Seeing as the European Parliament election is coming up on May 22-25, I thought it would be a good idea to check in on what the parliament is doing and get better informed about their work (because an informed voter is basically a must in a democracy and everyone does their best to live up to this, right?). I started following some people on Twitter who are better informed about this than I am.

Yesterday evening, it payed off when I found out via Twitter that the European Parliament had a debate about the recent European Court of Justice decision to invalidate the data retention directive (which I’m very interested in). Unfortunately, I just missed the live debate by a couple of minutes but thankfully, the European Parliament has a really great system setup to capture the debates and make them available online in basically minutes after a debate has concluded. (As a side note, the translation system they have is astonishing. You can choose in a drop-down menu which language you wan’t to watch the debate in!)

After some Googling, I found the URL to the debate.

It’s was actually a lot more interesting than it might sound. Many of the MEPs brought up very good points and listening to the debate actually restored my faith in the fact that many MEP:s are actually trying to look out for and protect the people (which shouldn’t be shocking since we elected them to represent us, maybe representative democracy is actually working in this case?).