The ReNEUAL Steering Committee has agreed for the years 2018 onwards to focus its research on three topics highly relevant for EU Administrative law and established the following working groups accordingly:
ReNEUAL working group 2.1: “Common European Principles of Administrative Law and Good Administration”
This working group focuses on certain fundamentals principles of administrative law shared by the national administrative laws of European States, the legal order of the European Union and the law of the Council of Europe. It develops the comparative analysis and the examination of supranational rules carried out for the elaboration of the Model Rules in two main directions.
First, it considers the procedural norms that are applied by the legal systems of Europe, as well as the content of procedural protection on the basis of a factual methodology; that is, it compares the answers that are most likely to be given to a set of hypothetical cases. Second, it explores → the principles of administrative law shared by the national administrative law of European States, in the light of the work of the Council of Europe, including not only the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, but also the resolutions agreed by the Committee of Ministers.
It is therefore, in reality, a “joint venture” of two externally funded projects carried out by the team leaders of the working group, which aim at disseminating the results of such projects and to connect their outcome with the other ReNEUAL research projects and working groups. Considered as a whole, these projects may give rise to a “European Administrative Law Toolbox”, unveiling the deeper rationale of legal tools, considered necessary, or at least helpful, to ensure key democratic principles in states governed by the rule of law, such as the protection of individuals’ rights by the administration, transparency and the democratic legitimation of the administration and its actions.
The two projects are:
- The Common Core of European Administrative Law (CoCEAL) funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme – Advanced Grant – Excellent Science (grant agreement No 694697) organized by Giacinto della Cananea and Mauro Bussani (for more information on CoCEAL, see www.coceal.eu and the recently published monograph 'The Common Core of European Administrative Laws' by Giacinto della Cananea)
- The development of pan-European general principles of good administration by the Council of Europe and their impact on the administrative law of its Member States funded by the German Research Foundation organized by Ulrich Stelkens (for more information on the project on pan-European general principles of good administration click here)
Team leaders: Giacinto della Cananea and Ulrich Stelkens
Affiliated SC members: Paul Craig, Joana Mendes
ReNEUAL working group 2.2: Digitalized Public Administration in the EU
This working group will focus on the impact of new technologies, and especially digitalized Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), on the way in which Public Administrations work and interact with one another.
By revisiting traditional administrative law concepts, and building on previous research activity and findings of WG4 of ReNEUAL 1.0 on Information Management, the research work will mainly focus on the following issues:
- Administrative procedure and the influence of ICT technologies on its functioning and its internal structure (This topic is being investigated as part of the INDIGO (Information in the EU’s Digitalized Governance) project, for more information see https://project-indigo.eu/ );
- Discretionary power and ICT technologies (machine learning, algorithmic decision-making, deep learning algorithms);
- Databases and interoperability in different domains of EU activity (cooperation in the Internal Market, Cooperation in the field of Police and Justice, Financial Market regulation);
- Public Service and ICT Technologies (e.g. Smart cities);
- Legal language, legal translation and ICT.
Team leaders: Diana-Urania Galetta, Herwig C.H. Hofmann, Jens-Peter Schneider
Affiliated SC members: Jean-Bernard Auby; Deirdre Curtin; Oriol Mir; Ulrich Stelkens; Jacques Ziller
ReNEUAL working group 2.3: International and transnational administrative law
Globalization has intertwined administrative legal orders, linking them in webs of administrative cooperation either territorially- or functionally-focused. Despite almost two decades of the most recent globalization wave, there are still no easy answers to solving conflicts of administrative norms or to define which law applies to functional regulatory regimes that appear to escape administrative legal controls. This working group focuses on the legal implications of administrative cooperation for the articulation of legal systems. Specifically, it examines the lacunae of legal regimes governing transboundary and functional cooperation and investigates which law applies when no legal system is an undisputed candidate. In doing so, it covers both horizontal interaction between legal orders (transboundary cooperation) and vertical interaction (regulatory cooperation).
Team leaders: Jean-Bernard Auby; Joana Mendes
Affiliated SC members: Deirdre Curtin; Herwig C.H. Hofmann