Madrid, 30 January 2013 — A massive public response to Access Info’s January fundraising campaign brought in a little over €10,000 in mostly modest donations from members of the public. A big “Thank You” from the Access Info Europe team!
Madrid, 11 January 2013 – Access Info today launched a campaign to raise €3000 for costs it has to pay to the Spanish government after the Supreme Court ruled that the pro-transparency NGO does not have the right to ask what the Spanish government is doing to fight corruption. Access Info has lost a last appeal against the costs imposed after a five-year legal battle to obtain a response to an information request asking what Spain is doing to implement the UN Convention against Corruption.
News articles from 2012 Lobbying and transparency: pressuring the European Union Global Voices | 15/12/2012English-Various NGOs, like Access Info Europe, HAI, Environmental Service Law and Spinwatch, decided to raise awareness of the need to control lobbying through the EU Citizens Project. This allowed more than 40 European citizens, committed to transparency, to travel to Belgium in order to discover the framework of the European Institutions, to meet with European officials and to reflect about problems generated by lobbying. The central event was the conference Participation, Ethics and Transparency: What the Citizens Want from Brussels, on November 16th. Read more... Access
Madrid, 17 December 2012 – Friends of the Earth (Spain) and Access Info Europe today (17 December 2012) presented a request for information calling on the Spanish Government to reveal the location of field with genetically modified maize which it is keeping secret in violation of EU law. The request was submitted via the website tuderechasaber.es (“your right to know”) and delivered in person to the Ministry of Agriculture. Spain is the only EU country with large scale production of genetically modified crops – around 100,000 hectares [1] – while other countries such as France and Germany
Clear the smoke in Brussels – demand lobbying transparency now! A major lobbying scandal has been unraveling in Brussels after one of the European Commission’s top officials was forced to resign following allegations of cash-for-influence. The tobacco industry claimed they’d been asked for tens of millions of euros by a lobbyist linked to health commissioner, John Dalli, in exchange for influencing EU tobacco policy. But with new tobacco legislation in the pipeline, there are fears that Dallimay have been caught in a tobacco industry set-up designed to delay changes the industry don’t want.
Participation, ethics and transparency: What citizens want from Brussels Brussels, 17 November 2012 – The European Union is ever more important in influencing the laws and policies that affect more than 500 million europeans. Yet very few know about our european representatives and the influence of interest groups upon them. Therefore, various organisations around Europe, including Access Info Europe, Friends of the Earth Europe, Spinwatch, Environmental Law Service, HAI Europe and Aitec have decided to make citizens aware about the topic through various national campaigns in favour of lobbying regulation through the EU Citizens Project. The last meeting aimed to
A pesar de la inminente puesta en marcha de una ley de acceso a la información pública, el informe del primer cuatrimestre de actividad en ‘Tu Derecho A Saber‘ pone de manifiesto que, en la práctica, existen graves problemas de transparencia en España. Este primer informe, revela que la mayoría de las solicitudes no obtienen respuesta, o ésta es incompleta. En concreto, el 47 % no tienen contestación alguna (lo que llamamos ‘silencio administrativo’), y sólo un 14% cuentan con una respuesta satisfactoria. Es decir, en un 86 % de los casos, el ciudadano no obtuvo la información que deseaba,
Debate on Lithuanian Nuclear Power Deal Centres on Access to Information It is unacceptable to shield a nuclear project from Freedom of Information says Access Info Europe Vilnius, 22 November 2012– At a high-level debate in Lithuania (20 November 2012), Access Info Europe strongly criticised an anti-freedom of information clause in the public-private partnership agreement on the Visaginas nuclear power plant between the government of Lithuania and Hitachi corporation. Access Info said that the confidentiality provisions represented particularly dangerous practice and risked stifling public debate around the important issue of nuclear power.
The Debate on How to Measure “Openness” 9 November 2012 – In a public comment issued today, Helen Darbishire, Executive Director of Access Info Europe and Toby Mendel, Executive Directorof the Centre for Law and Democracy respond to criticisms of the RTI Rating in the paper Measuring Openness: A Survey of Transparency Ratings and the Prospects for a Global Index by Sheila Coronel, Director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and Profesor at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University. The authors of the comment also raise concerns about the various global indices of “transparency” and “openness” and call