Members of the European Parliament are elected to represent their voters. This responsibility comes with accountability: citizens must be able to know what decisions their elected representatives are taking, and how they reached them. Yet while transparency should be the responsibility of governments, experience has shown that many have refused to be as forthcoming as citizens need, and the EU is no exception.
This led us to launch our Integrity Watch (IW) EU platform in 2014. The platform enables citizens to discover, in just a few clicks, who their MEPs and Commission officials are meeting, and how often. Designed to be user-friendly and easy to interpret, IW was developed to be as accessible as possible for all EU citizens—as all governmental data should be.
Data publishing is only as good as its source. When the platform first saw the light of day, it focused solely on MEP outside income, reflecting the limited information made available by EU institutions at the time. It took the European Commission almost a decade to publish data on the meetings of Cabinet Members and Directors-General with lobbyists. Today, we’ve succeeded in scraping the data and presenting it on a single, clear and easily interpretable website. This has been achieved through sustained advocacy at EU level for stronger rules on transparency and political integrity.
Ever since, IW has expanded far beyond Brussels. To date, the platform covers data from 18 countries in Europe. Now, in a groundbreaking development, IW has expanded to the enlargement countries in the EU’s neighbourhood, namely Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Serbia, as well as Türkiye. This expansion of the IW platform is highly relevant, as it strengthens the political integrity of these countries seeking EU membership. With the exception of Kosovo, which has potential candidate status, all are official EU candidate countries.
As these countries pursue EU membership, they must make progress across all EU accession chapters and their clusters to align with EU standards. One of the most critical is the Fundamentals cluster, which covers the core institutions and principles essential to EU membership, including a strong civic space, an independent media landscape, and the functioning of democratic institutions and the judiciary. Progress in this area can only be achieved through joint efforts, with support from civil society at both national and EU level.
While some countries are further along in this process than others, political integrity remains a broader challenge for many candidates at the early stages of accession. The launch of IW helps to address this gap by increasing the transparency of government actions, expenses, and the conduct of public representatives, thereby strengthening accountability.
These national platforms offer a range of additional features, including data on public procurement, asset declarations, and political financing. The latter, for example, shows how much public funding political parties receive, as well as income from donations and membership fees, alongside detailed information on party expenditure, including spendings on different media platforms. The exact features differ on every IW platform, depending on the national context. For example, IW Serbia has dedicated one page to the EXPO 2027 in Belgrade, displaying interactive data on procurement procedures conducted for its implementation.
As Transparency and political accountability remain central to the democratic governance that is required to access the EU. This matters more than ever at a time when the rule of law is under pressure, both within the EU and in its neigbourhood. By extending the IW platforms to Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Serbia and Türkiye, we support citizens, civil society, the media and institutions to hold power to account. This not only strengthens national political accountability, but also supports candidate countries in meeting the democratic standards and accession clusters at the heart of the EU enlargement process.
The newly launched IW platforms can be accessed here:
