MEPedia

Welcome to the MEPedia Portal on SpinProfiles
Welcome to the MEPedia Portal on SpinProfiles. It profiles current Members of the European Parliament focusing in particular on issues of transparency, conflict of interest and the revolving door. An A-Z list of articles on both individuals and institutions is here. The editors of the MEPedia Portal are William Dinan and Barçın Uluışık. SpinProfiles has a policy of strict referencing and is overseen by a managing editor and a sysop and several Associate Portal editors.

What is MEPedia? MEPedia is a resource for members of the public across Europe to find out basic information about selected MEPs, their financial and political interests, and their voting history and comments on issues related to transparency, accountability and conflicts of interest. We hope that these webpages will become a useful tool for European citizens to track the performance of their elected representatives in Brussels. At present this site is only available in English, but we hope, over time, to expand to include more languages, more profiles, and more issues. European Parliament Elections 2009 European Parliament European Parliament elections will take place from 04-07 June 2009. Eleven part-sessions will take place in Strasbourg and four two-day part-sessions will take place in Brussels. Election Campaign The Election Campaign is a collaborative project that aims at increasing public effectiveness in the European Parliament. The campaign tool supplies information on MEP candidates' status considering the four areas of pledges prepared and presented to them. The issues covered are: Lobbying transparency and ethics, demanded by the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU): to replace the current flawed lobbying register with a mandatory EU lobbying register that includes a list of all individual lobbyists, the legislative dossiers lobbied on and detailed information on the money spent on lobbying per client, to ensure that the Parliament takes all necessary steps to ban conflicts of interest, including barring MEPs from working as lobbyists while in office, to secure full transparency around Expert Groups and other groups advising the European Commission, and strong safeguards against privileged access and unbalanced composition of Expert Groups. Reforming financial architecture, demanded by the European Attac Network: to help develop legislation that obliges all corporations, including banks, to report on a country by country basis all their transactions and balance sheet figures, in order to increase transparency, curb tax avoidance and tax evasion and fight corruption, to help develop legislation which introduces strong regulation over investment funds (in particular hedge funds and private equity funds) as well as the establishment of a supervisory body (that would for example ban speculation on food commodities and curb tax evasion), to help introduce taxes on financial transactions and corporate profits to equilibrate income distribution and to support the financing of global public goods such as education, health and the ecological conversion of the economy. Just EU trade policy, demanded by the Seattle to Brussels Network (S2B): to urge the Trade Commissioner and the President of the European Commission to immediately stop the implementation of the Global Europe strategy, including a moratorium on the conclusion of bilateral and regional free trade agreements, to support a cross-committee investigation and stakeholder consultation process into the impacts of EU trade policies on development, social, environmental, human and women’s rights, in Europe as well as in third countries, to sign a resolution in the European Parliament advising a stop to the WTO’s Doha Round and calling for democratic reform of the international trading system and its rules of the game, to demand an international assessment of the responsibility of trade and financial liberalisation in the global financial and economic meltdown, the global food crisis and the climate crisis. Corporate accountability, demanded by the European Coalition for Corporate Justice (ECCJ): to support the development of a new legal framework for corporate accountability, which will hold companies operating in the EU and their directors legally responsible for the social and environmental consequences of their operations and those of their subsidiaries worldwide, to support transparency by implementing mandatory environmental and social reporting with accurate, comparable and comprehensive information, to support legal measures that allow victims of violations of human rights and environmental law by companies operating in the EU the possibility to go to a European court, even if the violation took place outside the EU. The Election Campaign is a collaborative project by the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU), the European Coalition for Corporate Justice (ECCJ), the Seattle to Brussels Network (S2B) and the European Attac Network.

Categories All pages associated with the MEPedia Portal are listed here. There are also a number of distinct categories listed below: MEP - Pages on MEPs Conflicts of Interest - Pages on MEPs with conflicting interests Political Parties - Pages on political parties that are represented in the European Parliament Revolving Door - Pages on people who change have taken positions in both government and private corporations How You Can Contribute

References and Resources

• European Parliament, Calendar of part-sessions 2009 - European elections 4-7 June 2009, accessed 07 March 2009.
• European Parliament, Your MEPs, accessed 07 March 2009.
• Friends of the Earth, EU Vote Watch, accessed 07 March 2009.
• Rowell, Andy, "Too Close for Comfort?" Spinwatch, July 2008, accessed 26 November 2008.

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