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Although the Council of Europe has been working in the area of administrative law for decades, the body of pan-European general principles of good administration developed by this organisation remains mostly uncharted. This paper attempts to help fill this academic gap by examining the scope and content of the pan-European principles of administrative law stemming from the Council of Europe, with a special emphasis on the principle of good administration. In doing so, the sources of administrative law of the Council of Europe are considered together with the mechanisms by which they penetrate and permeate domestic legal systems. This paper concludes that the work done by the Council of Europe in the administrative field has contributed to a process of harmonisation in its Member States’ domestic law, but that the exact scope thereof has yet to be uncovered and requires further research.
The Council of Europe (CoE) has a long-standing record of promoting standards of good administration in the European legal space. Today, these standards encapsulate the entire range of general organisational, procedural and substantive legal institutions meant to ensure a democratically legitimised, open and transparent administration respecting the rule of law. Therefore, these standards are about the ‘limiting function’ of administrative law, that is, its function to protect individuals from arbitrary power, to legitimise administrative action and to combat corruption and nepotism and other ‘diseases’ with which even a democratic polity willing to be governed by the rule of law may be infected. These CoE standards can be described as ‘pan-European principles of good administration.