Vigjilenca Abazi defends doctoral thesis
On 11 December 2015, Vigjilenca Abazi successfully defended her doctoral thesis entitled ‘Secrecy and Oversight in the European Union: The Law and Practice of Classified Information’ conducted at University of Amsterdam under the promotion of Professor Deirdre Curtin.
The Doctorate Committee praised the thesis for its major contribution that brings novel insights in an under-researched topic and it puts the question of secrecy firmly on the EU research agenda.
Based on a legal inquiry that draws from 40 interviews with EU officials, MEPs, experts, and civil activists as well as perspectives from political science and public administration, Dr. Abazi provides the first systematic and in-depth account of the regulatory regime of official secrets in the EU and its practice.
The thesis demonstrates that the current EU secrecy model is engineered by executive actors and ensures their discretion in the exchange of official secrets, whereas the EU oversight institutions have incorporated confidentiality rules that disproportionality affect public deliberation and fundamental rights but do not limit the executives’ discretion on final disclosure.
Adaptations to the EU constitutional oversight structure have been pragmatically developed behind closed doors leading to an administrative practice that legally thrives outside EU primary law.
From a democratic perspective, Dr. Abazi argues that EU oversight institutions should assume more responsibility in paving the way forward to establish more openness in the regime of official secrets in the EU.
Also read
-
The Honours programme is an extracurricular activity for bachelor’s students in year 2 and 3 to showcase their academic skills and teamwork in a real-life project. We talked to Emma van Straten, a Health Sciences student and Honours alumna who organised an international conference on Lama2 in...
-
It has come to the attention of Maastricht University’s Executive Board and Management Team via an anonymous email that six of the protesters who have been allowed to stay in the garden of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) have embarked on a hunger strike as of today until their...
-
Maastricht University has decided that some of the protesters at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) may remain present at night for the time being in the role of ‘observers’. The condition is that the protests remain non-violent and the agreements made by UM and the activists are kept.
T...
