The purpose of this article is to shed some light on the emerging, yet largely undefined, principle of openness in EU law. After addressing the semantic confusion existing between openness and transparency, it attempts – through a textual and systemic interpretation of their respective legal...

As the EU enters a new political cycle, this article provides a critical analysis of the state of EU democracy by focusing on its two main components: representative and participatory democracy through their theoretical and practical realities. It argues that it is for EU democracy — and...

This article examines what difference – if any – the renewed EU Better Regulation Agenda has made for the EU Commission in terms of its own accountability and policy outcomes. Emboldened by the Spitzenkandidaten process – which established for the first time a link between the outcome of...

This paper provides a critical assessment of the realities of EU participatory democracy and offers a set of innovative democratic innovations capable of making the Union more responsive to public input. It argues that today’s limited effectiveness of citizen participation to EU...

This paper discusses the legal implications deriving from the choice of an interinstitutional agreement to regulate interest representation activities in the European Union. In particular, it focuses on whether this instrument may validly allow the European Parliament to impose a set of...

This time was supposed 'to be different', at least this was the motto of the 2014 European Parliament elections campaign. With less than a year before the next European elections, the time is ripe to examine how different this EU political cycle has actually been. Emboldened by the...

The article outlines the options for collaboration between the European Union (EU) and the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The OGP accepts full participants (states), sub-national participants (pilot program), and observers. As of now, the OGP’s charter states that it only accepts...

The 2015 reform of the EU’s court system will go down in history as the most radical transformation of the EU judicial architecture since the establishment of the General Court in 1989. It doubles the number of General Court judges but also dissolves the Civil Service Tribunal. This article...