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The European Commission's open consultations of stakeholders are a central mechanism of the attempt to practice participatory governance at the European level and to open the political process to contributions from the societal sphere. This paper analyses the current practice of open consultations as one important operationalisation of participatory governance and as an implementation of Article 11 of the Treaty of the European Union ( TEU). It asks whether consultations can be a means to give voice to the citizens and to increase the legitimacy of European institutions. The paper presents an empirical analysis of the field of participants in the consultations. A main finding is that business and industry organisations dominate the consultative process while the participation of citizens and not-for-profit organisations is generally weak. The paper explores to which extent the consultations can, considering the empirical findings, be seen as a suitable way for direct or representative citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at three main issues raised by the PNR scheme: (i) the base‐rate fallacy and its effect on false positives; (ii) built‐in biases; and (iii) opacity and unchallengeability of the decisions generated, and at whether the Court has properly addressed them. It concludes that the AG and the Court failed to address the evidentiary issues including the base‐rate fallacy—a lethal defect. It also finds that neither the Member States nor the Commission have even tried to assess whether the operation of the PNR Directive has resulted in discriminatory outputs or outcomes; and that the Court should have demanded that they produce serious, verifiable data on this, including on whether the PNR system has led in practice to discrimination. But it also finds that the AG and the Court provided important guidance on the third issue, in that they made clear that the use of unexplainable and hence unreviewable and unchallengeable "black box" machine‐learning artificial intelligence (ML/AI) systems violates the very essence of the right to an effective remedy. This means that any EU Member State that still uses such opaque ML/AI systems in its PNR screening will be in violation of the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The word 'governance' has become an increasingly central policy motif in the European Union and elsewhere yet its meanings are ambiguous and often poorly understood. This article examines the genealogy of that concept focusing in particular on the European Commission's claim to have developed a new, more open and progressive model of 'European governance'. The paper is set out in four steps. The first analyses the European Commission's claims for 'governance' as a concept integral to its new vision for Europe. The second interrogates some of the conflicting definitions and meanings inherent in the term and examines the highly selective paradigm of governance that has been developed in official Commission discourse. The third addresses two specific areas where the Commission's governance model has been applied: the Green paper on The Future of Parliamentary Democracy and the Open Method of Coordination. The fourth turns to analyse these findings using critical social theory. I conclude that far from laying the grounds for a more inclusive, participatory and democratic political order, the Commission's model to governance represents a form of neoliberal governmentality that is actually undermining democratic government and promoting a politics of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enhanced cooperation was introduced in the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997). Despite a lot of academic ink being spilled, the instrument had, until recently, never been applied in practice. In June 2010, the Council reached consensus on authorising a group of Member States to pursue, in the framework of enhanced cooperation, common rules in the area of the law applicable to divorce. The present paper critically analyses this first precedent. For that purpose, the background to the policy area will be explored. Subsequently, the desirability of enhanced cooperation shall be assessed. Finally, the content of Rome III, and its effects upon Member States not participating in the initiative, will be analysed. The paper will attempt to formulate an answer to the question whether enhanced cooperation should be the new approach to harmonisation of family-related Private International Law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contract law issues on European or international level have been studied for several decades in academic circles. Contract law issues and other questions affecting European private law have already been regulated in the past on EC level, especially in the framework of several consumer protection directives. The European Contract Law project initiated by the European Commission received new impetus with the Commission's Green Paper of 2004. Emphasis is laid on developing a ‘common frame of reference’ (CFR) which shall be ready by 2009. A so-called ‘optional instrument’ and standard terms of contract are also looked at. The article explains the reasons behind these activities, describes the work currently under way, and points to a series of open questions of a legal or political nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to reveal the institutional interests of the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and the Commission in the comitology system. This is done by an investigation of the 2006 comitology reform, which introduced the regulatory procedure with scrutiny. This reform was the result of developments in four areas: the Lamfalussy reform in the area of financial regulation; the controversial use of comitology in the area of GMOs, food safety and the environment; the failed Constitutional Treaty; and the amending of the 1999 comitology decision. The analysis shows that the reform was