A shroud of secrecy will be drawn over the workings of the European Union under new proposals to limit access to documents and in some cases deny that they even exist, the European Ombudsman cautioned in a strongly worded attack yesterday.

MEPs were called on by the watchdog to stand up for openness in Brussels and oppose an attempt by the European Commission to reclassify which documents are available for public scrutiny.

Plans to withhold papers unless they are formally listed in a new register of documents would deny access to important material and break promises of transparency made under the new Lisbon treaty, the watchdog said.

The changes are being debated under a proposed directive that Margot Wallstrom, the EU Information Commissioner, says is needed to make the rules less vague but which her critics fear will plunge the EU into another secrecy row.

This year the European Parliament refused to release an auditor’s report on widespread abuse of expenses. It can be read only by a small group of MEPs who must go into a secret room and swear not to take notes or talk about the contents.

“The Commission’s proposals would mean access to fewer, not more, documents,” said Nikiforos Diamandouros, the Ombudsman, at a hearing in the European Parliament. “This raises fundamental issues of principle about the EU’s commitment to openness and transparency.”

He gave warning that the changes would mean the European Commission “could share documents informally with a limited number of favoured external recipients of its choice, without having to give public access to them”.

The Ombudsman added: “The Commission’s proposals not only ignore the lessons of the past, but also the new promises to citizens, civil society and representative associations made in the treaty of Lisbon.”

Ian Harden, the secretary-general of the Ombudsman, added that under the proposed register, the Commission could simply argue that papers did not exist if journalists or others requested them.

But Mrs Wallstrom denied that the proposed measures meant that any document currently available would in future be withheld. She added that the new definition of documents was needed to ensure that access was better understood by the public, implying that the current system had been misused by lobbyists.

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