Recital 53

(53) Information requests to economic operators should be used by the Commission only where the information which is necessary for responding adequately to the internal market emergency, such as information necessary for procurement by the Commission on behalf of or in the name of the Member States or estimating the production capacities of manufacturers of crisis-relevant goods the supply chains of which have been disrupted, is not yet available to the Commission and cannot be obtained from publicly available sources or as a result of information provided voluntarily. When making a request for information by means of an implementing act, the Commission should ensure that the benefit for the public interest outweighs the possible inconveniences that the economic operators concerned may sustain. The Commission should take into consideration the burden that such a request for information could represent, in particular for micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and should set the time limit for reply accordingly. When the processing of a request for information by an economic operator has the potential to significantly disrupt its operations, that economic operator should be allowed to refuse to supply the information requested. The economic operator should be obliged to provide to the Commission the reasons for any refusal to supply the information requested. Such reasons should include, in particular, the risk of liability for breach of contractual non-disclosure obligations based on contracts governed by the law of a country outside the Union or the risk of disclosing information related to national security in the case of goods with possible uses in the context of national security, which could include national reserves.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-10-27 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.