The Role of National Parliaments in European Decision-Making

National parliaments can be considered as victims of the European integration process. National parliaments ceded legislative powers to the EU and often lost leverage over their national executive branch, which continued to play a central role in EU decision-making. Different domestic parliamentary scrutiny systems have been established to enhance parliamentary involvement and control over EU affairs. In 2006 the Barroso Commission provided an additional impetus for parliaments to get involved, by offering to transmit its policy proposals directly to national parliaments with an open invitation to comment on them. The Lisbon Treaty foresees the possibility that national parliaments carry out subsidiarity checks on policy proposals. This paper argues that the different national and European provisions for parliamentary involvement do not amount to much. However, if we consider the combined effect of the different avenues in a dynamic perspective, they might jointly trigger a reassertion of national parliamentary influence in the European policy process

Preliminary specification and design documentation for software components to achieve catallaxy in computational systems

This Report is about the preliminary specifications and design documentation for software components to achieve Catallaxy in computational systems. -- Die Arbeit beschreibt die Spezifikation und das Design von Softwarekomponenten, um das Konzept der Katallaxie in Grid Systemen umzusetzen. Eine Einführung ordnet das Konzept der Katallaxie in bestehende Grid Taxonomien ein und stellt grundlegende Komponenten vor. Anschließend werden diese Komponenten auf ihre Anwendbarkeit in bestehenden Application Layer Netzwerken untersucht.Grid Computing

RDA in Germania, Austria e nella Svizzera tedesca: un nuovo standard non solo per le biblioteche

La comunità bibliotecaria in Germania, Austria e nella Svizzera tedesca ha raggiunto alla fine del 2015 un obiettivo comune. Dopo due anni di intensa preparazione, lo standard internazionale RDA è stato implementato e si è avviato il lavoro pratico.L'articolo descrive il progetto dal punto di vista della situazione organizzativa nei tre paesi e si concentra sugli obiettivi raggiunti e sul lavoro che resta ancora da fare.Offre inoltre una panoramica dell'impegno iniziale per allineare la gestione dei materiali speciali con RDA nelle nazioni di lingua tedesca e descrive le attività associate al requisito specifico derivante dalla natura multilingue della Svizzera. Infine, l'articolo riferisce lo sviluppo strategico nei comitati internazionali RDA, come il RDA Steering Committee (RSC) e l'European RDA Interest Group (EURIG).The library community in Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland achieved a common goal at the end of 2015. After more than two years of intensive preparation, the international standard RDA was implemented and the practical work has now started. The article describes the project in terms of the political and organizational situation in the three countries, and points out the objectives which have been achieved as well as the work which is still outstanding. An overview is given of the initial efforts to align special materials with RDA in the German-speaking countries, and the tasks associated with the specific requirements arising from the multilingual nature of Switzerland are described. Furthermore, the article reports on the current strategic developments in the international RDA committees like the RDA Steering Committee (RSC) and the European RDA Interest Group (EURIG)

Overview on the current organizational models for cultivar testing for Organic Agriculture over some EU countries.

Variety trials are an important way to evaluate the suitability of existing varieties (conventional, organic, landraces, heirloom, etc.) for organic farming, and are a necessary step in plant breeding and variety registration. However, it is essential that beside on-stations trials, varieties are also tested on-farm in different climatic regions as this gives more accurate and realistic variety performance assessment (Lyon et. al. 2019). Varieties of different crop species are in service to various stakeholders. Thus, their involvement may play an important role in variety trials. They could contribute, with knowledge, seed material in kind or financial support, to build cost-effective variety testing models also for crops that are not grown on a large scale and have small market share. In the report evaluation of different organic variety trials for pre- and post-registration as well as VCU across 15 EU countries (for arable incl. forage, vegetable and fruit crops) is presented through 4 main criteria (trial setup, organizational model, dissemination of results and financial model). Through the range of organizational models of variety trials there were some that were mainly governmentally supported and involving researchers, others that have strong engagement of breeders and seed companies, or are done within seed companies, and some that are running just if project financing is available or some that are mainly established by farmers and done on voluntary basis. Organizational models of variety trials have quite complex nature and therefore, it is not possible to give a general recipe for establishing successful variety trials network. Institutes or initiatives organize trials depending on different socio-economic conditions, such as financial possibilities, economic importance of the crop in the country, chain actors’ engagements, organic sector development, existing trial infrastructure etc. In the report, SWOT analysis of different organizational model groups give better understanding of pros and cons of the different systems and show necessary infrastructure for different models. These analyses will serve as a base for development of guidelines for on-farm trials models that are low budget, with alternative financing and new infrastructures

What is happening to the Schengen borders? CEPS Liberty and Security in Europe No. 86, December 2015

