This chapter presents the theoretical framework ensuring the political equality of citizens, resulting in their ability to hold decision-makers to account. Arguing that the principal–agent framework is not suitable for conceptualising accountability beyond the state, it argues that accountability should be understood as a value in itself, rather than a mechanism. Drawing on sociological and philosophical approaches to solidarity and the cosmopolitan literature on equality, the framework argues for an equilibrium between the principles of solidarity and equality that better provides for the political equality of citizens as the central normative concern of accountability. The chapter then applies this normative framework to the Economic and Monetary Union. By exploring the Treaties and the existing jurisprudence of the Court of Justice, the chapter finally defines the notions of the individual, equality, solidarity, and the common interest.

The Conclusion of the book joins the theoretical propositions from Chapters 1 and 2 with the empirical findings from the case studies carried out in Chapters 3–5. It is here that an assessment is made of how legal accountability has so far been able to ensure that decision-makers in the EMU are held to account by politically equal citizens. In addition, the Conclusion imagines how judicial review should look like according to the normative proposal from Chapter 2. As a final message, the Conclusion underlines the limits of judicial review in respect of democratic deliberation and participation that is to shape and sustain the common interest.

EUs economic governance is characterised by the tension in the relationship between Member States preservation of national budgetary autonomy embedded in the no-bailout clause and the prohibition of monetary financing, on the one hand, and the need to manage a shared currency area through a common and independent central bank, on the other. Accordingly, the aim of this contribution is to present the ways in which this tension materialises itself in constitutional conflict between national constitutional courts and the Court of Justice in the monetary field. The analysis will be based on the premise that, taking into account the EUs constitutional setup, constitutional conflict is a regular occurrence: not a bug but a feature of the systems functioning. In that sense, this contribution will look at the ways in which constitutional conflict between the EU and the national level can contribute to and improve legal accountability of the ECB in the monetary field.

The Eurogroup has played a central role in decision-making in the area of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) since its very inception. Nevertheless, it is one of those EU bodies that are least understood. This chapter focuses on the political and legal accountability of the Eurogroup, key aspects of which remained ill-defined for a considerable period of time. The discussion begins with the foundations and tasks of the Eurogroup (Section 2). The focus then shifts to the political accountability of the Eurogroup, the emphasis being on its relationship with the European Council and the Economic Dialogues with the European Parliament (Section 3.1). The chapter further looks at its legal accountability, in light of the relevant case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) (Section 3.2). The penultimate section of the chapter provides an assessment of the Eurogroup’s accountability in light of the framework laid down in the introductory chapter to this volume, namely in terms of procedural and substantive ways of delivering the normative goods of accountability (Section 4). Section 5 concludes by outlining the key features of the accountability arrangements and practices pertaining to the Eurogroup.

This chapter focuses on transnational solidarity conflicts, that is, a new type of distributional conflict which encompasses both quarrels about the adaptation of domestic welfare systems to EMU requirements and the distribution of costs and benefits between Member States. It seeks to understand how constitutional accountability may contribute to constructive management of such conflicts. In addressing this question, the chapter focuses specifically on the accountability goods of openness and publicness. It analyses the case law of the German and the Portuguese constitutional court as well as of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) following the Eurozone crisis. Domestic courts applied mostly a deductive approach to accountability in the EMU and thereby also tended to ‘nationalise’ transnational solidarity conflicts rather than acknowledge their European dimension. By contrast, the CJEU made the European constitutional dimension visible, thereby contributing more to openness. However, by focusing mostly on economic constitutional values, while only hesitantly applying other constitutional values such as social rights as a benchmark for substantive accountability it ensured publicness only to a limited extent. In conclusion, both domestic and European constitutional accountability mechanisms did not ensure meaningful accountability in the sense of concretizing and re-negotiating constitutional common goods.

IOM wields power over individuals and is capable of violating their rights, for instance when it contributes to migrant detention operations or when it engages in migrant returns that are ‘voluntary under compulsion’. This chapter assesses IOM’s legal human rights accountability in three steps. First, IOM’s human rights obligations are identified. While there has been much debate about their proper source, there is today little doubt that organizations such as IOM as have at least a core bundle of human rights obligations. The second step is to identify and analyze the mechanisms that may potentially hold IOM to account for violations of its human rights obligations. I identify the Office of the Inspector General and domestic courts as the only two IOM human rights accountability mechanisms, and analyze their rules on access, participation, neutrality, and outcomes using doctrinal legal methodology. Third, I assess the sufficiency of these two accountability mechanisms, in light of the right to an effective remedy and procedural justice research. The chapter concludes with an overall assessment of IOM’s human rights accountability, and some thoughts on potential avenues for reform.

The Lava Jato (or “Car Wash”) corruption investigation offers an important case study of the evolution of legal accountability in consolidating democracies. This chapter evaluates the origins of the investigation and the early successes of prosecutors, analyzes why Lava Jato initially succeeded where numerous previous cases had floundered, discusses the causes and likely consequences of the investigation’s declining effectiveness and ultimate neutering, and reflects on what this experience suggests about legal accountability in Brazil and other democracies facing long-festering patterns of elite collusion, corruption and impunity.

This chapter explores the expansion of transitional justice from present violence to past violence. This has been called post-transitional justice. It considers cases where long neglected victims of colonial repression have reentered history as claimants in controversial legal cases about atrocities in Kenya and Indonesia. The UK High Court decision on compensation for Mau Mau victims of British colonial repression (2010) and compensation for widows of the Rawagede village massacre of 400 villagers in 1947 by Dutch colonial troops in East Java (2011), extended legal accountability for empires, and remedies for individuals. While the globalization of human rights discourse has created the transnational legal environment in which these claims were made possible, it has also exposed the tension between the compromises of national self-determination and individuated justice. By unstitching the problematic settlement of collective national independence, and revealing asymmetries of suffering, it reveals the difficulty of treating political transition as caesura, and the ongoing legacies of trauma which persist well after the departure of the imperial power.