Work Package 4 (WP4) will focus on the tensions and synergies between democratic legitimacy, participation, expert-led mechanisms, and judicial review when addressing rights violations, inequality, and discrimination. Access to justice is consistently used throughout the EU to enforce liberal democratic norms and to challenge anti-liberal legal pursuits (e.g., reforms of national courts, redistricting).

At the same time, these instruments are regularly portrayed by antiliberal actors as undermining sovereignty or national democracies and may sometimes reasonably be seen as curtailing democratic input into the EU’s multilevel and polycentric order. The multiple crises faced by the EU – the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic – put pressure on legal guarantees of public participation in decision-making.

WP4 focuses on the opportunities and challenges that legalism (expertise, frameworks and politics defined by law) – rather than democratic powers – poses for legitimate decision-making at a time of crisis.