I must say that I very much enjoyed the UACES conference in Cambridge last week, especially some of the finished and ongoing research I was able to witness. Listening to the presentations, discussions and interventions, I’d say some of the people who were there would make pretty good EU bloggers. Here are some of the [...]
As reported one month ago, I’ve requested a meeting protocol of a meeting of the Chef de Cabinets of the European Commission, which I need for my research. Having requested the document on 30 July 2011, the Commission refused to grant me any access on 12 August, and so on 12 August I filed a confirmatory [...]
I must say that the Polish EU Council presidency has not been in the focus of my attention for the first two months of its term, which may be due to the sort-of-summer break politics takes in Brussels. Or because their online communication is not that catching. Or because I wasn’t following as closely being [...]
On early Sunday morning, I’ll be heading via train from Berlin to the UACES conference “Exchanging Ideas on Europe 2011” in Cambridge/UK. UACES is the academic organisation that also runs this blog platform, and the conference is a space for the presentation of ongoing academic research on mainly EU-related matters. Among other things, I am [...]
Yesterday, the EU Commission published its report on the application of the EU access to documents regulation in 2010 (PDF). The report gives some interesting figures, but one should see them in relation to reality, which shall be done below. A) The report’s figures in a quick and selective summary: In 2010, there were 6127 [...]
I just stumbled over a nice academic publication presented quite exactly 30 years ago, in June 1981. This article titled “A practical introduction to sources of information about the European Communities” by Giancarlo Pau (an Italian working at the Commission representation in the UK; Source (pdf)) covers ways to get information about the European Communities, [...]
England Expects has written a blog post titled “Citizens versus NGOs“, quoting the summary of reponses of government agencies, NGOs and individual contributions from the recently published “Report on the public consultation on the possible revision of the Tobacco Products Directive (2001/37/EC)“. With the majority of individual contributions (~82,000 in total) being against more restrictive measures against [...]
The Guardian just published a nice timeline-map visualisation on “how political shifts have altered the map of Europe” mainly showing the change of political left-right majorities across Europe over the past 40 years. Let’s complement this with an academic perspective: Through the analysis of 264 elections in 30 European countries (EU-27 + Norway, Iceland and [...]
[…] Having access to open data makes part of our life much easier, but for now, getting open data that is interesting for our research still seems to be as much activism as it is part of research. Take, for example, the image below. What you see there is an image of a network of 84 EU Commission expert groups and subgroups (a link means a minimum of 3 joint members)*. […]
European Parliament (EP) Library Briefings are short topical summaries mostly on currently relevant matters (e.g. because a committee is dealing with a topic) the EP library staff produces in particular for MEPs and their assistants. Until last year, these documents were not made available to the public – at least that’s what I’ve heard at [...]