Dr Lydia Medland

Today Europe has lost a great European, not a stateswoman, but an activist whose impact will remain unmatched by most political leaders. Helen Darbishire has been one of the staunchest, most charismatic, and most effective civil society leaders in Europe, whose actions have been instrumental in making the EU more transparent and accountable to the benefit of the many, not the few. She set up her influential organization - @Access_Info Europe—in Madrid, not Brussels, to keep herself and her organization closer to real Europe than to the bubble. Access_Info was created and de facto acted as the pan-EU movement for civil society organizations working on the Right to Information (RTI). I stumbled upon Helen in 2010, quickly became friends and teamed up on so many battles for greater access to the EU, from setting up the EU Transparency Register in 2012, making the EU join the Open Government Partnership, making the judicial appointments to the CJEU more transparent, setting up and getting access to beneficial ownership registers, improved access to EU document…. my greatest honour was when Helen asked me to be her ‘second’ when she became member of OGP civil society steering committee. Helen will be missed, but her legacy will keep us going.