How far would you go to obtain your empirical data?

How far would you go to obtain your empirical data? Would you be willing to sue a municipality withholding information on municipal waste, a company for denying access to their corporate sustainability data, or even take the European Commission to court to defend your right to access documents under EU law? And would you (especially as an early career scholar) be willing to bear the financial cost of doing so? Accessing a data source is not always straightforward. Sometimes, once you are on the right track, access comes quickly. In other cases, it can take years, for example, if you decide to enforce your access to information through administrative procedure or judicial review. Perhaps, no one designs a methodology with the assumption that legal action to obtain the data will be necessary, and some might suggest that such an assumption would be methodologically unsound. Most researchers do not anticipate legal battles in their research; rather, methodological plans are written with the optimistic belief that easy access will be possible.

When I started my PhD project, I never imagined I would find myself litigating against the European Commission (Commission) before the Court of Justice of the European Union (Court). In early 2024, I looked for public summaries of dossiers of food enzymes and food additives. These documents, designated as ‘non-confidential’ under the relevant Commission Regulation, were supposed to be readily available. It seemed simple: I found around ten summaries of dossiers on the Commission’s website, and for the rest, I submitted a request to access documents held by the Commission. The Commission responded that providing these non-confidential documents would be too time-consuming. Despite their public status, the Commission claimed that consultations with third parties were necessary to remove any potentially sensitive commercial and other information. They unilaterally scoped down my request, and I was advised to lodge a confirmatory application, a form of administrative review under Article 8 of Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001, handled by the same institution that received the initial request. So I did.

Then, something bizarre happened: my access to the digital portal where I was managing the request was suddenly cut off. I lost access to the dossier containing all files relating to my request, and I could no longer read communications from the Commission on the portal. I notified them – no reply. With no other recourse, I filed a case before the Court to annul the decision that presumptively confirmed the Commission’s initial reply to scope down my application. The General Court dismissed the action. The judges acknowledged that the Commission had provided false information regarding my right to redress, but they held that the misleading letter was not a ‘decision’ in the legal sense and therefore not subject to a confirmatory application or annulment proceedings. Still, the Court recognised the misleading nature of the letter as enough to exempt me from covering the Commission’s legal costs. It did not spare me from covering my own legal costs.

Despite this, I chose to appeal the decision at first instance. What started as a battle for access to public and non-confidential documents continues now as a battle of principle, a point of law: a principle that misinformation about procedural rights must not operate to the detriment of the applicant and the principle of good administration, which includes access to one’s own file. In that sense, this quest has become personal. So, if my appeal is successful, does it compromise my objectivity as a researcher? Could it predispose me to publication pressure or even confirmation bias? Or is the fact that the Commission withholds public and non-confidential information itself a piece of data that can also be used in the research? Perhaps. These are questions deserving earnest self-reflection. However, as a citizen and consumer, I believe that information about the additives and enzymes that are used in our food should not be buried under administrative mistakes, delays, misadministration, or opaque excuses. And only after these principles are defended does the dataset itself matter: somewhere behind this legal fog lies a dataset that could yield valuable insights. I imagined the analytical potential, the clarity of a dataset just waiting to be coded and studied.

In the end, how far would you go for your data? For me, the answer is: as far as I believe that accessing it is my citizen’s right (and not a researcher’s prerogative). That said, sometimes it is precisely the prerogatives of a researcher that can help advance those citizen’s rights.

If there is one lesson I would share from my experience, it is this: litigating for access to information demands more than conviction. It requires thorough legal research, familiarity with past cases, strong procedural preparation, and a certain shedding of the naïveté that often marks the early stages of a research career. These should not be underestimated. They are essential to making strategic procedural and evidentiary moves that can determine the outcome of the case. You are likely not the first to face such a challenge. Case law may be unsettled, but it offers critical insight. Through your research, you can support your attorney, who must represent you before the Court, in anticipating the opponent’s arguments, assessing the potential costs of an adverse ruling, and identifying when the information might ultimately become available for your scholarly analysis.