12
Good Governance: An Introduction
and Development. The European Court of Justice had already been using the principles of good administration. In July 2001, the Commission published a White Paper on European Governance in which some principles of good administration were further elaborated.24 In September 2001, the European Parliament adopted a resolution containing the ‘Code of Good Administration’ in which European Union institutions and bodies, their administrations, and their officials should respect in their relations with the public. This Code was developed by the European Ombudsman, who based the Code on his experiences in relation to cases of bad administration. In December 2000 there was already a Charter of Fundamental Rights of Citizenship—including rights on relations with the administration—proclaimed in Nice. In chapter V on citizens’ rights of the Charter, article 41 includes the right to good administration. In 2010, a link between the Lisbon Treaty and the Charter was made, so that it now has a strong legal base which will be further explained in Chapter 3, ‘Good Governance and Human Rights’. Based on these national, European, and international developments on good administration, we can see three general trends. The first trend is that in many countries most of the norms of good governance have been developed by the judiciary first. These controlling institutions are the discoverers and developers of the principles of good governance. But in several fields, these norms have been developed by the legislator, sometimes based on an initiative of the parliament. Finally, some norms were already worked out in the law and have been further developed by the Ombudsman and the Court of Audit. The second trend is that, in most situations, the principles of good governance were first developed as norms for the administration. Later, these norms have been codified as subjective rights for the citizens. The third trend is that these principles of good governance were developed in several groups. The first group is the principles of properness, the second group constitutes the principles of transparency and participation, the third group constitutes the principles of accountability and effectiveness, and the fourth and last group concentrates on human rights. There is an active interaction between these groups. Each group of principles will be elaborated in a separate chapter.
5. Structure of the Three Parts of this Book The book consists of three parts. Part I deals with general conceptual aspects of good governance, Part II pays attention to the specification by the principles of good governance, and Part III is about the application of the principles of good governance on a national level in the different regions in the world. In the first part we start—after the introduction—by presenting an overview of the principles of good governance on the three main levels of the legal system: the national, the regional, and the international level. Then we will focus on the national level. In two chapters, the relationship between the rule of law and good governance and between democracy and good governance will be made clear. The conclusion of these chapters is that good governance constitutes the third cornerstone of a modern democratic state. In the following chapter, the question of whether good governance is simply a norm for the administration or whether it also implies a fundamental right
24
European Commission, White Paper on European Governance, July 2001, COM (2001) 428.
