CONCEALING FACTS

It was a victory for environmentalists when the European Court in Brussels recently ruled that the European Community (EC) should not have refused the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) access to documents relating to a building project in Burren National Park in Ireland in 1995. Earlier, WWF had complained to the EC that the plan to build a visitors' centre in the park, using European structural funds, would violate European environmental law. The court ruled that the EC had breached its own rules, which say that the public should have the widest possible access to documents held by it.