With this post, we start a series of articles about EU vocabulary. With this we aim to help to better understand the language used by the EU institutions, especially the European Parliament. Please, feel free to give us ideas and ask about a specific topic or expression!

As today is the first time, I will go for something easy: What a political group is.

Even though Members of the European Parliament are elected in their home countries and are part of lists of national parties, when they arrive to Brussels they are not organised by nationalities. MEPs form ‘Political Groups’ according to their political affiliation. Political groups might be formal representations of a European political party or coalitions of a number of parties and independent politicians. There are several requirements to form a political group; the most important ones are having at least 25 Members, representing one-quarter of the Member States.

Members that are not part of any political group are known as non-attached Members.

Currently seven Political Groups are present in the European Parliament:

Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats)

Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament

Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe

European Conservatives and Reformists Group

Confederal Group of the European United Left – Nordic Green Left

This week Amelia is in Strasbourg, together with her assistant Ulf Petterson, for the European Parliament’s plenary meetings. The main activities of the week will be Amelia’s interventions in the Plenary regarding dual-use items, EU trade negotiation with Japan and EU-Russia trade relations. She will also take part in the 1st trialogue (negotiations between the European Parliament and the European Council, with the help of the European Commission to reach agreements on their technical and political diverging points) on ENISA regulation.

Monday
15:00 – 15:30 Radio Interview
16:00 – 18:30 Green group meeting

Tuesday
12:50 – 14:30 European Parliament Plenary
17:00 – 18:00 Shadow meeting on Public Sector Information
18:00 -20:00 European Parliament Plenary

Wednesday
10:00 – 11:00 Internet core group
17:00 – 19:30 Green group meeting

Thursday
10:00 – 11:00 Pirate delegation meeting
12:00 – 14:00 European Parliament Plenary
13:00 – 14:00 Meeting with the South Korean Ambassador to the European Union
15:00 – 16:00 Shadow meeting about the report on a Digital Freedom Strategy in the EU Foreign Policy
21:00 – 23:00 Intervention on EU-Russia trade relations

Friday
09:30 – 11:30 Extended shadow meeting on the Data Protection Regulation
10:00 – 12:00 Shadow meeting on the Public Sector Information directive
11:30 – 13:30 European Parliament Plenary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HNK70R1JLo&feature=youtu.be

The highlinght of this week is the event organised by Amelia in cooperation with MEP Ivailo Kalfin (S&D) on opening up public information for transparency, knowledge and growth. The re-use of Public Sector Information have started giving promising results in improving the accountability of public bodies towards its citizens and in creating new and innovative businesses within the EU. Still, today's challenges need to be addressed to reach optimal re-use of public sector information and that is the main topic in this event.

Monday

9.00-17.00 Legal reasoning in the political process

11.00-12.00 ENISA technical meeting

16:30 - 18:30 Extended planning meeting, drafting of short and medium term schedule and activities

Tuesday

9.00-17.00 Legal reasoning in the political process

12.30-14.30 General Data Protection regulation, GSMA Europe

Wednesday

14.00-16.00 Event Opening up public information for transparency, knowledge and growth

Thursday

9.00-12.30 Event Copyright what is broken how to mend it (S&D)

9.00-12.00 Work meeting on Exile6s movie series

16.00-18.00 Event EU40 welcomes Star Trek and ESA astronauts to the European Parliament

18.00-21.00 Event - opening of new EDRi office in Bruxelles

Friday

11.00-12.00 ENISA technical meeting

För ett par år sedan var jag i Kina, inbjuden av dot-asia, den registrar som handhar administrationen kring .asia-domänen. En journalist frågade mig då hur jag ställde mig till nomineringen av Liu Xiaobo. Jag sa att jag inte ställde mig så mycket i frågan, och förklarade att Nobels fredspris för unga människor i Europa inte betyder så mycket. Nomineringarna av Henry Kissinger och Barack Obama har urholkat förtroendet för pristagarnas integritet och faktiska påverkan på världen, och nomineringen av EU lär inte göra fredspriset några tjänster bland ungdomar i Europa. Både Dagens arena och The Guardian kritiserar tajmingen. I El País förstår man inte hur de många ryska nominerade kunde förbises i prisutdelningen.

Däremot är nog människors oro inför den europeiska maktapparaten i Sverige ofta obefogad. Imorse skrev en orolig väljare till mig om att EU ska ha stiftat en lag som begränsar energiåtgången i grafikkort. Jag misstänker att det är Energieffektivitetsdirektivet som antogs av ministerrådet i början av oktober (och därmed blev EU-lag) som avses. Jag ser inga energiåtgångsgränser i direktivet som inte, i alla fall på kort sikt, kommer gå att tänja på. Jag har heller inte tidigare mottagit information från någon hårdvarutillverkare eller webbhotellsrepresentant som menat att direktivet skulle var problematiskt för dem. Tvärtom vill de själva få ned sin energikonsumtion, och kommer nog att lyckas med det innan de i direktivet angivna slutdatumen passerat.

This week I have had the chance to presence my first parliamentary committee meeting. Concretely, I have been in the one dealing with the reform of the EU data protection framework. It has been very interesting and exciting to presence how things work in the European Parliament. Due to the importance of this regulation the room was crowded, and participation during the slot for questions and remarks was very high. I was happy to confirm that one of the main criticisms heard in Spain about MEP’s, regarding low participation and involvement, is not totally true.

The main objective of the first was presenting the proposal and its objectives, which are mainly four:

1. Encourage individuals to be informed and in charge of their data.
2. Simplify the environment for data protection, as now each country has a different legislation.
3. Have a simpler procedure for SME’s that do not work with sensitive data.
4. Cover both cross-border and national data with one legislation.

The most prominent article was the one dealing with the so called ‘right to be forgotten’ and the procedure on how to erase one’s information from a database. Another important discussion was the one referent to the big amount of delegated acts present in the legislation, which are seen as a way of passing over the Parliament and create mistrust among population. Therefore, most of experts agreed on the need to control them and leave this acts as secondary.

The week of 8th-12th October, is mainly dedicated to activities in the committees that Amelia is a member of, ITRE and INTA. She will also be participating in some events and preparing her own initiatives in order to promote topics that fall under the pirate area of interest.

Monday

13.30-15.00 ITRE Committee Working Group

15.00-18.30 ITRE Committee meeting

 Tuesday

9-18.30 ITRE Committee meeting

9.00- 11.30 Panel discussion: “Free speech in a hyper connected world”

Wednesday

15.00-18.30 INTA Committee meeting

Thursday

9.00-18.30 INTA Committee meeting

14.30 - 15.00 Pirate Delegation Meeting

16.00-17.00 Working meeting on an event on bloggers and democracy