Information Exchange in the European Administrative Union: An Introduction

Abstract

This special edition of the European Public Law (EPL) contains contributions exploring the law of information in the EU.This is a key aspect of the reality of decentralized implementation of EU policies – the European administrative union. Therein, organizationally separate bodies from the EU and the Member States (MS) levels are linked by procedures to achieve the output provided for in the specific policies of the EU.The possibilities and role of information exchange are a little understood aspect of high relevance for all areas of what one might call the ‘administrative’ law of the EU.This covers implementation of EU policies not only in the more narrow sense of activities necessary to implement legislative acts issued on the EU level. It also contains implementation in the wider sense as the activity of the MS when acting in what the European Court of Justice (ECJ) calls the ‘scope’ of EU law. The basis of this is circulation of information between national administrations, trans-border cooperation between local governments, and networks of national administrative bodies. Such activities have intensified since the past thirty to forty years, initially with support of the implementation of EU policies by ad-hoc exchange of information in the sense of mutual assistance.With more powerful means of computer-based information exchange, increasingly, the development of more structured forms of information networks has taken place in a wide spectrum of policy areas touched by EU law. The central questions which the contributions to this special edition, therefore, address are: what is the legal framework for procedures based on inter-jurisdictional information exchange in the EU and What is the law governing the establishment of information exchange systems in the EU? These