A court on Wednesday said that the European Union should not have denied a journalist’s request for text messages between the government agency and a Pfizer executive, reports Jeanna Smialek of The New York Times.
Smialek reports, “The commission, the European Union’s executive arm, argued that text messages are “short-lived” by nature and do not contain important information that would require them to be retained. It remains unclear whether the messages in question still exist or whether they have been deleted.
“The General Court in Luxembourg rejected the commission’s argument.
“‘The commission cannot merely state that it does not hold the requested documents but must provide credible explanations enabling the public and the court to understand why those documents cannot be found,’ the judges ruled.
“The commission also ‘failed to explain in a plausible manner’ why it thought that messages exchanged on such a major issue — the procurement of vaccines for a public health crisis — did not contain important information, the court said.
“The European Commission can appeal the verdict.”
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