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I just read the summary of last week’s EU Commission meeting (18 July 2012), and in there I stumbled over a very interesting quote from a discussion on two recent EU Court rulings*: “The PRESIDENT [Barroso] said that the potential consequences of these judgments were very far-reaching; leaving aside the damage done to the Commission’s reputation by […]
Dear Mr Gravili, I don’t know whether the EUobserver quoted you out of context, and whether you meant to say that only (or mostly) big corporation lawyers and “nutty NGOs” make use of the EU transparency rules. I don’t know whether you have ever tried yourself to request documents from the European Commission. Maybe you […]
In yesterday’s newsletter by the Danish Fishermen’s Association (Danmarks Fiskeriforening) I read the following interesting paragraph: “Danmarks Fiskeriforening har bedt om aktindsigt i sagen omkring muslinger i Limfjorden, hvor Danmarks Naturfredningsforening har klaget til EU over fiskeriet af muslinger. Det har ført til flere breve fra EU-Kommissionen til Danmark og omvendt, og derfor har fiskeriforeningen […]
In the debate on latest economic developments – focussing on Greece – during the Commission meeting on 14 February, the following point was raised (among others): “the problem posed by the discrepancy between the huge sacrifices asked of the great majority of the Greek people and the fact that senior executive pay remained untouched, making the efforts […]
Some weeks ago, the Commission refused to give its agreement to the merger of Deutsche Börse and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). I’m not in the position to judge this decision, but the public minutes of the College meeting of 1 February where this decision was taken reveal an interesting argumentation concerning lobbying and leaks […]
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 […]
Today, I’ve made the following request for documents to the EU Commission (links added): “In line with Regulation 1049/2001 and in combination with Commission Decision 2011/833/EU on the the reuse of Commission documents, in particular Article 8.1, I request access to the full database of the “Register of Commission expert groups and other similar entities” […]
The EU Commission, in a radical move towards transparency, has decided to publish one Commission meeting protocol from 1958 on its website. Rumours that one document from 1959 will be published next year cannot be confirmed so far. PS.: A proper Commission document register can be expected for 2015 the earliest if I’m informed correctly.
Using a dataset of EU Structural Funds spending between 2000-2006, Lisa Maria Dellmuth in “The cash divide: the allocation of European Union regional grants“* looks at factors explaining why the European Commission and EU member states gave more of this money to some regions of the “old” EU member states (EU-15) rather than to others. […]
“All the EP press officers considered their services to be of better quality than those of the Commission, which dovetails with the insights provided by the journalists. Nonetheless, the fact that several officials from the EC shared this assumption was a somewhat striking result. […] Between the lines […], one might read the Commissions’ staff dissatisfaction with the strictness […]
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