Please join HELA for a lunch talk on official secrets and oversight in the European Union with Dr Vigjilenca Abazi.
Topic
Does the governance of secrecy in the European Union impede its fundamental principles of democracy and fundamental rights? Based on her recent book, Dr Abazi explains the shifts in institutional practice of oversight in the European Union that disproportionately favour secrecy and the protection of classified documents while creating serious limitations to open democratic deliberations and access to justice.
Based on material from forty interviews with practitioners and other stakeholders, this book talk will also offer an understanding of the practices of official secrets and provide a critical and much-needed perspective on how parliamentary, judicial and administrative oversight institutions deal with access to classified material and the dilemma of oversight to concurrently ensure secrecy necessary for EU security policies and openness needed for constitutional checks and balances.
Dr Vigjilenca Abazi
Dr Abazi is a Fellow at Yale Law School, Information Project Society and Assistant Professor of European law at Maastricht University. She has been an Emile Nöel Fellow at NYU School of Law and Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Columbia Law School. Dr Abazi holds a PhD degree from University of Amsterdam and an LLM from Yale Law School.
Dr Abazi has more than 20 scientific peer-reviewed publications in leading journals and is member of editorial board at European Journal of Risk Regulation. She has been invited for more than 40 academic guest lectures at leading universities worldwide including at Harvard Law School, Oxford University, European University Institute, University of Tokyo, FGV Brazil, NYU, Sciences Po Paris. Her work has been translated in Russian, German, and Spanish and featured in news media such as Der Spiegel, Le Monde, EU Observer, Bloomberg and Publico. In addition to her academic work, Dr Abazi has offered legal advice to the European Parliament and the Council of Europe.