Wednesday 19 May 2010

"Transparency and Democracy" (1994)

It is of the highest importance for the credibility of the European Union that its decision making process be as transparent as possible, especially in view of the difficulties of ensuring democratic control of this process, and of its remoteness from European citizens.
"Transparency and Democracy" (1994)

2 comments:

Ralf Grahn said...

They are still working on it...

martinned said...

Of course they're still working on it. Essentially, this is what they've been doing in the three intervening Treaty changes. We should at least give them credit for trying. We've all seen how difficult it has been.

Anyway, it's important to remember that it's a bit hard to make decision making processes transparent if the average EU citizen can't even name two EU institutions. Transparency means more than simply putting everything on the internet. It means making information available in a form that people can understand, in a place where people will know to look for it. That's why I think this Access to Documents stuff is less important than finally building a decent Europa website. (Is it just me or is the new site more difficult to use than the old one?) Being able to read EU documents only matters to people who already know a great deal about the EU anyway.