the result of a two-dimensional constitutional struggle. The first dimension concerns the relative supervisory position of the two legislative actors, the Council and the European Parliament. The second dimension concerns the relationship between the legislative and the executive branch of the EU system. In theoretical terms, the analysis demonstrates an example of T.M. Moe's 'politics of structural choice'. The paper ends by drawing lessons for the negotiations on the new comitology system following the Lisbon Treaty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Last year the European Commission published itsAction Planon European contract law. That plan forms an important step towards a European Civil Code. In its Plan, the Commission tries to depoliticise the codification process by asking a group of academic experts to prepare what it calls a‘common frame of reference’. This paper argues that drafting a European Civil Code involves making many choices that are essentially political. It further argues that the technocratic approach which the Commission has adopted in the Action Plan effectively excludes most stakeholders from having their say during the stage when the real choices are made. Therefore, before the drafting of the CFR/ECC starts, the Commission should submit a list of policy questions regarding the main issues of European private law to the European Parliament and the other stakeholders. Such an alternative procedure would repoliticise the process. It would increase the democratic basis for a European Civil Code and thus its legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data plays a crucial role for society. Accordingly, building a 'single market for data' by increasing the availability of public and private data ranks high on the EU policy agenda. But when advancing legal data sharing regimes, there is an inevitable need to balance public and private interests. While the European Commission continues to push for more binding rules on data sharing between private businesses, public undertakings are already covered by mandatory rules. Exploring how the law addresses their data offers valuable lessons on the reconciliation of market reasoning with the public interest. In particular, this article inquires into the recast Open Data and Public Sector Information Directive, the Data Governance Act, and different national rules which regulate access to and re‐use of public undertakings' data. It identifies five striking characteristics and discusses their potential and limitations for regulating data sharing by private undertakings. The implications serve as a guidepost for advancing the wider debate on building a single market for data in the EU. Some of them are already reflected in the upcoming EU Data Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the avenues used by non-governmental organisations working in the sector of EU social policy to influence the law-making process at the EU. The Commission's current transparency initiative has focused attention on the rules (or lack of) governing access to the Commission as the initiator of legislation. This article examines more broadly, on the basis of interviews, both the formal and informal means of accessing not only the Commission, but also the European Parliament (in particular through intergroups) as well as the Council. By using specific examples of legislation it illustrates the routes by which ‘social’ non-governmental organisations currently interact with these institutions, offering examples of how their work may impact on the output of the Commission, Council and Parliament. The article avoids an overly legalistic analysis with an original glimpse at the ‘hidden’ workings of the EU law-making process which has hitherto received little attention among legal academics and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

: Since 1989 the European Commission has attempted to harmonise rules governing EU takeovers as a crucial step towards the integration of Europe's capital markets. The article takes its starting point in the vote in the European Parliament in July 2001, which turned down a proposal for a Takeover Directive. Members of the European Parliament overwhelmingly voted according to national rather than party lines, which is unusual. The article develops an explanation for opposition to the directive, which emphasises differences between national systems of corporate governance. The outcome is asymmetric vulnerability, which means that the likelihood of a company becoming the target of an unwanted takeover bid differs depending on the nature of national incorporation. The article shows how national differences constituted obstacles to real reform within a context of arguments about how to create a level playing field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing legislative activity of the Union in the field of criminal law highlights the need for a normative justification of EU action in this area. The article first examines and compares the existing EU legislative grounds for criminalisation, coupled with EU criminal policy orientations, with the well‐established criminalisation grounds recognised in criminalisation theory in order to distil what the underlying substantive criminalisation principles behind EU criminal law may be. This article then scrutinises 'effectiveness' as the potential normative principle of EU criminalisation. It is submitted that, within EU criminal law and policy, effectiveness has become a sort of 'hybrid criminalisation principle', joining pragmatic with seemingly normative criminalisation‐legitimising considerations. However, the article argues that effectiveness should remain primarily conceptualised as a pragmatic criminalisation consideration, not as a normative substantive criminalisation principle that acts as the first and most important criminalisation criterion determining the content of what may be criminalised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration and asylum elicit intense debate