ABSTRACT
To justify the denial of access to a document, EU institutions regularly argue that its release may lead decisional actors to avoid writing down their positions. This would be a threat to the decisional process and the overall transparency of the institutions since such behaviour would deplete institutions’ archives. Therefore, institutions would face a dilemma: complying with the right of access to documents to increase current transparency or denying access to a document to preserve the transparency of future negotiations. This chapter analyses the argument based on this dilemma. It shows that it is a strong argument because of its deontological scope and its consideration of long-term effects. However, these strengths are based on problematic empirical grounds: (a) the transparency dilemma invokes practices that are invisible per se; (b) the transparency dilemma is often linked to the assumption that actors would be sincere behind closed doors, which is empirically contestable. The chapter concludes that the transparency dilemma argument is unspecific and immune to empirical contestations. This means that it is double-edged as it is both powerful and intrinsically weak.
