By Annalisa Volpato The European Environmental Agency (EEA) has recently published its latest ‘State of the Environment’ report (SOER 2020). Published every 5 years as part of the tasks of EEA’s mandate, the report contains a comprehensive assessment on the state of, trends in, and prospects for the protection of the environment in the EU.… » read more

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    By Sabrina Röttger-Wirtz     The independence and impartiality of administrative procedures is a core component of the right to good administration and within the EU is emphasized in Article 41 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights as well as Article 298 TFEU, as well as many pieces of secondary legislation. Conflict of… » read more

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                by Merijn Chamon When the three main institutions adopted the Common Approach on EU Decentralised Agencies in 2012 one of the few innovative elements in this otherwise disappointing non-binding interinstitutional agreement were the provisions dedicated to the selection of the seat of EU agencies. As many EU-watchers… » read more

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The TARN academic research network was founded in 2015 and received co-funding as Jean Monet Network by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union over the period from 2015 until 2018. In order to provide an overview of the most important findings of this period, in this blog post the TARN Statement on EU Agencies… » read more

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      by Katrijn Siderius and Miroslava Scholten EU agencies’ number and powers have grown tremendously in the recent years. Despite the so-called Meroni ‘non-delegation’ doctrine, EU agencies perform a wide range of tasks. They can contribute to or pass (soft) rules of general applications and impose sanctions for violation of EU laws vis-à-vis… » read more

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By Andreas Eriksen The study of the accountability of administrative agencies should enable us to assess whether agency decisions are appropriately scrutinized. In order for this to be possible, we need sense of what makes something into a genuine accountability practice—as opposed to merely a set of administrative hurdles that create an illusory sense of… » read more

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By Tobias Tesche Mind the compliance gap The Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) has been plagued by chronic non-compliance and a lack of local ownership of the fiscal rules. To remedy this dysfunctional state of affairs a technocratic consensus has emerged between the European Commission, the ECB, the IMF and the OECD that fiscal councils… » read more

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By Ilaria Graceffa and Maia Ignatenko On 11-13 April, a TARN Workshop and Dialogue session took place in Brussels on the topic of ‘EU Agencies: Problem-Solving, Performance & the Accountability Overload: Squaring the Impossible Circle?’. Academics and practitioners participated in several panels to discuss a variety of current topics related to problem-solving, operability and accountability… » read more

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By Charikleia Vlachou   An institutional innovation in its conception Associating national parliaments to the democratic accountability of European agencies is not easy to conceptualize: the relationship between the two seems to be a primarily indirect one based on the control of national executives for the actions of national representatives in the Management Boards of… » read more

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By Sabrina Röttger-Wirtz Transparency is a persistently hot topic with regard to European Agencies. Especially the balance between granting access to documents and the protection of commercially confidential information, which might be contained in documents that third parties submit to Agencies in the context of administrative procedures, seems to be rather difficult to strike. As… » read more

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