One of the things that has, over the years, helped me maintain some faith in the functioning of the European Union was that – if push came to shove – you could find out what was going on within the walls of the institutions, and find out what the EU […]
Tag: openness
22nd June – a day of web activity for an open and honest European Parliament?
It has not been a good few months for the European Parliament, and today probably tops all of the days for stories that show the EP in a bad light. As Jason O’Mahony points out, the EP lost the Toland Case in the ECJ yet still refuses to publish the […]
Delightful irony as Koch-Mehrin runs an event on openness and suffers from it simultaneously
Thursday 12th April and Dr. Silvana Koch-Mehrin MEP runs an event in the European Parliament entitled “The New Rules of Openness”, together with LibertyGlobal. The poster advertising the event is shown above. The very same day the Vroni-Plag Wiki released its first analysis of Koch-Mehrin’s PhD thesis, an analysis that […]
What do you do about corrupt MEPs? Openness is vital, but give voters more choice as well
Since news broke on Sunday that three MEPs – Zoran Thaler, Ernst Strasser and Adrian Severin – were prepared to accept money in return for tabling amendments to legislation, I’ve been trying to work out what conclusions to draw from all of this. You can read more on the ongoing investigations and […]
The FT – the pin that can pop the Brussels bubble
The FT series this week looking at the EU’s structural funds is – with some caveats due to choice of words – decent investigative journalism. It takes a systematic approach to looking at where the EU’s structural funds go, and where the problems lie. For someone coming to this matter […]
FT’s report on EU structural funds: some thoughts on vocabulary, openness and administrative structures
Thanks to a few tweets from @farmsubsidy and a chat with Nosemonkey yesterday I knew I had to look out for today’s FT. Their series, researched together with The Bureau for Investigative Journalism, is entitled Europe’s Hidden Billions and will look at the way the EU spends its structural funds. […]