The linked article suggests looking at the “explanetory memorandum” of an EU law
to do a deeper dive on it. Searching for it is a shit-show. The page showing a
particular law shows the full text and a large selection of language and format
(pdf, text, html), which is good, but nowhere on these pages is there a link to
an “explanatory memorandum”. The advanced search page makes no mention of it. I
actually had to do a general web search from a non-EU site and sort through a
lot of garbage to dig up a link. The URL was cryptic and date-specific, so no
way to simply reform an URL to get an explanatory memorandum for any given law.
BTW, what exactly is the explanatory memorandum? Is it always just a proposal
before a law is created, or is it ever a post-enactment analysis with further
detail? It seems like the recitals in the preamble already exist to give
rationale so the original proposal would be a bit redundant. (update) I just
realised the web hit goes to www.europarl.europa.eu, not eur-lex.europa.eu. But
the search tool is blunt and non-intuitive… not sure which filter to use.
(update 2) woah, more of a shit-show than I thought. The parliament site had the
explanatory memorandum in a cryptic URL, but then when I search on that site for
the doc there is an overview page that has a buried link to the explanatory
memorandum on eur-lex. (update 3) woah! what a shit show! The PDF links on the
eur-lex site are fake. The *.pdf file is actually JavaScript! If you run the JS,
it’s like a shitty download manager that presents another HTML page. Then
/those/ PDF URLs are also fake. The only way to reach the PDF is using PDF.js
inside a gui browser. The EU is most certainly not adhering to its own open data
policy.
Linked post gives detail. The absolute shit-show of fake PDFs comes amid the eur-lex site’s restricted access that blocks Tor users, which means we can only reach laws that are mirrored on archive.org. And only if the builtin search tool can be avoided.