European Union

Journalists’ farm subsidy victory for European FOI and CAR

Tuesday, 23 January 2007, 11:44

Yesterday’s Guardian had a fascinating story about the EU’s decision to release all of its data about the beneficiaries of its farming subsidies.

David Hencke’s article shows how the rare cooperation of local journalists in many EU countries in a sophisticated research project based on Freedom of Information requests and computer-assisted reporting techniques led to this important development in openness at the EU level.

Danish CAR specialist Nils Mulvad was one of the first to probe this story, using the Danish FOI law to obtain CAP data for his country. Journalists from many oher countries later joined forces to establish the website farmsubsidy.org, which collects stories about CAP disclosures across the EU into a searchable database.

The site was modelled on a similar effort in the United States where the Environmental Working Group has maintained a searchable database of Federal farm subsidies since the Washington Post first forced their disclosure through an FOI case in 1996.

But what Hencke’s story also reveals is that when it suits government policy to release formerly secret data, it can be eager to do so. When the CAP subsidies were released last year, the government argued in favour of disclosure against the farming lobby. I recall being very surprised by Defra’s eagerness to respond to the FOI request by the Guardian.

Hencke’s story reveals the important role that Jack Thurston, a former special advisor to agriculture minister Nick Brown, had in having the CAP figures for England and Wales released without a fight.

As minister, Brown had become aware of the fact that the largest CAP recipients in Britain included major corporations and the royal family. The Data Protection Act appeared to bar him from disclosing this, however.

Thurston later joined the Foreign Policy Centre think tank, where he wrote a pamphlet calling for disclosure of CAP subsidies. When Freedom of Information Act came into force in 2005, Thurston knew exactly what to ask for:

While the Guardian was publicly demanding the information, Thurston was using his Labour connections to press Margaret Beckett, then agriculture secretary, and Larry Whitty, the farms minister, and advisers to Gordon Brown, to concede. The government agreed and Britain became the first big member of the EU to release the information.

This long-fought campaign was certainly a great success for European journalism — and those European governments seeking farm subsidy reform at the EU level. It shows how freedom of information does not always have to be an adversarial game between a government and its citizens. Sometimes governments can be persuaded of seeing openness as being useful for improving policy.

(In any event, for helping to spread CAR techniques — and showing genuine political successes with it — Mulvad and his new business partner in Denmark, Tommy Kaas, should go on that growing list of new role models for journalism students.)

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Canada warns the US (and Europe) over Arctic

Sunday, 29 January 2006, 10:47

Canada’s incoming Conservative government was supposed to forge warmer relations with Washington. But the Canadian prime minster-designate, Stephen Harper has already started making decidedly frosty noises about the United States meddling in some of the coldest places on Earth:

… on Thursday as the Prime Minister-elect used his first post-election press conference to take direct aim at David Wilkins, the US ambassador to Canada, who last week described the North-west Passage as “neutral waters”.

Mr Harper was not asked by reporters about the ambassador’s comment, but he refused to let it pass unchallenged.

“The United States defends its sovereignty, the Canadian government will defend our sovereignty,” he said. “It is the Canadian government we get our mandate from, not the ambassador of the United States.”

Some background, from the Toronto Star:

… most media hadn’t paid attention to Wilkins’ remarks, largely because they weren’t news. The United States, as well as Japan and the European Union, insist that the ice-choked passage, which winds through the archipelago of the Canadian Arctic to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is an international waterway.

Theoretically, Canada disagrees. But since 1945, it has signed a host of secret treaties that give American warships and submarines unimpeded access to these and other Canadian waters.

In 1988, Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney and U.S. president Ronald Reagan signed a pact whereby Washington agreed to tell Ottawa before sending non-military ships through the Northwest Passage.

In return, Ottawa agreed to never say no.

Harper wants to spend lots of Canadian dollars on underwater sensors and a new deep-water harbour in Iqaluit. But as the Star piece points out, the practical effect of all this posturing is more or less nil:

Is Harper prepared to tear up the treaties that already give the U.S. effective carte blanche in the Arctic? Would his three icebreakers attempt to ram the American fleet if it decided to steam through the Northwest Passage?

If his underwater sensors detect a U.S. submarine skulking along the coast of Ellesmere Island, would he have the Canadian Forces drop depth charges?

Still, it’s symbolically important. Asserting sovereignty over its sparcely populated but resource-rich Arctic archipeligo is of major symbolic significance for Ottawa, and has in recent years become one of Canada’s major foreign and defence policy objectives.

But it has become a bigger issue in recent years. With global warming making the Arctic region increasingly accessible, there is an increased interest in exploring for fossil fuels and trade routes. Long-dormant border disputes among the normally friendly Arctic countries suddenly have real consequences and are being re-examined.

Sometimes it is just symbolic. Canada’s maritime border with Greenland is fairly settled — with one tiny exception. Hence last summer’s kerfuffle with Denmark over barren Hans Island.

But there are also places where serious oil exploration, fishing and shipping rights are at stake. For example, there’s the small matter of the 30-year-old dispute between the United States and Canada over how Alaska’s border with Canada’s Yukon Territory extends into the Beaufort Sea. While Canada asserts that Alaska’s long straight land border along 140° west longitude should extend into the sea, the U.S. argues that the maritime border should be perpendicular to the shoreline, resulting in a triangular wedge of disputed — and potentially oil-rich — ocean territory just northeast of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The US Minerals Management Service, which oversees drilling on the United States’ continental shelf, estimates that the Beaufort Sea could contain about 7 billion barrels of oil and 32 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. In August 2004, the Minerals Management Service sold leases for oil development including a handful of tracts inside the disputed region, prompting a diplomatic protest from Ottawa. The State Department responded by reaffirming the American claim.

