Madrid, 8 May 2011: Meeting of the ACA-Europe Board

The Association of Councils of State and Supreme Administrative Jurisdictions of the European Union (ACA-Europe) held one of its two annual Board meetings in Madrid on 8 May 2011. Mr Yves Kreins, the Secretary-General of ACA-Europe, gave an overview of the association's activities, with a particular focus on projects connected with the databases managed by the association, working visits by judges, cooperation with the European authorities and the publication of the documents on ACA-Europe's 22nd colloquium, which took place in Luxembourg in June and was led by the Administrative Court of Luxembourg in the person of its President, Mr Georges Ravarini, who is also one of ACA-Europe's Vice-Presidents. The association's 24th newsletter was also mentioned. The newsletter focuses on the work of the seminar held in Brussels on 17 December 2010 under the title "Asylum and immigration law: the national judge between national and European standards". The updates made to the Tour of Europe following the seminar in Istanbul in late September 2009 were also presented. ACA-Europe's scheduled activities for 2011 were discussed too. Three seminars are planned for the year, with the first taking place in Dubrovnik on 26-27 May on the subject of "The new administrative jurisdiction system of Croatia in the perspective of the accession to the European Union: Exchange of European experiences". The second will be a seminar for the research and documentation services on a shared identification and metadata system for national databases and will be organised, with the support of the Council of the European Union, in Warsaw on 30 September, as part of the Polish Presidency of the European Union. The third seminar will take place in The Hague on 24 November 2011, in the form of a working group. It will examine the issues surrounding the application of the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights, in preparation for the colloquium to be held by the Spanish Presidency next year, which will look at this topic in more detail with all of the ACA-Europe High Courts. The programme of judges' exchanges for 2011 and the association's 2011 budget were also dealt with. Finally, there was an exchange of viewpoints on the creation of a European Law Institute (ELI), the principle of which is outlined in the STOCKHOLM Programme.

This Board meeting was chaired by Mr Carlos Dívar, President of the Supreme Court of Spain, pictured here (in the centre of the photo) with Mr Yves Kreins, Secretary-General of ACA-Europe (on the left).