Given that from what I see the EU Hackathon this week wasn’t really (meant to be) a contribution to more EU transparency, I thought I’d do a little life hack of EU institutions’ websites as my contribution outside the competition. These examples show how Google or other special searches can make your life much – or at least […]
When I sat on a panel together with the EU Ombudsman in Ireland in February this year discussing legal and practical aspects of the EU access to documents regulation (1049/2001*), I said to Mr Diamandouros (the Ombudsman) that it may well be that I’d have to make use of his office in the course of […]
Just saw these tweets by EU Commissioner Maros Sefcovic: “Just finished mtg w/MEP M. Mikolasik, co-chair on EP Intergroup on bioethics about his view of recent ECJ ruling on patentability of hESC.” (link) “Picture from mtg w/MEP M. Mikolasik http://pic.twitter.com/TlK5fs8N” (link) The MEP in question is Marek Mikolasik, a Slovak European People’s Party group member […]
We academics blog to keep our nose in the winds of reality, to make our research or the works of our colleagues visible to the real world. We blog to make academic thoughts accessible for those who are not into meticulous theoretical and methodological debates (or we use our blogs to continue these debates online). […]
Everyone studying the European Union knows that it’s the Commission that proposes legislation. However, this doesn’t say the Commission is always at the origin of such proposals. The Lisbon Treaty for example grants the Council the right to request, with a simple majority, from the Commission “any studies the Council considers desirable for the attainment […]
One year ago, the Polscieu adventure started, the experiment whether political science and political practice in EU matters could be brought together in a meaningful way. Now, to explain what I mean with “bringing political science and political practice together”, consider the following speech: As a political scientist, I shall analyse the content, the rhetoric, […]
The Greek referendum is an eye-opener for all of us, no matter if it will happen as announced yesterday by Greece’s prime minister Papandreou or not. It is an eye-opener because it suddenly makes visible the complexity of issues that are intertwined in what is a set of local, national, regional, European and global crises. […]