Journal entries tagged "Europe"
European elections: lack of interest by the media
The European Parliament plays a major role in enacting 70-80% of the legislation of Member States of the European Union, and its role is about to get even bigger when the Lisbon Treaty finally gets adopted.
Between the 4th and 7th of June, European citizens were invited to elect new MEPs (Members of the European Parliament), but indicators show a disappointing turnout: only 43.09% of electors went to the poll stations.
The media have called it a lack of interest of citizens, but aren’t they themselves, along with politicians, at fault?
Read the rest of this entry »
Having fun with maps
The subject of my “Mémoire”, the 60-page “Master Thesis” I have to write for university, is linked to European law, and I therefore use the europa.eu portal a lot (read: the EU institution websites and EUR-Lex were by far the websites I visited the most these past weeks).
The problem is, they all use text to get users to select their language. If it were a bilingual website, it would be easy. But there are 23 official languages in the EU, and so it takes time to figure out which string of text is “yours”.
The worst front page, in my opinion, is the Council’s homepage, which I find impossible to use under five seconds.
I therefore decided to try (during a small break) my hand at another system: maps.
“No!”: how the Irish proved their ignorance
What makes people vote “no” to a text they have never read?
The Irish “Say No to the Lisbon Treaty” campaign has been the perfect occasion for people to express their dislike of a number of elements: the “Europe of Defence” military idea, increases in taxes, …
Yet who are the Irish to say “no” to a project they do not approve in its entirety? When has a veto on a small part of a project had any positive impact? Especially when the issues at stake had nothing to do with the Lisbon Treaty?