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 prove which EU countries are, and are not, transparency champions.
Dive into the data and help shed some light on the relations between the EU and Member States and the so-called “policy-laundering” phenomenon, whereby citizens are told the EU is to blame for certain decisions which actually involve full and proactive Member State representatives’ participation.
What are you waiting for? There are over a hundred documents with until-now unknown information, including: e-mails, meeting notes, papers for specialised committees, different proposals with their corresponding amendments etc.
Access Info Europe can’t go through all this information alone, and because we believe these documents carry not only interesting but relevant data that should become public, we call on freedom of information activists to collaborate by analysing, visualising, and making the information public!
All help is welcome; the more we are, the richer the analysis, the better for transparency!
All documents obtained from the FCO are available in DocumentCloud here.
Please note that these documents describe in detail the proposed amendments article by article, so those with a background in law or expertise in right of access to information may find it easier to analyse the data and would be particularly welcome.
For more information, please contact:
Andreas Pavlou, Access Info Europe
andreas@access-info.org | +34 91 356 6558