Public entities in Italy, Germany and Spain have one calendar month to respond to requests for access to public information. They do not even always meet this deadline, which is the longest of the countries examined in a Civio-led investigation by members of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJnet).

At the other extreme is Slovakia, which grants its authorities only eight working days, excluding weekends and public holidays. Poland, Portugal, Croatia and the Czech Republic, allow almost half a month to respond to requests made through their transparency laws. Slovenia and Greece allow 20 working days, which places them almost at the bottom of the countries analysed.

What the ten European countries surveyed do share is a general lack of compliance with transparency rules. “The law is good. The problem is its implementation,” says Croatian journalist Dijana Pribačić Jurić of H-Alter. “We have had cases where, after a lengthy administrative procedure, we received information on our journalistic requests only after two to three years, when they are no longer relevant in a journalistic sense,” adds Toni Gabrić, editor in chief of the same media outlet. The same happens in Spain, Portugal and Greece, according to sources interviewed by Civio.

The sudden appearance of monkeypox outside its endemic regions, in Central and West Africa, surprised the world. Although it was not the first time the virus had broken out elsewhere, the scale of the current health crisis is unprecedented. From the beginning of May to the middle of July, at least 7,665 cases have been reported in the European Union (EU), according to figures compiled by Civio, which is one thousand more cases than the WHO reports. It is the largest outbreak of this virus ever seen in Europe, where few countries were well-prepared.

“No one expected transmission within Europe or the United States, without [a patient] having travelled or their partner or friend having travelled,” says Mar Faraco, president of the Spanish Association of Foreign Health Doctors. For the moment, the most affected countries in the EU are Spain (2,895 cases), Germany (1,859), France (912), the Netherlands (549), and Portugal (515), while the United Kingdom, where the first patients of this outbreak were detected, reported 1,856 cases through mid-July.

“There is much sorrow in prison, disguised as hostility. The sorrow is plainly visible even in the most angry faces.” This message was posted on John McAfee’s personal Twitter account last June. Thirteen days later, the creator of the McAfee antivirus software died in his cell in the Barcelona prison Brians 2, where he had spent eight months in pretrial detention, pending rulings on extradition to the United States on charges of tax evasion and non-payment. McAfee left a note: “Instead of fully living it. I want to control my future, which doesn’t exist.” The autopsy declared his cause of death to be suicide.

In 2020, according to the Council of Europe’s SPACE study (see methodology), 480 people committed suicide in EU member state prisons, of which 172 were in pretrial detention. These people were either awaiting trial or pending the outcome of their appeal; they had not been convicted of any crime. Entering prison, especially before trial, correlates with a higher risk of suicide: in 2020, there were 17.5 suicides per 10,000 people in pretrial detention, double the 8.54 suicides per 10,000 people in the rest of the prison population.

EVA BELMONTE CARMEN TORRECILLAS MARÍA ÁLVAREZ DEL VAYO DAVID CABO MIGUEL ÁNGEL GAVILANES
El Confidencial, Spain: MARÍA ZUIL DW, Germany: KIRA SCHACHT Eurologus, Hungary: LÁSZLÓ ARATÓ Divergente, Portugal: BEATRIZ WALVIESSE VoxEurop, Belgium: ADRIÁN BURTIN 
English editing: LUCAS LAURSEN

May 10, 2022

Almost 100,000 people across the European Union (EU) have one thing in common: their justice systems have locked them up but no court has issued them a final sentence. “If you don’t have the death penalty, pretrial detention is the most severe punishment that a state can use against a person in a democracy,” says German lawyer Thomas Röth. Despite the profound economic, social and personal consequences of going to prison, European courts often use this provisional measure against people whom they must still consider innocent.

More than one in five people in European prisons were, at the beginning of 2021, in pretrial detention, meaning they are waiting for their trial or the result of an appeal. Some 22 of every 100,000 inhabitants in the European Union (EU) were deprived of their liberty before final conviction.