The European Commission faces renewed pressure over transparency in its handling of Covid-19 vaccine contracts after an adviser to the European Union’s top court said its appeal against wider disclosure should be dismissed.
Advocate General Athanasios Rantos said on 11 June that the Commission had not granted the public sufficiently broad access to agreements for the purchase of Covid-19 vaccines. His opinion is not binding on the Court of Justice of the European Union, but such opinions are often influential and the final ruling will be closely watched in Brussels.
The case concerns access to contracts negotiated during the pandemic between the Commission and vaccine manufacturers on behalf of the EU’s 27 member states. The agreements involved large-scale public spending at a time when governments were under acute pressure to secure supplies quickly. That emergency context explains why decisions were taken at speed. It does not remove the later question of how much information the public is entitled to see.
The Commission had redacted parts of the vaccine purchase agreements, including information relating to members of the negotiating team and certain contractual clauses. It argued that the restrictions were justified by the need to protect personal data and commercial interests. In July 2024, the General Court ruled that the Commission had failed to grant sufficiently wide access to the documents, particularly in relation to provisions on indemnification and certain contractual obligations.
The Commission appealed. The Advocate General has now advised the Court to reject its arguments and uphold the earlier judgments.
That leaves the Commission exposed on a question that has followed the vaccine procurement process for years: whether commercial confidentiality was used too broadly in contracts involving public money and public-health decisions. The dispute is no longer only about pandemic-era procurement. It concerns the standards that should apply when the EU executive negotiates large contracts on behalf of member states.
Rantos’ opinion states that transparency in the process of negotiating Covid-19 vaccine agreements constitutes a specific purpose in the public interest under EU law. That is the central point. The public interest in disclosure is not incidental in a case of this kind. It is tied to accountability for a procurement process conducted at EU level, under exceptional circumstances, with direct financial and public-policy consequences.
The Commission has said it takes note of the Advocate General’s opinion and will await the Court’s final decision. It is entitled to defend confidentiality where disclosure would cause specific harm. EU access-to-documents law does not require every commercial clause to be made public in every case. But the courts have repeatedly made clear that institutions must justify redactions properly and cannot rely on broad claims of confidentiality without sufficient explanation.
The political implications are also clear. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen led the EU executive during the pandemic procurement process and has faced sustained criticism over transparency, including in relation to communications with Pfizer’s chief executive during vaccine negotiations. In a separate case in 2025, the General Court annulled the Commission’s refusal to disclose text messages relating to those talks, finding that the institution had not provided a sufficiently credible explanation for why the messages could not be found.
Taken together, the cases show a wider legal and institutional problem. The Commission’s role has expanded in areas once handled mainly by national governments, including joint procurement, crisis response, industrial policy and defence-related initiatives. With that expanded role comes a higher demand for documentary accountability.
The vaccine contracts were negotiated during an emergency. But emergency decision-making still creates records, obligations and public consequences. When contracts are signed on behalf of the Union and member states, transparency cannot depend only on the Commission’s own assessment of what is convenient to disclose.
There is a commercial dimension as well. Pharmaceutical companies have a legitimate interest in protecting sensitive business information, pricing structures and liability arrangements where disclosure would cause identifiable harm. The question is whether those interests were weighed correctly against the public interest in knowing how public contracts were negotiated and what obligations were accepted.
The Advocate General’s opinion does not by itself force immediate publication of all redacted material. The Court must still issue its judgment. But it signals that the Commission may struggle to defend the breadth of its secrecy before the EU’s highest court.
For Brussels, the case is about more than one set of contracts. It is a test of how far the EU executive can go in centralised procurement while limiting public access to the documents behind it. During the pandemic, speed was treated as the overriding priority. Years later, the legal question is whether speed was followed by sufficient accountability.
If the Court follows the Advocate General, the Commission will face renewed pressure to disclose more of the vaccine agreements and to tighten its approach to future procurement transparency. That would matter beyond health policy. As the EU takes on larger roles in defence, energy security, industrial support and crisis purchasing, the standards set in this case may shape how much secrecy Brussels can claim when it spends public money at scale.
