Repeated complaints about secrecy from my fellow Green members have resulted in our being admitted to the restricted reading room but we are still not able to share what we discover there with our constituents or with journalists. What we do know is that 92% of those involved in the consultations have been corporate lobbyists. Of the 560 lobby encounters that the commission had, 520 were with business lobbyists and only 26 (4.6%) were with public interest groups. This means that, for every encounter with a trade union or consumer group, there were 20 with companies and industry federations.

What I am able to reveal from my visit to the library is that I left without any sense of reassurance either that the process of negotiating this trade deal is democratic, or that the negotiators are operating on behalf of citizens. The whole process, from the implicit accusation of industrial espionage, to the recognition about who is actually engaged in the negotiations, makes it clear that this is a corporate discussion, not a democratic one. I picture a room full of bureaucrats trying to find ways to facilitate the business of the world’s most powerful companies, many of which have a turnover larger than the economic activity of some EU member states.

[source of citations via salon.com]

[source/credits]

"The ambassadors of the 28 European Union member states had agreed to secrecy. "Under no circumstances" should the public learn what was said at the talks that took place on March 23rd … Europe wants to send cameras, scanners and servers for registering refugees to the Sudanese regime in addition to training their border police and assisting with the construction of two camps with detention rooms for migrants."

It obviously doesn't suffice that Germany supports - directly & secretly - the Turkish actions against part of it's own people in exchange for keeping refugees fleeing to their (our, my) country.

One gets the idea how the EU officials think about the Europeans they are supposed to represent:
They don't care what the people want. They do whatever keeps them in power and out of responsibility for providing a safe & secure transit of refugees according to international law.

As if this wasn't enough:
They deal with a wanted war criminal and try to hide this from the general public. I wonder how our minister of foreign affairs, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, (SPD) - who in the past has earned a reputation of lying to the public about detention of citizens at Guantanamo - is going to explain this to the constituency of his party and the citizens of Germany ....