Vigjilenca Abazi

The European Union security exception : beyond control?

Executive discretion and dominance in the European Union is salient due to the considerable reinforcement of both political and administrative power in recent years towards types of decision-making that eschew electoral accountability and democratic control. This includes not only new executive actors such as the President of the European Council, the High Representative of Common Foreign and Security Policy and the European External Action Service but also the expansion and intensification of the remit of existing actors such as the Secretariat General of the Council, the European Central Bank, security agencies and committees. At the EU level we have (semi-) autonomous administrative executive power that is not embedded in a democratically elected government at the same level of governance but still adopts decisions with highly relevant political implications. This democratic gap is fed by far-reaching secrecy arrangements and practices exercised in a concerted fashion by various executive actors at different levels of governance and resulting in the blacking out of crucial information and documents – even for parliaments and courts. The more recent security crisis induced accelerated decision-making and security measures with fundamental implications for civil liberties brought to a fore by the Paris attacks combined with the refugee influx. The state of the security exception has been greatly reinforced in Europe – through legislation, both national and supranational. In December 2015, the European Commission adopted a series of measures aimed at transforming the current system of border management into the European Border and Coast Guard.

Transparency in the Institutionalisation of Transatlantic Relations: Dynamics of Official Secrets and Access to Information in Security and Trade

This chapter analyses transparency in the context of the institutionalisation of transatlantic relations more specifically in the fields of security and trade. In both of these fields, the EU’s rules on transparency clash with (soft) norms and arrangements of official secrets mostly agreed solely between EU and US executives without parliamentary involvement or external oversight. The paper analyses the TFTP and TTIP as two relevant cases in unveiling the dynamics between access to information and official secrets in transatlantic relations. The chapter posits that despite the many limitations to access to information, transatlantic relations have contributed to better-defined legal limits to secrecy in the EU. Yet the chapter concludes that the EU regime of official secrets, largely resulting from security-driven cooperation, grants a wide discretion to US institutions on disclosure of information and would remain a concern for parliamentary access to information in the EU.