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After having telephoned with the official responsible at the EU Ombudsman for my complaint against the EU Commission, today I have received the following confirmation from the Ombudsman’s office: “Dear Mr Patz, On 9 November 2011, you submitted a complaint to the European Ombudsman against the Commission concerning its handling of your request for access […]
Last week, the EU Parliament Civil Liberties committee – with the exception of the EPP group – voted in favour of a draft report which in essence supports more access to EU documents (see my blog post). Here is how the EU Council sees the report: “This draft report substantially restricts the possibility to refuse […]
This week, the Civil Liberties Committee (‘LIBE’) of the European Parliament has passed by 33 to 17 votes a report on the legislative proposal(s) by the EU Commission to reform the EU’s access to documents regulation.* This means that finally the process on reforming the EU transparency legislation will move on, although I have my doubts […]
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 […]
“The primary findings are that EU-level groups, groups that promote a European identity and groups based in western Europe receive stronger support from the Commission.“ These findings are presented by Christina Mahoney and Michael J. Beckstrand in their newly published article “Following the Money: European Union Funding of Civil Society Organizations“*. In their research, they use a […]
Back in May of this year, I wrote a blog post titled “The schizophrenic Council, Part 2“, and among other things I remarked regarding the delay of a freedom of information request I had sent to the EU Council (highlights changed): “On 18 May, the exact deadline for the 15 working days limit given by […]
1 1/2 months ago, I’ve requested a meeting protocol of the Chefs de Cabinet of the EU Commission. As blogged before, my initial request received a negative reply.
I appealed this decision, and – as I have also blogged – on 6 September I was informed that the Commission needed an additional 15 working days. Yesterday, I have received the following answer: […]
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 […]
[…] Having access to open data makes part of our life much easier, but for now, getting open data that is interesting for our research still seems to be as much activism as it is part of research. Take, for example, the image below. What you see there is an image of a network of 84 EU Commission expert groups and subgroups (a link means a minimum of 3 joint members)*. […]
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