Deirdre Curtin is Joint Chair Professor of European Union Law at the Department of Law and Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute.

Date & Time

29 March 2021

15:30 -17:00

More details

Abstract

The lecture will zoom in on three distinct levels of supranational expert involvement during the pandemic using the prism of transparency as a tool. Traditionally getting access to what happens inside technocracies and the role of experts in that context is a real challenge if not impossible. With EU transparency policies that evolve and strengthen through institutional pro-activity after some nudging (for example, the European Medicines Agency and now very recently also the ECDC) is it possible to study them empirically to determine their legitimacy and also to shed light on their actual role in practice? Seeing transparency in action requires precisely a more empirical, possibly sociological, turn in terms of methods and European law and governance seem to offer us the tools. Can we see what is happening within the black box of EU governance related to the pandemic? Is transparency a tool that is meaningful in this context? Does it go further during pandemic related responses and do new challenges become visible? What does this tell us already in terms of accountability of executive technocracy both at the European and at the national level?

Speaker

Deirdre Curtin is Joint Chair Professor of European Union Law at the Department of Law and Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute (Florence, Italy) since September 2015.

Prior to joining the EUI, Prof. Curtin held the Chair in European Law and Governance at the University of Amsterdam where she was also the founding Director of the Amsterdam Centre of European Law and Governance (2008-2016). Earlier, she held the Chair in European and International Governance at the Utrecht School of Governance of the University of Utrecht (2003-2013) and the Chair in the Law of International Organizations at the Faculty of Law of the University of Utrecht (1992-2002).