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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 […]
As an academic working on EU affairs you are sometimes forced to read EU law, even if that is not the most beautiful prose you come across in your life. On one of these EU law journeys I had to read the “Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on […]
Update: See the collective anniversary post by 12 Bloggingportal.eu editors! Tomorrow, on 26 January 2012, Bloggingportal.eu celebrates its third birthday. I haven’t been an editor right from the start, but I followed the development of the portal right from the beginning, and for me it feels as if the journey we went through was much longer […]
I just watched the the Eurogroup press conference with Eurogroup president Juncker, Commissioner Rehn and EFSF chief Regling. I didn’t expect anything substantive – those press conference rarely offer great insights – but than I heard Juncker talk about the future European Stability Mechanism (ESM) – the long-term versions of the EFSF bailout fund – […]
The Norwegian Government has just published a 900-page long report titled “Outside and Inside – Norway’s agreements with the European Union” (the link leads to the English translation of the 1st chapter). The report summarises the scope of Europeanisation of Norway and the implications this has for the country and involved notable (EU) scholars such as […]
It’s the mid-term exams in the European Parliament, and not just the person on the president’s chair has changed, but so do a good number of the chairs of the parliamentary committees. Some stay apparently, others change. What the exact rules for this castling are? Nobody knows. Mabe the EP web editors could explain… Thanks to […]
Yesterday, Martin Schulz (Socialists & Democrats) was elected President of the European Parliament until 2014. But while his acceptance speech, although quite nice, probably will not be remembered as one of the major political speeches in 2012, one line of it still caught my attention (my highlight): “If our Parliament is to become more visible, if […]
Together with Andy, I went to the Parlamentarium, the new EU Parliament visitors’ centre, yesterday. One day later I actually still don’t know what to think about it. It kind of feels like a cosy and fancy vision of the European Parliament, with some interesting features and some strange things that don’t make sense. Parlamentarium making-of video After getting […]
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