in the EU. The Commission's New Pact for Migration and Asylum 2020 sought to diffuse some of the divisive issues among Member States by proposing a series of measures, mainly directed at diminishing asylum arrivals. In this article I argue that there is a profound incoherence at the centre of this policy, which is its embrace of the nineteenth‐century theoretical framework of migration as driven by push and pull factors. While EU statistics provided by Frontex and Eurostat reveal that hundreds of millions of third‐country nationals are welcomed to the EU each year as tourists but also as students, workers, etc., and a few hundred thousand are treated as unwanted, EU policy is still dominated by a framing of people as pushed and pulled to the detriment of the host state rather than as an essential element of the European way of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article holistically discusses the alleged new EU return system which the Pact on Migration and Asylum heralds. Absent any impact assessment accompanying the key draft legislative measures and any implementation report regarding the existing legislative instruments following the 2015 refugee‐protection crisis, it provides both a substantial and a formal assessment of the proposed reform. A substantial analysis reveals that the two main objectives of the EU return system, namely effectiveness and human rights compliance, are pitted against each other to the detriment of human rights compliance and that effectiveness is questionably narrowed to return rate. Looking at the key components of the return system under the Pact and taking into account past interinstitutional negotiations in the field, it shows that the draft proposals are not conducive to fulfilling these objectives. From a formal standpoint, the article questions the weight of the Commission's proposals on the future outcome of the current negotiations based on their lack of legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates that the role of the European Commission in the area of asylum policy is characterised by an imbalance between politicisation and rationality. Politicisation of the role of the Commission is especially visible in its proposals for border procedures in the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. We show that the efficiency and effectiveness of these proposals are not supported by evidence or a thorough assessment of past EU action, as required by Better Regulation. The result is that they fail to address the structural problems that exist with regard to the implementation and application of EU law at external borders. The broken balance between politicisation and rationality in the legislative process leads to a prioritisation of security over freedom and justice. We argue that it needs to be compensated by a stronger role of the judiciary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU Commission has a long tradition of consulting interested parties when formulating its policies. While the rationale, format and legal basis relied upon by the Commission when holding public consultations have changed over time, its systematic inability to make those consultations equally accessible to all affected parties has remained constant. This article discusses the extent to which such a consultation practice conflicts with the principle of political equality, as enshrined in Article 9 TEU. Given the Commission's unrestrained discretion regarding who, how and when to consult and the absence of corresponding participatory rights, it argues that the EU can no longer presume that all stakeholders—especially citizens and civil society groups—enjoy equal access to EU institutions. Rather, under a proposed substantive reading of the principle of political equality, it contends that EU institutions are procedurally required to ensure that everyone will effectively be given equal opportunities of access to the policy process. Only a series of structural, power‐shifting reforms—some of which are proposed in this article—may enable participation to become an autonomous form of legitimation of the Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article traces the origins of the European economic constitution in the debate on Article 30 of the EC Treaty (general rule on the free movement of goods) between 1966 and 1969, which resulted in Directive 70/50. In this, the first archive‐based analysis of the policy origins of the Court's Dassonville (1974) decision, the article demonstrates that there was a strong continuity in the investment by a number of key actors in focusing on Article 30 to create the single market from the mid‐1960s. These civil servants and lawyers provided the backbone for the Commission's transformation of the Cassis de Dijon judgment (1979) into a powerful tool, driving back the need for legislative harmonisation and making it a cornerstone of the Single European Act of 1986. The article therefore analyses one of the key moments in the transformation of European law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the institutional position of the Commission within the European citizens' initiative (ECI) process, with particular emphasis on its decision regarding the admissibility/registration of a proposed ECI, and its final decision on the outcome of an ECI which has met the necessary levels of support. The purpose of this contribution is to juxtapose the case-law of the Court on the Commission's discretion and the relevant provisions of the Treaties with the evolution of European integration and, more specifically, the evolution of the Commission's role therein. Viewed under this prism, the Commission's powers at the registration stage (which in any event clearly fall under the scope of judicial review) are compatible with the constitutionalisation of the Union, whereas the Commission's width of discretion at the follow-up stage, while compatible with the Commission's prerogatives, cannot easily be reconciled, nonetheless, with the Commission's limited legitimacy