EU Council Monitoring: shedding light into a black hole

With our latest update to our platform, we have made monitoring the European Council (🔗Consilium) and the Euro-Group as convenient as never before. With approximately 15.000 documents published yearly, the EU Council is the point of convergence of both European and national interests and the ultimate decision-making institution in the EU. Hence, insights in its daily work are of highest relevance to assessing the state of play of the legislative processes in the European Union.

Monitoring the EU Council was always a challenge

Unlike the European Parliament (EP), accessing the EU Council or the Council of the European Union has historically been difficult. Whereas monitoring the EP in pre-internet times was facilitated by access to the so-called pigeonholes (🔗The pigeonholes are back – EU policy monitoring in a new era), insights into the works and developments of the EU Council have required tremendous effort. This has created an uneven playing field among all stakeholders.

Also, the EU Council has been rather thrifty in publishing policy documents on its website. While having significantly improved its website over the years, the relevant information is still distributed among different website sections.

In our latest update to policy-insider.ai, we have made all these EU Council documents available in one place, together with documents from the EU Commission, the European Parliament, and many other EU institutions. Therefore, we are providing a central, standardized EU policy monitoring platform. Also, the direct access to hundreds of thousands of documents from policy institutions in Germany, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom enables you to look at the larger picture. And you don’t need to speak French anymore, to understand what’s happening in France. Policy-Insider.AI translates it all for you.

Institutional websites are for citizens, and policy-insider.ai is for professionals

We need to remember for whom institutional websites are primarily designed: citizens with very different levels of education and policy knowledge. And rightly so, in an effort of transparency, these websites are increasingly becoming easier to use, usually by the structured distribution of information across the website. Yet, public affairs professionals ( 🔗How much bias is there in Public Affairs?) have completely different needs. Being conscient of time and resources, optimized knowledge platforms have developed a significant impact on the success of advocacy and campaigning (🔗PI.AI’s sustainable impact on policy monitoring in consultancies).

We developed Policy-Insider.AI with a unique focus on public affairs professionals’ needs.

Among many other things, we wanted to enable you to quickly identify related policy activities and documents, such as in the example below. Our AI recognized the connection between an EU Commission report to the European Parliament and the European Council in 2022 and a Draft Law debated in the German Bundesrat in 2018.

Of course, we then provide you with a full translation of that German draft legislation and enable you to identify key policymakers.