About the website

se2009.eu is the Swedish Presidency’s official website.

• Publisher
• General
• Content
• Usability and Accessibility
• Cookies
• Copyright
• Errors
• Processing of personal data

Publisher

Communications Secretariat for Sweden’s EU Presidency 2009 (COM-09), Prime Minister’s Office, Sweden.

Responsible for the website:
State Secretary Maria Åsenius
Prime Minister’s Office
Government Offices
SE-103 33 Stockholm
Tel. +46 8405 10 00

© Prime Minister’s Office, Sweden

General

Sweden holds the six-month Presidency of the European Union between 1 July and 31 December 2009. The official website, se2009.eu, is the most extensive source of information and news during the Swedish Presidency.

The website is published in Swedish, English and French. During the Presidency, the site will be updated daily. After the Presidency, the website will no longer be updated but will still be available for reference at the aforementioned address.

The website is designed and maintained by the EU Presidency web team at the Communications Secretariat for Sweden’s EU Presidency 2009 (COM-09), Prime Minister’s Office, Government Offices, in cooperation with the ministries. The web team consists of an editor-in-chief, a project manager, four web editors, one photo editor and one host photographer.

Content

The website is divided into five sections:

Meetings & News (the Calendar)

On the calendar, you can find comprehensive information on all the meetings being held during the Presidency. The calendar also includes web TV and photos related to the meetings. Here you can also find information on all the political and cultural activities and events taking place within the framework of the Presidency, as well as events organised by civil society. It is easy to search for activities via the calendar, the search box, or by filtering the category of activities that you want to see in the calendar.

The Presidency

This section contains facts on the Swedish Presidency, Sweden’s priority issues and information on the Swedish Government ministers. Facts about the European Union and its activities can also be found under this heading. You can also learn more about Sweden and the Swedish meeting locations here.

Services

As a journalist, you can be accredited directly on the website. Information about how to do this is in the ’Services’ section. In this section, you can also subscribe to meetings information via SMS and newsletter, and receive customised information via email and RSS.
Here you can also access the Presidency media library containing press photos and pictures of Sweden.

Press

Here you can quickly find the latest press releases and statements, information about upcoming press conferences and more. In the Press section, we also list answers to the most frequently asked questions, and this is where you can find the most important media links.

Contact

The Swedish Presidency is to be characterised by transparency and accessibility.
That is why we provide a lot of contact details for those of us who work for the Presidency. The contacts are divided into sections for each of the Council configurations. 

Usability and Accessibility

Accessibility has been the guiding principle throughout the work to develop se2009.eu.

W3C’s (World Wide Web Consortium) coding standards have been followed and the content conforms to XHTML 1.0 strict standard, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.1.

The website has been adapted as far as possible in accordance with W3C’s (World Wide Web Consortium) guidelines WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).

All major functions can also be accessed when JavaScript is deactivated.

Measuring instruments have been used to verify that the text and background colour contrast sufficiently to be read by partially sighted people.

Great importance has been attached to optimising the size of the pages so that se2009.eu will also be accessible via low-bandwidth connections.

Usability tests have been carried out on sketches, with good results.

se2009.eu has been tested in the standard web browsers: IE 6/7/8, Firefox 3 PC/Mac, Safari 3/4.

The appearance of the website can be altered by changing the text size settings. The website also offers speech synthesis. This means that you can choose to have the text read out by a synthetic voice. 

Cookies

The website uses cookies. Cookies are small text files that are stored on the visitor’s computer and enable such things as keeping track of what the visitor does on the website or saving personal preferences.

There are two types of cookies:

A session cookie is temporarily stored in the computer’s memory while the visitor is browsing the website. The session cookie is erased when the web browser is closed.

A persistent cookie remains on the visitor’s computer until it is deleted. On se2009.eu, both session cookies and persistent cookies are used. A persistent cookie is used to save the personal preferences the visitor makes regarding such things as choice of font and spacing.

If you do not want to accept cookies, you can adjust the settings in your web browser’s security preferences so that you either do not accept any cookies at all or so that your consent is requested every time a website tries to place a cookie in your computer. You can also delete cookies that have previously been stored in your web browser; see the web browser’s help files for more information.

Copyright

Copyright must be respected. Therefore, always request permission if you wish to copy or use a computer program, text, image, video or sound that someone else has created or has the rights to and it is not clearly stated that they are free to use. Do not use anyone else’s name or photograph/image without his or her permission.

Instructions on use of the EU Presidency logo and widget can be found under Visual identity.

Errors

We would be grateful if you could let us know of any inappropriate content or incorrect information posted on other websites accessed through links on our website. Please let us also know of anything that is erroneous, out-of-date, incomplete, unintelligible etc. on our own website. You can use our contact form to advise us of such problems.

Processing of personal data

Personal data is any kind of information that can be directly or indirectly linked to a natural person. Examples of personal data are name, personal identity number, postal address and email address. The Personal Data Act contains rules for how personal data may be processed.

Controller of personal data

The Government Offices is the controller of personal data for the processing of personal data on se2009.eu.

The purpose of processing personal data

The Government Offices processes your personal data:

• when you register for meetings, conferences and other events arranged by the Government Offices
• when you order publications
• when you write contributions in the chat forum
• when you sign up for our subscription service.

The right to request information

In accordance with Section 26 of the Personal Data Act (1998:204), you have the right  once every calendar year to request information on the personal data concerning you that has been processed at the Government Offices, regardless of whether this data has been collected via the website or another channel. If you want this information you must submit a signed request to us. In accordance with the Personal Data Act, the request must be on paper and cannot be sent via email.

Send your request to:
Controller of personal data
Government Offices
SE-103 33 Stockholm
Sweden