when compared to that of the co-legislators, the fact that it may not always represent the Union interest, and the latter's pragmatic losses within the EU institutional balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spitzenkandidaten experiment has elicited much interest in academic and political circles as a move towards further politicisation of important aspects of EU lawmaking. This article puts forward a sobering account of the normative and instrumental reasons that explain why these expectations were grounded on shaky premises and the experiment could not have delivered its promises. In particular, the article stresses (1) the failure in creating a channel for political opposition through the indirect election of the President of the Commission; (2) the adoption of a formal understanding of the institutions involved in the process, that is, a conception detached from their social basis and (3) the choice of the wrong institution for the purpose of politicisation. The article concludes with a modest proposal for the consolidation of the channels for political action already available at the level of the Member States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governing bodies have significant autonomy in the organisation of professional sport in the EU, a situation now supported by Article 165 TFEU. However the post- Lisbon competence for sport does not grant any exemption for practices that infringe fundamental freedoms or competition law; such infringements can only be justified where they are a proportionate response to an inherent need in that sport. The football 'transfer system' has been the subject of a series of EU law challenges, but continues to place obstacles in the way of the free movement of players between Member States and may restrict the ability of most clubs to compete for the elite players. Court of Arbitration for Sport decisions in transfer dispute cases have entrenched this situation, and recent evidence casts doubt on both the ability of the authorities to justify the current system and the 2001 decision by the European Commission to sign it off as being an acceptable balance between the rights of the stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of recent developments in Hungary, the article discusses the question whether the European Union ought to play a role in protecting liberal democracy in Member States. First, it is argued that the EU has the authority to do so, both in a broad normative sense and in a narrower legal sense (though the latter is more likely to be disputed). The article then asks whether the EU has the capacity to establish a supranational militant democracy; here it is argued that at the moment both appropriate legal instruments and plausible political strategies are missing. To remedy this situation, the article proposes a new democracy watchdog, analogous to, but more powerful than, the Venice Commission. Finally, it is asked whether EU interventions would provoke a nationalist backlash. There is insufficient evidence to decide this question, but the danger of such a backlash probably tend to be overestimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the impact of the economic, social and political crisis on the labour law regimes of two of the Member States of the EU most affected; Greece and Ireland. Both countries have been the recipients of 'bail-out' deals, negotiated and monitored by what has become known as the ' Troika' of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The article considers the extent to which both countries have been required to make amendments to their labour law regimes as a condition of their bail-outs. It argues that the changes demanded reflect the basic norm now governing the EU legal order, namely that of 'competition'; the logic of market integration based on the primacy of economic competition. The article sets the reforms in Greece and Ireland within the broader context of the 'social deficit' problem of the EU construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a method for conceptualising the way lawmaking has ebbed away from our national parliamentary-governmental complexes: horizontally, towards unelected officials, in a process of bureaucratisation; vertically, towards the EU, in a process of Europeanisation; and laterally, towards private actors that are left to regulate themselves, in a process of privatisation. The combined effect has been to diffuse lawmaking across many very diverse actors that interact in dense constellations across a 3 D governance space described by these axes. The descriptive innovation of analysing these processes together points also to a common normative challenge; that of finding new ways to legitimate the outer reaches of this governance space, furthest removed from our traditional constitutional structures and the reasonably neat (electoral) lines of accountability they offer back to us. A tentative solution is proposed in creatively rethinking administrative and constitutional law while remaining faithful to the philosophical core of classical constitutionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major achievement of the new institutionalism is the formalisation of the idea that certain policies, such as competition law, are more efficient when administered by a politically independent organisation. Based on this insight, several practitioners and scholars criticise the European Community for relying too much on a multitask, collegial, and therefore politicised organisation, the European Commission. Defining collegiality as the involvement of non-expert commissioners in the implementation of the EC competition law, this article offers the first interdisciplinary analysis of the causes and consequences of that peculiar European institution. The central finding is that, far from being a mistake or the product of unanticipated consequences, collegiality was a necessary condition for the creation of supranational European law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of