The EU's General Court has ruled against European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in the case widely nicknamed "Pfizergate." The Luxembourg court delivered the judgment on 27 November 2024, in Case T-360/22. The dispute centres on the Commission's refusal to release the text messages von der Leyen exchanged with Pfizer's chief executive during COVID-19 vaccine negotiations.

The applicant, a Belgian lawyer and transparency campaigner, asked for access to those messages back in 2022. The Commission said it held no such documents. The campaigner sued. The court has now found against the Commission's position, holding that the institution cannot escape its transparency duties simply by not registering communications.

What did the court actually decide?

The General Court (the EU's first-instance court, which reviews acts of Union institutions) examined whether the Commission properly handled the access request under Regulation 1049/2001 — the EU's public access to documents rule. The core issue was narrow and technical. The question wasn't whether the texts must be published. It was whether the Commission could claim the messages don't exist as "documents" at all.

The court's reasoning turns on institutional record-keeping. If a president's text messages relate to policy — here, the purchase of hundreds of millions of vaccine doses with public money — they fall within the scope of document-access rules. Declaring that no record exists, without a proper search or registration practice, doesn't satisfy the institution's obligations.

Who brought the case and why it matters?

The litigation traces back to 2021, when journalists reported that von der Leyen had negotiated directly by phone and text with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla ahead of the EU's largest vaccine contract — up to 1.8 billion doses. The Commission declined to release the correspondence. That refusal triggered the access request, then the lawsuit.

For practitioners, the ruling sets a workable boundary. Institutions now face real pressure to register informal communications — texts, messaging apps — when they carry policy weight. Lawyers advising clients in access-to-document disputes can cite this judgment when an institution answers "no records found" without evidence of a genuine search. The judgment doesn't automatically publish anything. It sends the record-keeping question back for proper handling.

Does this end the matter?

Probably not. The General Court's judgments can be appealed to the Court of Justice (the EU's highest court) on points of law within two months. The Commission can also comply, conduct a fresh search, and issue a new, properly reasoned decision. Either path takes months.

The political stakes are high for von der Leyen. The case has shadowed her Commission since 2021. Transparency campaigners call it a test of whether the EU's right-to-know rules have teeth in the age of ministerial messaging apps. The court's answer, in effect: they do — a text can be a document, and an unlogged text is still a text the public may lawfully request.