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[…] Already last year, we at Bloggingportal.eu have made fun of this “State of the European Union” (#SOTEU), and Jon was the first to call for a revival of our Barroso Bullshit Bingo. […]
From time to time you stumble over interesting types of documents of the EU institutions, such as the European Parliament Library Briefings. One thing I’ve come across these days are the “Annual Activity Reports“* of the different directorates general (DGs) of the European Commission, i.e. the kind-of-ministries of the European Union. Now while these documents […]
Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen‘s paper “‘The shady side of sunlight’” for the Annual Conference of the European Group for Public Administration tries to argue why transparency is bad and problematic. His view seems to be based on two main arguments: If there is more transparency, government will be demystified and people become cynical. If there is more […]
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 […]
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