EIJC17 & Dataharvest

Requesting access to documents with the EU institutions follows the general structures of freedom of information legislation with some specialities. The EU regulations were all passed in the digital age and thus have particularly strong wording in that field; on the difficult side the EU’s institutions are dealing with a diversity of national administrative cultures, which obviously influence the practice of granting access to documents; finally the law is less than two decades old and legal practice via the EU-ombudsman and the European Court of Justice is only emerging. In this workshop FOI veterans journalist Staffan Dahllöf and transparency advocate Olivier Hoedeman will give you a practical introduction on how to wob the EU. Staffan Dahllöf has decade long experience with wobbing on several levels, he has done systematic comparative between the Nordic countries and the EU, as well as systematic wobbing within the EU system, he is the author of a recent report on transparency in the EU http://oeiceurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Transparency_report_Final_52p.pdf and on the team of journalists taking the European Parliament to court over lacking access to documents. Olivier Hoedeman, Brussels based EU-lobbywatcher from the Corporate Europe Observatory uses wobbing as a systematic tool to get insights into the working of the EU-institutions with regards to lobbyists.