Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 27th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Panel: The Rule of Law & Public Administration Author(s) Erzsebet Csatlos University of Szeged Szeged Hungary Title Rule of Law and the European Administration of Consular Protection File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Erzsebet Csatlos Abstract Rule of law is a fundamental value of the EU and of the legal system of Member States. Execution of EU law and the decision -making in single cases is basically the area of indirect administrative system of the European administration, although there is an increasing number of policies where coordination and cooperation measures are adopted at EU level and the competent authorities of other Member States, and the direct level institutions and organs are also involved in the procedure; thus a single decision-making procedure may involve horizontal and vertical cooperation. The consular protection policy of the EU and its recent developments is worth to be explored and analysed in this point of view especially with procedural administrative law aspects to see how it is in conformity with rule of law requirements and what challenges emerge. The right to get consular protection in the territory of third States from any consular authority of any Member State if the EU citizen’s state of nationality is not represented there, is a fundamental one. Although the provision as a right inherent to EU citizenship has a history of more than two decades, it is still under construction due to the development wave caused by the Lisbon Treaty. The cooperation and coordination measures based on new competences were introduced by the Council Directive (EU) 2015/637 of 20 April 2015 (Directive) which entered into force this May. Beside the consular authority at site, its cooperation and coordination measures involve new actors in the procedure (inter alia other State’s consular authorities, EEAS, delegations) and other provisions imply substantive law changes despite its non-harmonisation aims (ie. the expansion of the scope of protection to accompanying non-EU citizen family members) and the scenario of procedural steps is drawn up. All these leads to a better conformity with the general principles of good administration, however, they also leave open questions and ambiguity in the point of view of citizens procedural rights. Such details of horizontal and vertical cooperation of authorities within the EU administrative structure has always been a challenge for rule of law. The Directive also boosts the demand for a sort of coherence and predictability as Member States are obliged to ensure the equal treatment, but the procedural rules and consular protection measures are regulated by domestic law, so they vary from state to State and the inter-state phase of the procedure is only framed without exact and detailed procedural rules. Meanwhile, the Council directive proposal (submitted this May) on the new emergency document is a further step towards a better administration of this specific consular protection measure. It involves a more developed version of provisions on the above-mentioned scenario including exact deadlines for procedural steps and preferring hard law instead of soft law measures (which is a common solution to administrative details in the form of guideline, for instance) to that end while the beneficiaries of such provisions and their procedural rights in this administrative procedure is still confusing. Its pioneer provisions are challenging for legal application but on the other hand, they envisage further harmonisation and in a wider scope, it strengthens the need for a comprehensible code for administrative procedures of EU administration especially for those phases of procedures which connects authorities of Member States and/or organs of direct administration of the EU.
