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Principles of Good Administration in the Member States of the European Union
http://www.statskontoret.se/upload/Publikationer/2005/200504.pdf
The Swedish government has commissioned the Swedish Agency for Public Management to conduct a survey on current regulation on good administration in the Member States of the European Union. The background is that the Swedish government has declared that it intends to work for a law on good administration for the institutions, bodies, offices and agencies of the European Union. Such a law would be based on Article III-398 in the newly signed Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe. The article was originally proposed by the Swedish government’s representative to the Convention on the Future of Europe and the intention was to allow for the adoption of a law on good administration by giving the right to good administration its own legal base in the Treaty.
The origins of the right to good administration can be traced back to a number of Council of Europe resolutions as well as to the case law of the European Court of Justice. Before the adoption of the new Constitutional Treaty, the concept of good administration had been codified in two documents with are not legally binding. Firstly, in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which only has the ambiguous status of a 'solemn proclamation' by three of the Union's most important institutions. Secondly, the meaning of the concept was further elaborated in the Ombudsman’s Code of Good Administrative Behavior. The legal status of the right to good administration will therefore be significantly strengthened if the new Constitutional Treaty, with its Article III-398, is ratified.
Based on the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union and the European Code of Good Administrative Behavior, the Agency for Public Administration chose a set of rights and obligations which were considered to be essential for the meaning of good administration. These rights and obligations were compiled into a questionnaire consisting of 12 questions. The questionnaire was then distributed to all the Swedish embassies in the EU with a request to identify a suitable English-speaking officer in each respective Member State administration that could answer the questionnaire. The purpose of the survey was to examine if and to what extent some of the core principles of good administration had been transformed into legally binding rules in the Member States of the European Union.
The results of the survey show that:
- A core set of principles of good administration is widely accepted among the Member States.
- Most principles are enacted as general and legally binding rules in constitutional or statutory legislation.
- The material content of the rules varies significantly.
- The interpretation of the principles will vary between, at least, four different tratitions of administrative law.
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