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Corruption ignored entirely in Barroso’s State of the Union address…

10 September 2010 in European Union

Perhaps the most striking oversight of the Barroso address delivered in Strasbourg on Tuesday was the complete absence of the theme of corruption in the EU. In a year that has seen Europe’s common currency shaken to its very foundations by the turmoil of the corruption-fuelled Greek crisis, this omission on the part of the […]

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Visualisation of EU funds helps to fight corruption in the EU

19 August 2010 in European Union, Technology

What you see above is a visualisation to who (some of the) EU funds were awarded in 2009*. It is just a little experiment, a proof of concept, to see if open data available from the EU can contribute to the fight against corruption. The map is a very practical way to demonstrate that the […]

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Accounting can change the world!

6 August 2010 in European Union, Human rights, Private sector

(Source: blmurch // Creative Commons BY 2.0) All too often, natural resource revenues flow into government coffers and disappear for a time, only to transform magically into private jets, presidential palaces, luxury cars and, of course, the obligatory off-shore bank account. This is the ‘resource curse’ – kleptocracies (governments that view public funds as their […]

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Back to the dark ages? – EU backsliding regarding access to documents and information

23 July 2010 in European Union

Picture by bobthelomond (Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0) What do a journalist living in Denmark, a British EU transparency activist, a Finnish web editor of the European Parliament, a German constitutional law blogger, a Bulgarian PhD researcher, a British agriculture expert, a Portuguese intellectual property law blogger, a Greek agriculture journalist and a Brussels correspondent from Reuters have […]

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Wake up, EU, Stockholm is calling!

21 July 2010 in European Union

“The European Council invites the Commission to develop indicators, on the basis of existing systems and common criteria, to measure efforts in the fight against corruption, (…) and to develop a comprehensive anti-corruption policy” (EU Stockholm Programme) It’s not without reason that this reference is in the Stockholm Progamme: Greece is drowning in corruption, the Commission […]

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Towards a new and more transparent culture of spending EU funds?

13 July 2010 in European Union

EP Public Hearing on Transparency in Structural Funds from TI EU on Vimeo. Intransparency of EU funds spending is not only bad for democratic governance and public participation and control, but transparency is also crucial for the fight against corruption as the President of the Budget Control Committee, Luigi de Magistris, underlined this morning in […]

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The Transparency International EU office is moving (not just physically)

8 July 2010 in European Union

A lot is on the move here in Brussels – especially the Transparency International Liaison Office to the EU (short: TI EU office). We’ve just unpacked most of the boxes, installed the coffee machine and plugged in the computers in our new office. It’s actually not far from the old one on Rond-Point Schuman (see the new […]

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