Brussels’ open door — and who’s walking through it

By Sébastien Laye

Cyprus holds the Presidency of the Council of the European Union at a moment when Brussels’ much-celebrated openness is facing a test it has so far declined to take seriously. The European Parliament prides itself on being the most transparent legislature in the world. Civil society groups, NGOs and advocacy organisations are not merely tolerated in EU policymaking: they are welcomed, courted, institutionally embedded. They brief lawmakers over coffee and frame debates. On everything from human rights to sanctions, they have become indispensable interlocutors.

But indispensable to whom, exactly?

The scandals that have rocked Brussels in recent years have largely followed a predictable script: foreign governments, corporate actors, envelopes changing hands. Qatargate, the Huawei bribery probe – these stories easily form a familiar picture and raise questions about the boundaries of permissible influence. However, perhaps a more complex and less discussed question lies elsewhere: what if the influence sometimes flows not despite civil society, but through it?

A Belgian court ruling handed down in late March offers a sobering illustration. The French-speaking Enterprise Court in Brussels ruled in favour of Kyrgyzstan’s Bakai Bank in a defamation case against the Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF), a well-connected Polish-Belgian NGO with deep roots in the European institutions. The court found that ODF had failed to substantiate its claims that the bank helped Russia circumvent international sanctions. It ordered the removal of those allegations and the prominent publication of the ruling on the NGO’s website for 30 days, under penalty of €10,000 per day for each day of non-compliance. The court also explicitly rejected ODF’s attempt to cast the Bakai Bank lawsuit as a SLAPP (strategic litigation aimed at silencing criticism), finding no evidence of abuse.

However, months before any court had examined the underlying facts, the European Parliament had already taken sides. A September 2025 resolution on EU–Kyrgyzstan relations echoed ODF’s framing, alleging that Bakai Bank was involved in anti-Russia sanctions evasion and characterising the bank’s legal action in terms the NGO itself had been promoting. Lawmakers had adopted a position — one that turned out to be legally unsupported — before the judicial process had even begun.

Shortly after the resolution passed, Lyudmyla Kozlovska, ODF’s president, took to Instagram to thank several MEPs , tagging them. It was a revealing moment of candour. Those MEPs are widely believed to be among those who submitted ODF’s draft language as their own amendments. However, the key question is less about their intent and more about the extent to which they may have relied on the information provided to them. Most likely, they were acting in good faith, placing trust in a source presenting itself as a credible civil society actor — a trust that, as subsequent developments suggest, may not have been fully justified.

This is not a procedural quirk. It is a structural problem — and one that becomes harder to ignore when you look more closely at who is doing the influencing.

Brussels has built an ecosystem of access without accountability. NGO language migrates into parliamentary amendments, sometimes word for word, a phenomenon that observers have flagged with growing unease. Networks of intermediaries, some with opaque funding and undisclosed agendas, enjoy direct lines to legislators. And because they operate under the banner of civil society, they benefit from a presumption of neutrality that lobbyists and corporate interests are never afforded.

That presumption needs to be challenged. Qatargate itself showed how NGO structures can serve as conduits for influence. Contacts between ODF’s leadership and former MEP Antonio Panzeri, a central figure in that scandal, have been widely reported. The architecture of influence in Brussels is rarely simple or transparent. It overlaps, mutates, operates through layers.

None of this is a case for shutting the doors. Civil society has a legitimate role in democratic debate, and any proposal to simply restrict NGO access would be illiberal and ultimately self-defeating. The problem is not the principle of openness. It is the absence of any serious scrutiny to go with it.

There is currently no consistent mechanism to verify the factual basis of claims promoted by advocacy groups before they enter the legislative process. Disclosure requirements are uneven at best. The EU ethics body remains a half-built institution, without the authority to examine the ecosystem around politicians — only the politicians themselves.

The consequences are real. When allegations on high-stakes issues like sanctions can shape parliamentary positions before being tested, and when courts correct the record long after the political damage is done, something has gone wrong — not necessarily through bad faith, but through a system that never demanded better.

Brussels has convinced itself that openness is the same thing as integrity. It isn’t. Access is power. And power, whoever wields it and under whichever banner, does not govern itself.

With Cyprus at the helm of the Council Presidency, there is a narrow window to press for the accountability mechanisms that have long been deferred. Openness without scrutiny is not a democratic virtue. It is a vulnerability.

Sebastien Laye is an American entrepreneur and economist, Lecturer at HEC Paris and regular opinion author at Washington Examiner, Valeurs Actuelles and other media in France and the United States.