Access Info invites open analysis of UK FCO documents Madrid, 4 August 2014 – Access Info Europe called for fellow freedom of information activists to help analyse and discover the information and data held in the tens of UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office documents on negotiations in Brussels to revise the European Union's transparency law, in a crowdsourcing initiative launched today. Download the documents here! These documents, obtained as a result of a four-year legal battle, are a unprecedented insight into the debate around the right of access to EU documents that has been going on since 2008, and could

Madrid, 16 July - Access Info Europe has joined over 50 other signatories, including networks and coalitions, calling upon the European Union to closely engage and eventually join the Open Government Partnership (OGP) initative. The letter sent earlier this month asks the EU to commit to uphold the same inclusion, transparency and accountability standards that they ask of others both inside and outside the Union. It will help bridge the gap between the EU and its citizens, and enhance the EU’s credibility in its international efforts to improve the quality of governance in third countries by empowering citizens through participation.

Madrid, 2 June 2014 – The European Commission is impeding the public's right to submit access to documents requests via the AsktheEU.org web portal by refusing to register requests which are not accompanied by a postal address. AsktheEU.org, which is run by Access Info Europe, was launched in September 2011 with the aim of making the requesting process more transparent. It is set up to work via email, with requests and responses published online in real time. Hence it does not currently have the capacity to deliver postal addresses without making them public. The Commission in early May started to

Brussels, Madrid, Cologne, 30 May 2014 – Civil society groups from across Europe this week called on newly elected Members of the European Parliament to make an urgent priority of tackling the problem of corporate lobbying in the next parliamentary term. The call by members of the Alliance for Lobby Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER_EU), of which Access Info Europe is a Steering Committee member, went out to all 751 new MEPs and in particular to the 174 who signed a pre-election pledge under the Politics for People campaign to ‘’stand-up for citizens and democracy against the excessive lobbying influence

Madrid, 26 May 2014 – More than 250 civil society organisations worldwide, including Access Info Europe, today called on the European Commission to make the negotiations on the future Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) open and transparent. The TTIP is the biggest bilateral trade agreement ever negotiated and it will have significant effects on the economy, the environment and the future of citizens on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. There is a clear public interest in being able to follow these negotiations, and yet, since they started, they have taken place behind a veil of secrecy, with

Madrid/Brussels, 19 May 2014 – The Council of the EU is failing to comply with EU transparency rules by not respecting time frames for responding, applying too many extensions to requests, and not informing all requesters of their right to appeal when information is denied, according to a report published today by Access Info Europe. Analysis of 50 access to documents requests submitted to the Council between 2011 and 2013 via the AsktheEU.org platform, found that the average time for answering was 20 working days, significantly over the maximum 15 working days permitted by EU law. Requests which resulted in