Monday 3 May 2010

Access to Commission documents

This is just an example:

I was searching for the European Commission working document Sec(2010)426 in their document search and what I get are these results without any link to the actual document(s).

However, the document is accessible on Eur-Lex, in the Council register and even somewhere on the Commission website where it can be found via Google.

Why not making it public through the actual document search of the Commission if it is public anyway?

4 comments:

martinned said...

Maybe it's too recent, and they haven't gotten around to making it accessible in this way? "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence", etc.

(It's called Hanlon's razor, like Occam's razor only funnier.)

nilleren said...

A related example is the consolidated version of the treaty available at http://www.consilium.europa.eu/showPage.aspx?id=1296&lang=en but a new version was published in the official journal 30. March - the new version can be found but only in pdf.

Julien Frisch said...

@martinned

I didn't say it was "malice", I just point to obvious inconsistencies...

@nilleren

Thanks for the additional example!

martinned said...

@Julien Frisch: I didn't think you did...

BTW, how is this for access to documents annoyance. Linking from Pre-Lex to the OJ of 1990, I'm getting this:

"This Official Journal does not exist."

Yet it certainly does exist, which I know because I just linked there from Pre-Lex, not to mention that it's a perfectly ordinary OJ chapter, that should exist like all the others of that year. The problem is that the Official Journal doesn't go back before 2001, not even in the L series. (L series documents are generally accessible through other means on Eur-Lex, but not by simply typing in the OJ chapter & page.)