Challenges of the Knowledge Society (Jun 2023)
THE RIGHT TO SOUND ADMINISTRATION IN THE EUROPEAN UNION. THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ASPECTS. ELEMENTS OF CASE LAW
Abstract
In the activity of adopting legal acts through which any entity endowed with decision-making powers carries out in order to achieve its objectives, there are inherently moments when it is necessary to make choices, and identify legal solutions to the problems raised by the development of both economic and social areas of life. However, these decisions, whether legislative or administrative, have consequences for the subjects of law on which the effects of the acts adopted extend. Due to their nature, the positive consequences are not the object of our analysis. However, on one hand, the limitation of the negative consequences to what is strictly necessary in order to achieve the set goals and, on the other hand, the need for the action of those respective institutions to meet the expectations of the legal subjects concerned, are aspects that have always been of interest for the institutions, courts, relevant doctrine and addressees alike. From this preoccupation, inherently present at the level of the EU, was born the initial jurisprudential consecration, followed by that at the level of primary law, of the right to a good administration and the doctrinal comments that accompany it. These are the perspectives that we will consider in our study that will follow the development of good administration at the level of the EU, from the jurisprudential consecration of this right, which occurred shortly after the establishment of the European Communities, through its inclusion in the Charter of Rights Fundamentals of the European Union (initially in the absence of binding legal force), until the current situation, in which the principle in question is part of the Charter that acquired, following the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, the legal force of the sources of primary law of the EU. It is also important to mention that we will refer exclusively to this activity (and the right associated with it, that of good administration) throughout our study, and not to the broader concept of governance, of which we can consider the activity of administration to be only a part.