comitology-the system of implementation committees that control the Commission in the execution of delegated powers-has been characterised by institutional tensions. The crux of these tensions has often been the role of the European Parliament and its quest to be granted powers equal to those of the Council. This process came to a head with the 2006 Comitology reform and the introduction of the regulatory procedure with scrutiny ( RPS). After just over three years of experience with the RPS procedure, the Treaty of Lisbon has made it redundant through the creation of Delegated Acts ( Article 290 TFEU). This article aims to evaluate the practical implications that Delegated Acts will entail for the Parliament, principally by using the experience with the RPS to better understand the challenges ahead. This analysis will be of interest to those following the study of comitology, formal and informal inter-institutional relations and also to practitioners who will have to work with Delegated Acts in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Commission's soft post-legislative rulemaking by way of communications, notices, codes and similar instruments has become an increasingly important tool for the adequate functioning of the system of shared administration in the EU. However, the development of its legal framework has not kept pace with this, as the Treaty on the EU nor the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) recognise this regulatory phenomenon. As a result, its current procedural control is of a very ad hoc nature. Given the risks this rulemaking involves for the legitimacy of the EU, its practical and legal importance for legal practice and the way in which the Treaty of Lisbon has sought to condition and control the behaviour of the Union institutions, it is argued that the time is ripe for a more stringent and consistent procedural control of soft post-legislative rulemaking. Some options to realise this are presented for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the implications of the European Commission, as primary administrative enforcer of competition law in the Union, using its own 'preliminary reference procedure', through observations in national court proceedings under Council Regulation 1/2003, to minimise the risks of divergent application of EU anti-trust rules under the decentralised system of enforcement ushered in by that Regulation. It sets the scene with the relationship between the European Commission and national courts in competition law, before describing the relevant provisions of the Regulation and its accompanying Courts Notice. It then discusses the legal nature of the Commission opinion as a Union instrument. Identifying cases where the Commission has offered observations, it assesses the implications of administrative intervention in judicial decision making. It finds that greater transparency is crucial for legitimacy, legal certainty and maximum impact on consistent application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic literature repeatedly calls for the EU's accession to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms 1950 (hereinafter Convention 1 ). Similarly, the not (yet) ratified Lisbon Treaty provides that the EU must accede to the Convention. This might seem odd as the European Court of Justice (hereinafter ECJ 2 ) has over the years developed abundant case-law on human rights protection in the EU, and the EU has not so long ago adopted a, albeit non-binding, catalogue of human rights (the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (hereinafter Charter)). But after all these years, cases, and Treaty amendments, the EU is in fact going back to the ECJ's 1996 landmark opinion which recommended the EU's formal accession to the Convention, 3 already proposed in 1979 by the Commission. 4 One reason for this might be that, in the meantime, human rights issues have multiplied in the application of EU law, especially in areas such as the Second and Third Pillars where—at least initially—fewer human rights protection guarantees were foreseen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the cultural welfare concerning cinema, a medium capable of both painting and shaping society. It aims to investigate the impact of the European integration on national film promotional law, by studying the European Commission decision-making practice in the field of State aid to cinematographic works. The analysis shows that this practice can be understood in two main phases that are delineated by the adoption of specific criteria. These criteria are explored by highlighting the most elucidating cases. Furthermore, this analysis discloses two relevant conflicts: within the Commission itself and between the Commission and the Member States. Particular emphasis is placed on the latter, which is explored with regard to: the European national film agencies' polarisation of the conflict, the main form of dispute settlement adopted by the Commission, and the legal obligations imposed by Member States upon TV broadcasters to invest in audiovisual 1 production. The analysis ends with an evaluation of the above-mentioned impact and a few remarks on some unresolved issues related to the conflict between the Commission and the Member States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the ‘Common Frame of Reference’ is a highly prominent topic on the agenda of European integration. However, its underlying procedures have had only limited investigation. This article discusses the European private law project by inquiring into the drafting experiences of four other private law legislative processes, with a focus on sales law. These instruments concern Article 2 (on sales) of the American Uniform Commercial Code, the Vienna Sales Convention, the Dutch Civil Code and the Directive on Consumer Sales and Associated Guarantees. Ultimately, the article asks what can the European project learn from these experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the