About Statewatch 
Statewatch is a non-profit-making voluntary group founded in 1991. It is comprised of lawyers, academics, journalists, researchers and community activists. Its European network of contributors is drawn from 18 countries. Statewatch encourages the publication of investigative journalism and critical research in Europe the fields of the state, justice and home affairs, civil liberties, accountability and openness.
One of Statewatch's primary purposes is to provide a service for civil society to encourage informed discussion and debate - through the provision of news, features and analyses backed up by full-text documentation so that people can access for themselves primary sources and come to their own conclusions.
Statewatch is the research and education arm of a UK registered charity and is funded by grant-making trusts and donations from individuals. You can support our work by making a donation.
For more information, read our brochure (pdf). If you are interested in contributing work to Statewatch, please get in touch.
Awards and praise
Statewatch has received six Awards for its work:
- 2011: Liberty awards Statewatch the human rights "Long Walk" Award: "For dedication to openness, democracy and informed debate about European institutions, keeping us reliably informed and suitably engaged for the last 20 years. Their network of independent volunteers has become one of the most respected and reliable sources of investigative journalism and critical research in the fields of the state, justice, home affairs and civil liberties in the European Union."
- 2004: European Voice newspaper, Brussels: Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor, selected by a distinguished panel as one of the "EV50", one of the fifty most influential people in the European Union over the year for Statewatch's work on civil liberties and the "war on terrorism"
- 2001: European Voice newspaper, Brussels: Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor, selected by a distinguished panel as one of the "EV50", one of the the fifty most influential people in the European Union over the year for Statewatch's work on access to documents in the EU
- 2001:
The European Information Association gave Statewatch the "Chadwyck-Healey
Award for achievement in
European Information" for its work on openness and the new code of access to EU documents - 1999: Privacy International gave Statewatch an award for its work in exposing EU-FBI telecommunications surveillance plans
- 1998: The Campaign for Freedom of Information gave Statewatch an Award for its work on fighting for EU openness (access to documents)
A wide range of individuals and groups have praised our work:
- "The campaign group Statewatch has performed great service over the years monitoring the activities of the European Union in the area of civil liberties. Its communications are a source of detailed, solidly researched, information on which NO2ID among many others (of all political persuasions) has come to rely" - No2ID, UK
- "Statewatch provides a tremendous service rooting out documents which most of us have no idea how to get hold of!" - European Information Association
- "We believe that, in general, Statewatch is a paradigm of sound scholarship" - Foundation for Critical Thinking
- "A systematic job of researching this. It's the one source you need in Europe. It collects a lot. This is very serious. It's following the process for several years. So for any journalist training we do, doing FOI issues, that would be the one address to go to and say have a look there" - Wilfried Ruetten, Director of the European Journalism Centre, on Statewatch's work on FOI in the EU
- "Statewatch has persistently and systematically over two decades, brought to public attention (through its exemplary website and thorough expert opinions, evidence and otherwise) the hidden and barely visible activities of EU executive power in its various components and manifestations. Often working behind the scenes, quietly, with little or no public funding.. individuals, such as Tony Bunyan, Professor Steve Peers and Dr Ben Hayes and others, have tirelessly worked to bring information and facts into the public domain" - Professor Deirdre Curtin in her book 'Executive Powers of the European Union' (Oxford, 2009)
- "Statewatch's work in highlighting developments at the EU level over the past 30 years for the benefit of organisations like ICCL across Europe has proven invaluable" - Irish Council for Civil Liberties
- "Statewatch is the most reliable source of comment and official documents - many not publicly available until request by Statewatch - on the most controversial areas of EU policy. It currently has the best coverage from around Europe of the "Mos maiorum"Joint Police Operation coordinated by the Italian Presidency, aimed at tackling illegal immigration to the EU." (INFO-EUROPA is edited by Patrick Overy at the European Documentation Centre, University of Exeter and Eric Davies of Eurojargon Enterprises, October 2014))
A wide audience
Statewatch's services are very widely used:
- The Statewatch website has over 85,000 unique visitors each month and visit, on average, 14,246 separate URLs are visited each month. Thousands of people are signed up to our e-mail list (8,540) and follow us on Twitter (3,248)
- The Statewatch database contains over 30,000 items
Since its launch this website has had 14,874,966 user sessions and 109,601,588 "hits" (December 2014)
- 2014: 817,219 users sessions10,088,230 hits
- 2013: 931,851 user sessions, 9,578,024 hits
- 2012: 959,237 user sessions, 7,305,161 hits
- 2011: 1,198,831 user sessions, 10,288,301 hits
- 2010: 2,070,595 user sessions, 11,306,982 hits
- 2009: 1,263,573 user sessions, 7,305,161 hits
- 2008: 1,232,435 user sessions, 9,896,072 hits
- 2007: 1,693,941 user sessions, 6,464,960 hits
- 2006: 1,341,158 user sessions, 5,446,221 hits
- 2005: 979,772 user sessions, 4,076,016 hits
Partners
As well as working with our contributors
group, Statewatch works with a wide range of other organisations.
We are a
member of:
- CILIP
- Drone Campaign Network
- EDRi
- FREE Group
- FOIAdvocates
- JUSTICIA European Rights Network
- Migreurop
We have also collaborated with a range of groups and organisations on particular projects and reports:
- Back from the battlefield: domestic drones in the UK was co-published with Drone Wars UK
- Eurodrones, Inc., Legalising Surveillance and NeoConOpticon were co-published with the Transnational Institute
- Securing Europe through Counter-terrorism: Impact,
Legitimacy and Effectiveness (SECILE):
a part-EU funded project
of assembled European human rights and legal research experts tasked with exploring the true impact of European counter-terrorism policy since 2001 - Statewatch was one of the founder members of the European Civil Liberties Network, which attempted to bring together groups working on similar issues across Europe
- The Policy Laundering Project was set up with the American Civil Liberties Union and Privacy International
Funders