European Principles of Good Administration and UK Administrative Justice

Recent interest in the harmonizing potential of European administrative law stems in part from the view that administrative states are facing a ‘legitimacy crisis’ and that administrative law must evolve to survive. Emergent ‘new administrative law’ no longer recognizes the state as a centralized leviathan, but rather as promoter, facilitator, regulator, and helmsman of domestic social and economic progress. In this article I argue that articulating shared ‘European’ principles of good administration and administrative law only goes part of the way to understanding this re-positioned administrative state, and that a better approach also focuses on the architecture of administrative justice. I outline various UK conceptions administrative justice and European conceptions of good administration and examine, for the first time, the impact that European principles of good administration have had on UK administrative justice. I argue that UK approaches to administrative justice help to meet the challenges of new administrative law by focusing on incorporating principles of good administration and human rights into the design architecture of institutions, as well as into administrative law itself. I conclude that there is potential to develop, through further comparative analysis, European conceptions of administrative justice, overlapping with and complementary to, European principles of good administration. Good administration, administrative justice, Council of Europe, European administrative law, right to good administration