extensive scrutiny of the human rights credentials of the new Member States under the EU pre-accession conditionality, which itself was riddled with paradoxes, this article considers a rather unexpected irony thrown up by the accession of these countries. It is that the post-communist constitutional courts, which have been applauded for vigorous protection of fundamental rights after the fall of the Communist regime that was marked by nihilism to rights, have come rather close to having to downgrade the protection standards after accession, due to the new constraints of supremacy of EC law. The article will consider the sugar market cases of the Hungarian and Czech Constitutional Courts and of the Estonian Supreme Court, which appear to add weight to the concerns that have been voiced in some older Member States about the fundamental rights protection in the EU. Indeed such concerns were recently also addressed in the concurring opinions to the Bosphorus judgment of the European Court of Human Rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article concerns the inter-institutional relations and describes the dynamics between the main EC institutions in the decision-making process regarding the adoption of the new external action instruments. In 2004, the Commission had proposed a set of new external action instruments as base for the delivery of the Community's external assistance. By that time, the existing instruments amounted to more than 30 different legal instruments, which implicated a loss of efficiency in the management of the EC's external assistance. After 2 years of inter-institutional negotiations between the European Parliament, Council and the Commission, the new set of instruments was finally adopted. Compared to the initial Commission proposals, the design of the new instruments got significantly reshaped in the course of the inter-institutional decision-making procedure. In particular, the European Parliament had gained an unprecedented degree of power over the legislative framework for external spending. Compared to the former range of geographic and thematic regulations, the new external action instruments fundamentally reform the delivery of external financial assistance with their streamlined and simplified structure. They consist of three horizontal instruments to respond to particular needs or crisis situation: an Instrument for Stability, an Instrument for Nuclear Safety Co-operation, and a European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights. With regard to geographic coverage, four instruments will implement particular policies: the Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance, the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument and the Instrument for Development Co-operation and an Instrument for Co-operation with Industrialised Countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the main interactions between bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and EU law. The European Commission identified a number of incompatibilities in BITs signed by eight recent Member States with the USA, proposing solutions for their adjustment in conformity with EU law, but was this step sufficient? The risk of disputes remains, as long as the proposed adjustments do not achieve legal force and as long as other BITs still need to be harmonised with EU law. Moreover, provisions in BITs that are not in conflict with EU law could still be challenged if the application of certain EU requirements by Member States interferes with foreign investors' rights. To avoid such risks, coherence between different commitments and practices of the Member States is needed and coordination at the EU level is highly desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fact that Interinstitutional Agreements (IIAs) are an established part of the mass of informal and formal rules structuring EU decision-making and interinstitutional relations, there is as yet no common understanding of their role and functions in the institutional and legal system of the EU—neither in political science nor legal studies. Tracking the evolution of the European Parliament's competencies in three areas where IIAs figure prominently—comitology, legislative planning, and the establishment of procedures to hold the Commission accountable—this article seeks to show that the European Parliament strategically uses IIAs as instruments to wrest competencies from the Council and the Commission. Having no formal say in treaty reform, the European Parliament ‘creates facts’ through informal but politically binding IIAs hoping that, once established, it can achieve a later codification of its new rights at IGCs. Viewed this way, the analysis of the role of IIAs in Treaty Reform could help to explain a still under-researched puzzle in European integration theory, namely the incremental parliamentarisation of the institutional system of the EU over the last two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the current state of EU law and the political sentiment surrounding Genetically Modified Organisms, this article argues that the best approach to regulating the import and export of GMOs into the Community and between Member States is by what I will call ‘regulatory anarchy’. Applied in the context of GMOs, regulatory anarchy envisions integration not coming solely from Community rules conceived by the Commission, but by Member State negotiated rules accomplished at the level of regulatory civil servants negotiating among each other. Greater centralisation will occur in the regulation of GMOs because the risk of defection in this area by an individual regulatory body imposes very high costs on other national regulators, to the point where they are willing to relinquish some of their own enforcement authority for assurances against collective action problems. As a result of the current gridlock caused by recalcitrant Member States, the GMO regime may be more effectively and efficiently handled by a system that employs regulatory anarchy; whereby 25 interested parties are initially brought to the table to approve a release (rather than one Member State), leaving less opportunities for regulatory capture by one Member State and still leaving room for Community supervision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

