“I have never been placed on a ‘blacklist’ by the European Parliament, nor banned from election observation missions,” Joron wrote to EUobserver on Monday (26 January). The DEG keeps an internal list of MEPs whom it has temporarily banned from going on official missions over their misbehaviour. And vocabulary quibbles aside, the EU Parliament press service confirmed to EUobserver that Joron was lying when she said: “I have never been … banned”. The procedure for exclusion from future official election observation activities applies for a fixed period”. And the fact Joron’s 2021 EU Parliament ban still haunted her five years later showed the effectiveness of the crackdown, the EPDE’s Stefanie Schiffer said.