EU court rules that farmers getting subsidies should not be named
Following the judgment, the Department of Agriculture immediately took down the list of those in Ireland who received more than €1.9 billion in subsidies from the EU last year and said they were taking legal advice.
Farmers organisations welcomed the decision and ICMSA secretary general Ciaran Dolan said that the EU “had been trampling on the fundamental rights of farmers to satisfy the unjust and unwarranted curiosity of third parties”.
Lawyers in Brussels are now studying the decision by the Luxembourg-based court and some experts believe it may just apply to publishing the names of private individual farmers, and not to companies.
The court said that publishing people’s names and the exact amounts they have received breached their right to personal data protection in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Most of the big payments go to huge companies and in Ireland last year the top 10 payments went to companies including the Irish Dairy Board, mushroom producers, multinationals Abbott and Wyeth and the manufacturers of Baileys.
Yesterday’s court finding resulted from an action taken by two German farmers against the publication each April of the annual list of recipients of the EU’s €56 billion in farm subsidies.
The European Commission argued that since the money comes from European taxpayers, they were entitled in the interests of transparency to have access to the names of the recipients.
However, the court said that while it accepted the taxpayers in a democratic society had a right to be informed of the use made of public funds, the courts also needed to protect the privacy rights of individuals.
They found that the online publication by each member state of the names, addresses and amounts received by individuals went too far, noting that no indication was given as to how long the persons were receiving such aid, how frequently they got it or the nature and amount for each individual grant.
A commission source said the court ruling had given several hints as to how the legislation could be changed to allow publication of data in future, and lawyers were studying this.
One of the main issues seemed to be that the ruling referred just to “natural persons” which meant that information on companies could possibly continue to be published.
MEP Mairéad McGuinness said the EU will now have to revisit the controversial issue of publication of payments to individual farmers. “They will have to examine a way of dealing with the issue of transparency for taxpayers while at the same time not breaching individuals’ right to privacy.”
The CAP payments amount to more than 40% of the EU’s annual budget and accounts for the vast amount of money that Ireland receives. The names of recipients has been published for the past few years following public pressure to do so.
