Von der Leyen’s private texting habits face court scrutiny

LUXEMBOURG — Ursula von der Leyen has plenty on her plate already. 
Amid a bruising wrangle to get her new European Commission team in place, the EU’s most powerful woman faces the indignity of judges and lawyers crawling over her personal phone habits in a public hearing in court. 
At the center of the case is the question of whether von der Leyen’s office was right to refuse to release text messages she allegedly exchanged with the boss of drugs giant Pfizer in 2021. At the time, the Commission chief was negotiating a valuable deal to secure up to 1.8 billion doses of Covid vaccines from the company. 
The case may ultimately set a precedent for whether cellphone text messages count as official documents and what rights the public and press have to access them. 
But the bigger political issue at stake is von der Leyen’s own credibility, as she embarks on her second term running the European Union’s executive branch. 
The European Commission she leads has pledged it would defend standards of transparency, efficiency and probity. Von der Leyen’s team frequently assesses and occasionally punishes EU member governments if they fall short of its rules.   
On Friday, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg will examine the claim that von der Leyen’s administration was wrong to deny requests from Matina Stevis-Gridneff, the former New York Times bureau chief in Brussels, to see the text messages she allegedly swapped with Pfizer boss Albert Bourla at the height of the pandemic. 
Stevis-Gridneff first reported on the messages in an interview with von der Leyen in 2021. Ever since, however, the Commission has been reluctant to confirm or deny whether such texts ever existed or what they did or did not say. 
In the EU’s General Court case, Stevis-Gridneff is seeking the annulment of the Commission’s decision to refuse access to the documents, claiming it goes against EU transparency laws. While the court will make its ruling at a later date, likely early in 2025, Friday’s public hearing will offer the first and perhaps only opportunity for the two sides’ positions to be aired in a public court. 
“We brought this lawsuit because it raises important issues about democratic oversight in the European Union,” said Nicole Taylor, a spokesperson for the New York Times. “The public continues to be denied information about the negotiated terms of one of the biggest procurement contracts in the history of the European Union. We look forward to the case being heard.”
The final verdict may also be challenged on appeal. 
Judges at the same EU court dealt a blow to von der Leyen earlier this year, when they ruled the Commission wasn’t transparent enough about the Covid vaccine contracts it struck with pharma companies. 
They said the Commission had failed to justify why it had so heavily redacted the contracts when requested by MEPs who wanted to check if the Commission staff negotiating them had any conflicts of interest.
Lawyers for the European Commission and the New York Times declined to comment. The Commission itself did not immediately respond to a request for comment.