Vietnam FTA negotiations were discussed – some meetings were
dedicated to the EU-Vietnam FTA, but often the state of play of the
EU-Vietnam FTA was discussed together with other on-going FTA negotiations
(18 in total)
- List of stakeholders that had registered for one or more of these
Civil Society Dialogues (408)
- List of stakeholders met individually or via the Civil Society
Dialogues (452 in total)
You can find the full list of organisations registered for the Civil
Society Dialogues at [4]this link. The list contains for the moment 539
organisations.
Kind regards,
Peter BERZ
Acting Director
[5]http://ec.europa.eu/trade/images/ec-logo...
European Commission
DG TRADE
Directorate C (Asia and Latin America)
CHAR 08/003
Rue de la Loi 170
B-1049 Brussels/Belgium
+32-2-29.63083
[6][email address]
From: "Kristoffer Marslev" <[7][email address]>
Date: Thursday, 6 February 2020 at 17:56:10
To: "BERZ Peter (TRADE)" <[8][email address]>
Cc: "[9][email address]" <[10][email address]>
Subject: Access to information request
Dear Peter Berz,
I hope everything is fine in Brussels. Thank you very much for our meeting
in November - that was very interesting. Now, after having finished
teaching this semester, we started diving into our fieldwork findings from
Brussels. And we realised that we never solved the issue with the access
to documents request, which we at our meeting in November changed into an
access to information request instead. Therefore, I would kindly like to
ask you, if it would be possible for you, as we agreed in Brussels, to
provide us with a list of the meetings you have had on the EU-Vietnam FTA
negotiations and with whom? That would be absolutely great! Please let me
know if you need additional information from us.
Hope it is possible.
Thanks and kind regards,
Kristoffer
Kristoffer Marslev
Postdoctoral researcher
E-mail: [11][email address]
[12]Sent from Mailspring
References
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1. mailto:[FOI #7348 email]
3. mailto:[email address]
4. https://trade.ec.europa.eu/civilsoc/sear...
6. mailto:[email address]
7. mailto:[email address]
8. mailto:[email address]
9. mailto:[email address]
10. mailto:[email address]
11. https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/link.... address]/0?redirect=mailto*3Akristoffer.marslev*40univie.ac.at&recipient=cGV0ZXIuYmVyekBlYy5ldXJvcGEuZXU*3D__;JSUl!!DOxrgLBm!T4O9thecON9dC1OERd_uPFB_OeEmoziYJP69A91FRDvy5Gkk9JQ6RcB7qZSGLC7hTy3q$
Dear Ms. Srdic and Mr. Berz,
Please accept my apologies for the late reply. Unfortunately, I have had some problems with that email account.
Thank you very much for providing us access to the requested information. It is highly appreciated, as it will be a great help in our research. We are looking much forward to delving into it.
I hope we can get back to you in case we have further questions.
Thank you again.
Kind regards to you and the whole team,
Kristoffer Marslev