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Votewatch.eu has been relaunched on Monday, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s time doing so. Put in very simple terms, it’s a website that takes publicly available information from the European Parliament and the EU Council – in particular everything related to votes – and makes it accessible in a way that both […]
Ich hab in den letzten Tagen häufiger über Europa reden dürfen, reden müssen. Wenn man das tut, merkt man, dass das mitnichten einfach ist, dass man manchmal viel lieber nichts sagen würde, weil man, obwohl man das Richtige sagen möchte, doch nur das Falsche sagt. Vielleicht ist es besser, wenn man andere sprechen lässt, und […]
It may be just a minor issue, maybe I’m also getting things wrong, but there seem to be differences in how Commission President Barroso and Vice-President Rehn see the legal situation on the banking union. On 12 June, the Financial Times Brussels Blog quoted from an interview with José Manuel Durão Barroso that “Treaty change would […]
In general, I think that Barroso is not the right EU Commission President in these times of crises. He lacks the profile, the passion, the liveliness to convince citizens across the continent to see the value of a common European project, as flawed as it may be in practice. His only luck is that European […]
At the recent Personal Democracy Forum Brussels we already got a sneak preview by Stephen Clark to the new EP Newshub. Now it’s officially out there. As far as I understand the thing, it is supposed to bring together everything said from the inside of the European Parliament – by MEPs, political groups as well as the […]
You may wonder: What is the most important, the most pressing, and thus the most recurring problem in EU policy-making for EU member states? The financial and economic crises? The European agriculture? High-speed internet for disconnected regions? Not really. In fact, the most recurring problem is “delegated acts“, a special legal instrument introduced by […]
A group of 10 EU foreign ministers is meeting to discuss the Future of Europe, proposing some lukewarm reforms of the EU system to save it. But more than that: When you read the interim report of the group, you can see that the reforms proposed are not just lukewarm, the foreign ministers seem to mock […]
In the penultimate vote, ACTA has been rejected 19 to 12 votes in the leading International Trade (INTA) committee of the European Parliament. If this vote is confirmed in the plenary on 4 July 2012, this may be the year in which the Commission realised the relevance of social media. It might be the year in […]
According to the 2011 Annual Activity Report (p. 24-25) of the Commission’s Secretariat General, the European Parliament has asked 12.093 questions – 16 questions per member in average – to the European Commission in 2011, doubling the figures from 2007 (6066 at the time). 984 of these questions were so-called “priority questions” (3 weeks deadline instead of […]
After my live-blogging Tuesday and Wednesday night, what was still missing were the actual documents containing the decisions of the Council. CFP Reform Watch has them. Interestingly, CFP Reform Watch have them even though they are not yet listed in the Council’s public register of documents. And also interestingly, although the document containing the “General […]
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