“The appeal for access is well founded and deserving of acceptance”. With a 12-page ruling, the second section bis of the Lazio TAR agreed with Acciaierie d’Italia, formerly Ilva, and ordered the administrations of Arpa Puglia, Aress Puglia and Asl Taranto to make criteria available to the steel company and data which, analyzed over a period ranging from 2012 to 2020, led to the Health Damage Assessment (Vds) of 2021 related to steel production in the steel industry. The administrations had in fact denied access to Acciaierie d’Italia.
The latter had requested this information to intervene in the review of the integrated environmental authorization (the procedure was initiated by the former minister Sergio Costa at the request of the then mayor of Taranto, Rinaldo Melucci) and to defend itself against those that the company considers further constraints on industrial activity.
At the request of the former Ilva, however, the administrations had said no. With a series of reasons: “generic nature of the access request”, “impossibility of providing the requested data as they are contained in computer databases or because they are provided or processed by different bodies”, request aimed at “investigating and verifying, in general, the activity put in place by the administration “, finally,” failure to provide in the present investigation phase, still preliminary, of an option for the operator to participate “, Acciaierie d’Italia in fact.
The Ministry of Ecological Transition had also intervened which, after a letter from the former Ilva, “urged the making available of these elements of investigation both to guarantee the principle of transparency and to be able to better carry out the assessments within its competence”. But nothing had happened.
The judges: the requested data has already been used
The Lazio TAR now declares that “the request for access, far from being generic and indeterminate or formulated only in order to be able to exercise generalized control over the activity of the public administration, appears, in truth, to specifically concern not all computer databases of health or environmental matters in possession of the resistant administrations, as hypothesized by the latter, but the data, albeit numerous, already used by the administrations themselves for their evaluations “.