The following are quotes from the Commission meeting minutes of 22 February 2012 from their debate about ACTA: “[Reding] concluded by highlighting the rising influence of social networks on the Internet and the need for the Commission to take account of this in its communication policy and in dealing with various dossiers. Instructions had already been given to the [...]
Today, EU foreign minister Catherine Ashton has issued two statements, one on the conflict in Sudan and one on the International Women’s Day, the latter with a focus on the Middle East/North Africa. The statements issued on Sudan is introduced with: “The Spokesperson of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security [...]
It’s been more than two years now that the Treaty of Lisbon is the constitutional foundation of the work of the European Union. Yet, there are still turf wars between the EU institutions on how the powers laid out in the Treaties are to be implemented. An example comes from the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP): [...]
In the debate on latest economic developments – focussing on Greece – during the Commission meeting on 14 February, the following point was raised (among others): “the problem posed by the discrepancy between the huge sacrifices asked of the great majority of the Greek people and the fact that senior executive pay remained untouched, making the efforts [...]
I recently had the opportunity to talk with an official (director level) working in a financial administration of one of Germany’s federal states who shared an interesting observation: Since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty with its subsidiarity protocol and also following the new internal participation rights of German parliaments introduced after the famous [...]
It’s been a while that we have seen something coming from Brussels that actually reflects a positive and yet convincing vision of the European project. This video is convincing not because it is explains from A-Z what the EU does for us like many of those fancy PR videos that try to sell us EU [...]
Some weeks ago, the Commission refused to give its agreement to the merger of Deutsche Börse and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). I’m not in the position to judge this decision, but the public minutes of the College meeting of 1 February where this decision was taken reveal an interesting argumentation concerning lobbying and leaks [...]
It was back in October when I discovered that on 29 June 2011 the EU Ombudsman had opened an own-initiative case against the EU Council regarding the appeals procedure (‘confirmatory application’) for access to documents requests. In short, the observation was that more or less all confirmatory applications in the Council had been handled outside the basic [...]
As I have blogged previously, I have requested access to the Register of EU Commission expert groups as a re-usable, machine-readable data set at the beginning of January. On 16 January, the Commission replied that the information was already public and that my request therefore was “devoid of purpose” in the sense of the EU regulation [...]
On 30 July 2011, I requested a meeting protocol of the Chefs de Cabinets of the European Commission. On 12 August , the Secretariat General of the EU Commission refused any access, not even to parts of the document. I went into appeal, and on 6 September the Commission informed me that they were unable [...]