The European Courts have maintained a restrictive approach to participation rights in EU administrative procedures. The right to be heard is primarily recognised to addressees of unfavourable administrative decisions or, at any rate, to those directly and individually concerned by them. As such,...

Book II aims to fill a gap in the existing legal system of the EU. It links the provisions, general principles of law and values arising from primary law with the procedure for adoption of non-legislative acts of general application. Progressively over the past decades, a set of constitutional...

Enforcement of competition law affects consumers' economic interests, as part of the public interests EU competition law protects. Therefore, consumers ought to be involved in the respective enforcement procedures. Against this normative background, we analyse consumers' access to the public...

It is conventionally assumed that administrative discretionary decisions are determined by political and expert-driven considerations and that law's structuring and constraining capacity in that regard is and should be limited. Law defines a space within which discretionary choices are...

We shall introduce a set of fundamental legal concepts, providing a definition of each of them. This set will include, besides the usual deontic modalities (obligation, prohibition and permission), the following notions: obligative rights (rights related to others’ obligations), permissive...

The completion of a Community system of unitary intellectual property protection has come to a halt when the Commission’s proposal for a Community Patent Regulation was shelved by the Council on political grounds in late 2004. By contrast, under the auspices of the European Patent Organization...

This paper will appear in Genèse et Destinée de la Constitution Européenne Commentaire du traité établissant une Constitution pour l’Europe à la lumière des travaux préparatoires et perspectives d’ avenir edited by Giuliano Amato, Hervé Bribosia and Bruno De Witte. It seeks to...

International comparisons of Civil Services usually overlook the difficulties due to differing definitions of the civil service in national legal systems. Comparative statistics are therefore extremely misleading, as they are at best based on formal-legal criteria instead of being based on...

The 2005 World Summit was announced as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform the United Nations so as to provide it with the institutional and policy tools needed to meet the challenges and threats to peace and security in contemporary world. But the Summit was also meant to be a crucial...