European Sovereignty Monitor
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Sources and databases

Every primary source this publication reads, grouped the way they get used, each with the limit that is not obvious until it has cost you an afternoon. Kept current here rather than repeated in every issue.

Primary sources, grouped the way they get used. The notes are the point: most of these carry a limit that is not obvious until it has cost you an afternoon, and those limits are where the interesting gaps live.

Our own two datasets, the stack map and the ledger, sit under Resources in the menu alongside the dictionary, and Method explains how anything below gets read and graded.

Law and the legislative process

  • EUR-Lex. The authentic text of everything: treaties, regulations, directives, consolidated versions, case law, the Official Journal.
  • Legislative Observatory (OEIL). Where any file has actually got to, with rapporteurs, committee stage and votes. Use this host; the older oeil.secure address now redirects.
  • Council public document register. Working party papers and negotiating mandates. Member state positions surface here weeks before the press notices.
  • European Parliament committees. Draft reports, amendments and trilogue records. ITRE, IMCO and SEDE carry most of this subject.
  • Comitology Register. Draft implementing acts and committee votes. Delegated acts are not here; they sit in a separate register. A great deal of operative technical detail is set here rather than in the parent law.
  • Have Your Say. Calls for evidence and consultations, the earliest point a rule is visible.

Money and procurement

  • TED, Tenders Electronic Daily. Every EU public procurement notice above the EU thresholds, searchable by sector and place of performance. Below-threshold contracts are advertised nationally instead, so a supplier claim can legitimately fail to appear here.
  • EU Funding and Tenders Portal. Horizon Europe, Digital Europe, the European Defence Fund and Commission procurement in one place.
  • Financial Transparency System. Named recipients of EU budget money. Note the limit: direct and indirect management only, so structural and cohesion funds are absent.
  • Kohesio. Project-level cohesion beneficiaries, which is where the money the system above omits can be found.
  • CORDIS. Participants, funding breakdowns and results for EU-funded research. The ledger's Horizon grants view is built from it, monthly.
  • Open data of this publication. Five files are served from this site under CC BY 4.0: news.json (every published news item, graded, with its links into the other four), stack.json (the map), flows.json (the ledger), cordis.json (Horizon Europe grants, from CORDIS, European Union) and timeline.json (the timeline). Every published snapshot is kept beside the live file with its date in the name, for example stack-2026-07.json, so any figure can be checked against the file it came from.
  • Public endpoint. The same data as a read-only JSON API and as a Model Context Protocol server for AI assistants, no login: api.sovereigntymonitor.eu (docs on the page, llms.txt for machines). It reads the files above on demand, so it is never ahead of or behind this site. Hosted on Scaleway in Paris. How to add it to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any MCP client, and what the nine tools do: Connect to the data.
  • European Court of Auditors. Whether a programme delivered what it promised. Its special reports are the most reliably unflattering documents the EU produces about itself.
  • Competition case search. Antitrust, mergers and State aid, including the cases behind national chip subsidies. The old elojade State aid register is deprecated and redirects here.

Technology and compute

  • EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. Every supercomputer, AI factory and quantum system the Joint Undertaking itself procures, with the call texts attached. National systems outside it, including Alps, Hunter and SuperMUC-NG, are not here.
  • Shaping Europe's Digital Future. The Commission's policy hub for AI, cloud, semiconductors and sovereignty.
  • European Chips Act. Legal basis, funding pillars and the European Semiconductor Board.
  • data.europa.eu. The official open data portal, roughly 1.8 million datasets, and the machine-readable layer beneath most of the above.

Defence and space

  • DG Defence Industry and Space. The European Defence Fund, EDIP, SAFE, military mobility, Galileo, Copernicus and IRIS².
  • European Defence Agency. Capability planning, CARD and joint procurement across all 27 member states.
  • EUSPA. Operates the service and security layer of the space programme, including IRIS² security accreditation.
  • European Space Agency. Essential reading, and not an EU body. ESA is an intergovernmental organisation with 23 members including Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, funded by its member states. The EU pays ESA to run specific programmes such as Galileo and parts of Copernicus, which ESA books as third-party activities. Treat its documents as third-party, not EU primary source. That distinction matters more than it sounds in this subject.

Who is who, and who is lobbying

  • EU Transparency Register. Registered interest representatives with declared clients, budgets and meetings.
  • EU Whoiswho. The units, directors and heads of unit who hold the files. Names below head of unit were removed in 2023 and have not been restored, despite an Ombudsman finding against the decision.

Statistics and analysis

  • Eurostat. Industrial production, ICT, R&D spend and trade in high-tech goods. Dual-use trade is not published as a statistic and has to be approximated from COMEXT customs codes, which correlate poorly with dual-use classification.
  • European Parliament Think Tank. EPRS briefings, usually the fastest neutral summary of a pending file.