What is happening to the Schengen borders? Is Schengen in ‘crisis’? This paper examines the state of play in the Schengen system in light of the developments during 2015. It critically examines the assertion that Schengen is ‘in crisis’ and seeks to set the record straight on what has been happening to the intra-Schengen border-free and common external borders system. The paper argues that Schengen is here to stay and that reports about the reintroduction of internal border checks are exaggerated as they are in full compliance with the EU rule of law model laid down in the Schengen Borders Code and subject to scrutiny by the European Commission. It also examines the legal challenges inherent to police checks within the internal border areas as having an equivalent effect to border checks as well as the newly adopted proposal for a European Border and Coast Guard system. The analysis shows that the most far-reaching challenge to the current and future configurations of EU border policies relates to ensuring that they are in full compliance with fundamental human rights obligations to refugees, effective accountability and independent monitoring of the implementation of EU legal standards. This should be accompanied by a transparent and informed discussion on which ‘Schengen’ and which 'common European Border and Coast Guard Agency' we exactly want within current democratic rule of law and fundamental rights remits

Dynamic Data Citation Service-Subset Tool for Operational Data Management

In earth observation and climatological sciences, data and their data services grow on a daily basis in a large spatial extent due to the high coverage rate of satellite sensors, model calculations, but also by continuous meteorological in situ observations. In order to reuse such data, especially data fragments as well as their data services in a collaborative and reproducible manner by citing the origin source, data analysts, e.g., researchers or impact modelers, need a possibility to identify the exact version, precise time information, parameter, and names of the dataset used. A manual process would make the citation of data fragments as a subset of an entire dataset rather complex and imprecise to obtain. Data in climate research are in most cases multidimensional, structured grid data that can change partially over time. The citation of such evolving content requires the approach of "dynamic data citation". The applied approach is based on associating queries with persistent identifiers. These queries contain the subsetting parameters, e.g., the spatial coordinates of the desired study area or the time frame with a start and end date, which are automatically included in the metadata of the newly generated subset and thus represent the information about the data history, the data provenance, which has to be established in data repository ecosystems. The Research Data Alliance Data Citation Working Group (RDA Data Citation WG) summarized the scientific status quo as well as the state of the art from existing citation and data management concepts and developed the scalable dynamic data citation methodology of evolving data. The Data Centre at the Climate Change Centre Austria (CCCA) has implemented the given recommendations and offers since 2017 an operational service on dynamic data citation on climate scenario data. With the consciousness that the objective of this topic brings a lot of dependencies on bibliographic citation research which is still under discussion, the CCCA service on Dynamic Data Citation focused on the climate domain specific issues, like characteristics of data, formats, software environment, and usage behavior. The current effort beyond spreading made experiences will be the scalability of the implementation, e.g., towards the potential of an Open Data Cube solution

A comparison of European systems of direct access to constitutional judges: exploring advantages for the Italian Constitutional Court

As protection of fundamental rights increasingly becomes a defining feature of modern constitutionalism, some countries debate over the opportunity to introduce systems of direct individual access to constitutional judges to increase protection of constitutional rights. Part I of the article provides a comparative overview of the systems of individual constitutional complaint adopted in Europe, focusing on their functioning, structure and admissibility requirements. Part II addresses possible benefits of the introduction of such a system in Italy. After describing the main features of the Italian system of judicial review, the article details proposals that, since 1947, have been presented to introduce a system of direct individual access to the Italian Constitutional Court. Finally, Part III offers reflections on the potential advantages that adoption of such complaint would bring to the Italian legal system, compared to the currently existing avenues of access to the Court

Opening a new window to other worlds with spectropolarimetry

A high level of diversity has already been observed among the planets of our own Solar System. As such, one expects extrasolar planets to present a wide range of distinctive features, therefore the characterisation of Earth- and super Earth-like planets is becoming of key importance in scientific research. The SEARCH (Spectropolarimetric Exoplanet AtmospheRe CHaracerisation) mission proposal of this paper represents one possible approach to realising these objectives. The mission goals of SEARCH include the detailed characterisation of a wide variety of exoplanets, ranging from terrestrial planets to gas giants. More specifically, SEARCH will determine atmospheric properties such as cloud coverage, surface pressure and atmospheric composition, and may also be capable of identifying basic surface features. To resolve a planet with a semi major axis of down to 1.4AU and 30pc distant SEARCH will have a mirror system consisting of two segments, with elliptical rim, cut out of a parabolic mirror. This will yield an effective diameter of 9 meters along one axis. A phase mask coronagraph along with an integral spectrograph will be used to overcome the contrast ratio of star to planet light. Such a mission would provide invaluable data on the diversity present in extrasolar planetary systems and much more could be learned from the similarities and differences compared to our own Solar System. This would allow our theories of planetary formation, atmospheric accretion and evolution to be tested, and our understanding of regions such as the outer limit of the Habitable Zone to be further improved.Comment: 23 pages, accepted for publication in Experimental Astronom