Follow a law from Brussels to Finland

One file from the EU proposal to the Finnish statute

Lobster joins the sources on the identifiers the institutions themselves use: the Commission’s COM number, the CELEX number, the Finnish bill number, the statute number. One file can therefore show:

• the Commission’s proposal and its stages in the European Parliament
• the Finnish Parliament’s scrutiny of that proposal (U and E matters)
• the Finnish government project that drafts the law, with its consultation rounds, the people assigned to it and a log of what has changed
• the government bill, its committee stage and the plenary votes, counted by parliamentary group
• the statute the bill became and, where Finland has reported it to the EU, the directive the statute implements

Every item keeps its official identifier, and documents link back to the original wherever the source publishes one.

Influence windows: where you can still act

From the dates in the official record, Lobster works out where a file can still be influenced:

• Consultation rounds. Finnish government consultations and the European Commission’s feedback periods, each with its closing date and the days left.
• Committee stage in the Finnish Parliament. A bill or an EU matter that a committee has taken up and Parliament has not yet decided.
• Committee stage in the European Parliament. From the referral to committee until the plenary vote.

Ask what is open and you get the list with the nearest deadline first. A consultation has a closing date. A committee stage has none, so it stays open until the decision is recorded.

Who said what

• Consultation statements. Which organisations responded to Finnish government consultations and to the Commission’s feedback rounds, each with a link to the statement. Where the published file can be read as text, the assistant also gets a short excerpt.
• Parliament. Committee reports and opinions, the expert statements committees received and plenary speeches from the Finnish Parliament. From the European Parliament, the questions Finnish MEPs have tabled and the Commission’s written answers.
• Lobbying disclosures. Disclosures from Finland’s Transparency Register, attached to the government project they name. From the EU Transparency Register, the registered organisations and their meetings with Commissioners, their cabinets and Directors-General.
• Votes. Each plenary vote on a file, counted by parliamentary group.

Most of it can be searched by meaning. Describe the issue in your own words and the assistant finds the material that is about it, with a short excerpt and a link to the source.

Statutes

Find Finnish statutes and EU acts by title, with their official numbers and a link to the text at the source, and see which statute a government project or a bill produced.

In your AI assistant

Lobster Policy Graph reaches you through the same connector as the rest of Lobster, so there is no second connection to set up. The assistant can read the public record and your own Lobster side by side: look up the government project your Lobster project names, see what is still open on it, and check what your team has already recorded.

The public record is read-only. It is the same for every Lobster customer and contains none of your own data.

In Lobster

The profile of a Member of the European Parliament shows how they voted in the roll calls on the files Lobster follows. It is not a complete voting record, and the profile says so.

Keyword alerts on newsfeeds, government projects and parliamentary votes are part of Lobster’s Monitoring section. See the guide to political monitoring.

On the EU side Lobster follows the files the Finnish Parliament scrutinises and the directives Finland has implemented, together with the Commission’s annual work programme. The EU Transparency Register and the Commission’s meeting register are covered EU-wide.

Sources. EUR-Lex, the Commission Work Programme, Have Your Say, the European Parliament’s open data, the EU Transparency Register, TRIS notifications from Finland, Hankeikkuna, the Finnish Parliament’s open data, Finlex and the Finnish Transparency Register.

Limits worth knowing.

• The Council of the EU is not covered, and neither is the national law-making of any country other than Finland.
• Municipal and agency consultations are not covered.
• A Finnish statute is linked to an EU directive only where Finland has reported the implementing measure to the EU.
• Most consultation statements come back as a title and a link. Some can also be read as text, and then as a short excerpt.
• A link between two steps is made only where the official records share an identifier, so for some laws a step is found by searching rather than by following a link.
• MEP questions are collected for Finnish members only.