In a nutshell

The final conference of the European project Better Knowledge for Better Solutions (BETKOSOL) takes place on 26 and 27 May 2022, at Luiss University (Rome). The conference on 'European financial interests and the Next Generation EU: Legal challenges and future perspectives' will take place in English and be held both in presence and online. It will address some of the most recent and debated issues in the European and national legal orders, starting from the adoption and management of recovery plans.

Programme

This will be a two-day event. The conference will open on the 26th at 9 a.m. and will end at 6.30 p.m.  

• After the introductory greetings and the presentation of the project, the day will be divided into a morning section and an afternoon one, both introduced by a keynote speaker. Giacinto della Cananea, Professor of Administrative Law at the Bocconi University, will give a speech entitled The new finances of the EU, while Gert Vermeulen, Professor of International and European Criminal Law at the University of Ghent, will introduce the afternoon with the topic The protection of EU financial interests and the impact on European and national criminal law.
• During the morning session, two panels have been organised, the first one dedicated to the comparative constitutional perspective (EU and new resources: Integration through Budgetary policies?), the second one, instead, to the European public law point of view (The reinforcement of EU budget: ordinary and extraordinary measures).
• In the afternoon session, the conference will address issues of Criminal Law and Administrative Law, in European and national perspectives. The first panel will be dedicated to the topic European institutions and new challenges in the Centralized protection of the EU financial interest: EPPO and OLAF. The second panel will zoom in on The reinforcement of EU budget: ordinary and extraordinary measures. Within the latter, the speakers will present the final recommendations produced by the BETKOSOL Research team for four different Member States.
• The second day will host the round table (9:30-13:00), which will be moderated by the journalist Gianni Riotta. Among the guests, there will be representatives of the Italian and European institutions.

Registration and programme

About the project

The BETKOSOL project contributes to the research on the protection of the European Union’s interest. Especially in these times, dominated by the COVID-19 crisis, a proper use of old and new European resources can guarantee stability, recovery, and solidarity. Inspired by this context, the team chose the acronym BETKOSOL, which stands for Better Knowledge for Better Solutions.

The project is funded under the Hercule III programme, managed by the European Anti-Fraud Office. It officially started on 1 January 2021 and it will end on 30 June 2022.

Luiss University is the project leader and the principal investigator is Aldo Sandulli, Professor of Administrative Law at the Law Department of the same university. Several other partners are involved in the project, the main ones being the University of Ghent (Belgium) and the University of Torun (Poland). Among the main peculiarities of the project, in fact, there is the comparative approach, as well as the interdisciplinarity, especially in terms of duality between Administrative Law and Criminal Law.

The research group has thus developed numerous theoretical and empirical products, with a focus on four countries: Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Poland. Noteworthy are the Databook and the Report book relating to working package number 3, during which semi-structured interviews were run with European and national institutions, as well as with representatives of civil society (for example, trade associations).

In addition to disseminating the results among the scientific community (deliverables, policy briefs, reports, articles), the project has also taken care of increasing the perception of the role of the European Union’s financial interest among young people. A questionnaire was administered online, which reached a considerable number of students in the main partner universities and subsequently three online seminars were given on the topics covered by the project.