Research on the Council of Europe and Good Administration: Reasons, methods, and substantive findings

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