: This article analyses the history of EU company law and locates a stable ‘non-competitive equilibrium’. This equilibrium follows from Member States that founded the EU unwilling to give up their lawmaking authority regarding company law issues. From the outset, Member States were determined to prevent the ‘Delaware effect’. Since then, stability has ruled. The agenda-setting in EU company law has changed little during the existence of the EU. Operative incentives, market structure and regulatory results have been more constant than dynamic, even as the recent enactment of the European Company has triggered discussion about competitive lawmaking in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fall of the Santer Commission, prompted by the Report of the Committee of Independent Experts, sent shock waves throughout the entire Community. This article seeks to examine the nature of the problems which beset the Commission, to place these within the broader context of decision-making by public bodies, and to consider also the responsibilities of the Council and European Parliament for the delivery of agreed Community policies. The article analyses in detail the Reports of the Committee of Independent Experts, and the subsequent reforms initiated by the Prodi Commission, in order to assess the prospects for improved service delivery in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence collected by the European Commission indicates that insofar as the diversity between laws of national legal systems presents an obstacle to trade in the Internal Market, the problem consists of the inability of businesses to use their standard terms of business in cross-border trade with confidence. It is suggested that the solution to this problem lies not in legal integration through harmonisation of the private law of contract, but rather through the creation of procedures for autonomous agreements under which representatives of parties to standard types of contracts can agree upon model contracts containing fair ancillary terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main question addressed in this article concerns the role of law in regulating the Internet in Europe, while the focus is on the European Commission in the process. The thesis advanced is that Bourdieu's notion of capital may offer a view radically different to understanding regulatory law as objective and neutral, and to conceiving action as being initiated to achieve certain policy outcomes. Based on the assumption that power is at the heart of action, the argument is that the European Commission is predominantly engaged in struggles to remain a crucial locus of governance and maximise its power as a major think-tank. To follow this intuition, this article questions the extent to which decentralised regulatory techniques have been effective in weakening mechanisms of control, as power may now be exercised in novel and less visible ways and thus be misrecognised. Unravelling the processes that disguise the effects of power will be done by virtue of three case studies: Architectural solutions introduced in software by the industry with the aim to combat illegal copying, domain names allocation by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and content regulation in the context of the Safer Internet Action Plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on a study which examined the general powers of the European Commission to take infringement proceedings against the Member States. Information on the three faces of infringement proceedings; Details on the triangular relations of the three faces; Explanation on the discretion and the decision-making chain.

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the legal aspects of European Union (EU) citizenship, a European Commission-funded Jean Monnet Multilateral Research Group project, and various fundamental rights in the EU.

We hope to stimulate more systematic research on all areas of legal integration by making available for free and open use a comprehensive data base on preliminary references in EC law. The Data Set, which has been under construction since 1996, is now online at various websites. The data are not publicly accessible elsewhere. In this article, we provide a brief summary of the data base and its potential uses. We begin by introducing the main features of the Data Set. We then discuss some of the dynamics of legal integration in light of our analyses of the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the procedures used in EC law to prosecute infringements committed by Member States, in addition to the well-known Article 226 (ex Article 169) EC. It has three purposes. The first is to systematise the main categories of these, to examine the reasons for the creation of these procedures and the interaction among them, using Article 226 as the main point of reference. The basic criterion is the distinction between procedures established by the EC Treaty and procedures established by secondary legislation but without a clear legal basis in the Treaty. The second purpose is to explain why Member States have accepted the development of new procedures, even though they serve to reinforce the Commission's powers. The article argues that this acceptance can be explained, first, by the active participation of Member States, through committees, in the establishment of these procedures; and, secondly, a deliberate strategy to convince Member States, on both a sectoral basis, and a case-by-case basis, by the Commission. The article concludes, however, that the current procedures should be improved and that it is time for them to be realigned and rationalised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]