(2) Without prejudice to Council Decision 93/731/EC of 20 December 1993 on public access to Council documents 1 and to the principles and limits governing the right of access to documents to be adopted under Article 255 of the Treaty establishing the European Community:

• further efforts should be made to improve information on the Council's legislative activities as defined in Article 6 of its Rules of Procedure, 
• measures should be taken to enhance further the performance of the public register of Council documents accessible on the Internet (http://ue.eu.int) since 1 January 1999, 
• the Council's internal procedures for public access to its documents should be further rationalised by using information technologies and avoiding excessive bureaucracy, 

 

(2) In this context, the Council must introduce rules guaranteeing effective protection of documents concerning these matters disclosure of which could harm the essential interests of the Union or of one or more of its Member States. For this reason, under the Decision of the Secretary-General of the Council/High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy of 27 July 2000 on measures for the protection of classified information applicable to the General Secretariat of the Council, such documents must be classified as TRES SECRET/TOP SECRET or SECRET or CONFIDENTIEL.
 

(3) The seriousness of the consequences of disclosure of such documents, in particular with regard to the prospective development of the new strengthened European security and defence policy, and the necessary confidence which those involved must be able to have at a crucial moment in the development of this policy, justify the exclusion of such documents from the scope of the rules on public access to Council documents until such time as they are declassified, or declassified in accordance with the rules referred to in recital (2) concerning classification of documents.
 

(4) The exchange of information in the particularly sensitive areas referred to in recital (1), which is one of the features of the development of this new policy, will work only if the originator of such information can be confident that no information put out by him will be disclosed against his will. It is therefore necessary to provide that a Council document from which conclusions may be drawn regarding the content of classified information put out by a natural or legal person, a Member State, another Community institution or body or any other national or international body may be made available to the public only with the prior written consent of the author of the information in question.
 

(5) With the same objective of reinforcing protection of the confidentiality of information when scrutinising documents to which access has been requested, it should be provided that measures are taken to ensure compliance with the principle that access to classified documents must be reserved for those persons who are authorised to take cognisance thereof.
 

(6) Since the security and defence of the Union or of one or more of its Member States or military and non-military crisis management represent public interests which Decision 93/731/EC [1] is intended to protect, this should be specifically mentioned among the reasons justifying refusal of access to a document,
 

Article 2

Decision 2000/23/EC [2] is hereby amended as follows:
 

• the protection of the public interest (public security, international relations, monetary stability, court proceedings, inspections and investigations), 
• the protection of the individual and of privacy, 
• the protection of commercial and industrial secrecy, 
• the protection of the Community's financial interests, 
• the protection of confidentiality as requested by the natural or legal person who supplied any of the information contained in the document or as required by the legislation of the Member State which supplied any of that information.