This is not the last we will have heard of this issue.

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British and European MPs want answers on CIA renditions

Wednesday, 23 November 2005, 01:51

A new cross-party committee of backbench MPs will investigate the UK’s role in the CIA’s &;dquo;extraordinary renditons” flights, the Guardian reports today.

Andrew Tyrie (Conservative), Sir Menzies Campbell (Lib Dem) and Foreign Office minister Chris Mullin (Labour) are leading the effort.

While the UK government is strangely silent on CIA flights stopping over on its own soil, other European countries are more concerned about the practice, leading to rather strange situation reported by the Associated Press:

Britain has agreed to write to the United States on behalf of the European Union requesting clarification of reports of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, a diplomat said Tuesday.

Britain, which currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, was asked by several nations including Finland and the Netherlands to write the letter during a EU foreign ministers meeting Monday, the European diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (which, contrary to some headlines, is not an EU body despite confusingly using the same flag) is also looking into CIA rendition flights and their connection to the alleged CIA “black site” prisons in Eastern Europe.

Swiss liberal senator Dick Marty, who is leading the COE parliamentarians’ investigation, says that he has no proof of the existance of the “black sites”, but is investigating 31 flights that landed in Europe and seeking satellite images of sites in Romania and Poland.

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EU may publish farm subsidies

Friday, 11 November 2005, 16:28

European Commissioner for adminstration Siim Kallas wants the EU to publish details of who receives subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy as part of a new drive for transparency in the European Union institutions.

The subsidies received by farmers in England were released earlier this year in one of the first high-profile tests of the Freedom of Information Act. Denmark, Estonia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Slovenia and parts of Spain have alsro released their figures.

As the figures emerged, it became clear that large argibusinesses are the major benefitiaries of the EU’s most expensive programme.

Now France, the biggest receipient of CAP funds, is coming under the spotlight.

Oxfam says the top 15 percent of French farming companies receive 60 percent of CAP subsidies, while the bottom 70 percent French farmers receive only 17 percent.

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Netherlands to reveal EU farm subsidies

Saturday, 20 August 2005, 17:29

The Netherlands has become the latest country to increase transparency about how farm subsidies under the EU’s Commond Agricultural Policy are distributed.

The breakdown of who receives the Netherlands’s €236 million in CAP subsidies will be released next month following a request under the Dutch freedom of information law.

According to the International Herald Tribune, the Dutch agriculture minister, Cees Veerman has acknowledged that he receives €190,000 in subsidies for farms he owns in France and the Netherlands.

The Danish and British campaigners drew their inspiration from a similar movement in the United States, which in 2001 showed that celebrities, dead farmers and even a basketball star got farm payments.

They now want to target other countries, principally Germany and France, that so far have not released details of farm payments, partly because of the strength of their lobbying groups.

Nils Mulvad, a journalist who led the Danish campaign in 2004, said: “I think we will soon have Sweden. Some of the information is already out in Estonia and Ireland. There has been some data released in Spain. No one has had the courage to tackle France yet.”

The Danish institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting obtained the figures for that country in 2004, and the subsidy figures for England (but not Wales or Scotland) were released in March following a Freedom of Information Act request.

Update: Meanwhile, new research shows that the Common Agricultural Policy increases the divide between rich and poor farmers.

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How to vote in Germany

Tuesday, 16 August 2005, 19:58

For the first time in my life, I’m going to try to navigate the bureaucracy necessary to claim my right as an Auslandsdeutscher to vote in the early German federal election on 18 September.

As a public service to other Germans living in member states of the Council of Europe, I’ll explain the process.

You’re entitled to vote in the German federal election if you:

• Are a German citizen as defined by Article 116 of the German Basic Law,
• Are at least 18 years of age on 18 September 2005,
• Have lived in the Federal Republic of Germany for three consecutive months after 23 May 1949, and
• are not excluded from voting

If you meet these criteria, you need to gather a bunch of information to fill out a rediculously complex form. You will need the following materials, which German officialdom clearly expects you to have lying around in a nice neat spiral binder or something:

• The postal address of the Gemeindebehörde (local authority) that you were last registered with
• The address and postcode of the most recent place where you were registered as living in Germany.
• The dates that you were registered and de-registered from these addresses
• Your passport or Personalausweis (National ID card) number alond with the date of issue and the issuing authority

Right. Got all that stuff? Good. Now download a form from a web site of the Bundeswahlleiter (Federal Director of Elections) called, in superb German bureucratese, “Antrag auf Eintragung in das Wählerverzeichnis”. (PDF)

Adobe Acrobat will help you fill this out neatly in duplicate. When you’re done, print it out, stick a 60 pence stamp on an envelope and send it to the Wahlamt of the local council of the last place in Germany where you were a resident. I found mine using Google.

They will enter you onto the electoral register and send you all the materials you need for a postal ballot.

If you don’t have access to the Internet, you’re clearly not reading this, but you can also get a paper copy of the form from your local embassy, such as this one, in London.

But hurry. The deadline is 28 August.

Update: My postal ballot has arrived.

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