EIPA cheat sheet

ESIF under shared management: ERDF, ESF+, Cohesion Fund and JTF (2021–2027); the managing authority, certifying authority (may sit inside the managing authority) and audit authority must be functionally independent.

Automatic decommitment under the CPR (Reg. (EU) 2021/1060): N+3 for budget commitments of 2021–2026, N+2 for 2027 commitments.

RRF (Reg. (EU) 2021/241): about €723.8 billion at 2020 prices (grants plus loans), organised around 6 pillars and 11 objectives; at least 37% for climate and 20% for digital; do-no-significant-harm applies.

RRF disbursement is performance-based: payment requests (normally twice a year) are released only after the Commission assesses that the relevant milestones and targets in the Council implementing decision are satisfactorily fulfilled.

EU public procurement thresholds (2024–2025): works €5,538,000; supplies/services €143,000 for central government and €221,000 for sub-central authorities; €443,000 for utilities and defence.

Directive 2014/24/EU procedures: open, restricted, competitive dialogue and innovation partnership; the negotiated procedure without prior publication is admissible only in the exhaustively listed cases.

Standstill period: at least 10 days (15 days if non-electronic means are used) between notification of the award decision and signature of the contract, to allow review.

State aid (Art. 107(1) TFEU) requires cumulatively: an undertaking, state resources, an advantage, selectivity, distortion of competition and an effect on trade between Member States.

De minimis aid (Reg. (EU) 2023/2831): up to €300,000 per single undertaking over any three-year period is deemed not to affect trade; GBER (Reg. 651/2014) exempts defined categories from notification; Altmark sets four conditions under which SGEI compensation is not aid.

Ordinary legislative procedure (Art. 294 TFEU): Commission proposal → Parliament first reading → Council position → Parliament second reading (3 months, extendable by 2) → conciliation (6 weeks, extendable by 2).

Qualified majority in the Council: 55% of Member States (at least 16) representing at least 65% of the EU population; a blocking minority requires at least four Member States.

Trilogues are informal negotiations between Parliament, Council and Commission that produce provisional compromises, which are then formally adopted under the applicable legislative procedure.

Subsidiarity control: national parliaments have 8 weeks to send reasoned opinions; one third of them (each parliament holding two votes in the total) triggers a 'yellow card'; a majority triggers an 'orange card'.

Delegated acts (Art. 290 TFEU) supplement or amend non-essential elements and can be vetoed by Parliament or Council; implementing acts (Art. 291 TFEU) are adopted through comitology committees (advisory or examining procedure).

Better regulation toolkit: impact assessment for major initiatives, 12-week public consultation, Regulatory Scrutiny Board review, REFIT fitness checks and a 'one in, one out' burden principle.

Council Presidency rotates every six months; three successive Presidencies form a trio that jointly adopts an 18-month strategic programme.

COREPER II prepares the General Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Economic and Financial, and Justice and Home Affairs Councils; COREPER I prepares the remaining configurations.

The Commission holds the right of initiative for EU legislation; the European Council provides political direction by consensus and has no legislative function.

CAF structure: 9 criteria - 5 enablers (leadership; strategy and planning; people; partnerships and resources; processes) and 4 results (citizen/customer, people, society, key performance).

CAF 2020 scoring: each sub-criterion is rated 0–100 across four PDCA phases (plan, do, check, act), with evidence required for the score awarded.

CAF is a free self-assessment framework derived from EFQM, used to identify strengths and improvement actions; external feedback is optional but scored on the same scale.

SECI model (Nonaka): socialisation (tacit→tacit), externalisation (tacit→explicit), combination (explicit→explicit), internalisation (explicit→tacit).

Tacit knowledge is experience-based and hard to codify; explicit knowledge is documented and transferable; effective knowledge management converts between the two.

PDCA (Deming cycle) underpins ISO 9001 and CAF improvement cycles: plan, do, check, act.

Knowledge-management instruments: communities of practice, after-action reviews, lessons-learned registers, mentoring and structured exit interviews.

Once-only principle and the European Interoperability Framework: public bodies reuse data already held by another public body rather than requesting it again.

CFSP (Arts 24–40 TEU): the European Council and Council decide by unanimity; constructive abstention is possible, and the decision is not adopted if abstentions exceed one third of the weighted votes.

The High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy chairs the Foreign Affairs Council, is a Vice-President of the Commission and heads the EEAS.

Common commercial policy is an exclusive EU competence (Art. 207 TFEU); the Commission negotiates on a Council mandate and most agreements require Parliament's consent.

Restrictive measures (sanctions) are adopted by unanimity; economic or financial sanctions interrupting relations require a decision under Art. 215 TFEU.

Global Gateway: EU strategy launched in 2021 to mobilise up to €300 billion of investment in partner countries by 2027 in digital, climate and energy, transport, health, education and research.

NDICI–Global Europe is the main financing instrument for EU external action in 2021–2027, with an envelope of roughly €79.5 billion.

Copenhagen criteria (1993): stable institutions guaranteeing democracy and rule of law, a functioning market economy, and capacity to assume the obligations of membership; accession requires a unanimous Council decision and Parliament's consent.

The EU holds enhanced observer status in the UN General Assembly under Resolution 65/276 (2011), allowing it to present common positions but not to vote.

Competences: exclusive (Art. 3 TFEU), shared (Art. 4) and supporting (Art. 6); the principle of conferral is set out in Art. 5(2) TEU, alongside subsidiarity and proportionality.

Hierarchy of norms: primary law (Treaties, Charter) > secondary law (regulations, directives, decisions) > delegated and implementing acts, flanked by general principles and CJEU case law.

A regulation is binding in its entirety and directly applicable; a directive binds Member States as to the result, leaving the choice of form and methods and requiring transposition by its deadline.

Key doctrines: direct effect (Van Gend en Loos, 1963), primacy (Costa v ENEL, 1964), indirect effect (Marleasing, 1990) and Member State liability for breach of EU law (Francovich, 1991).

Infringement: Art. 258 TFEU letters and reasoned opinion, then CJEU referral; financial penalties and lump sums under Art. 260 TFEU.

Judicial protection: Art. 263 TFEU annulment within two months (non-privileged applicants need direct and individual concern - Plaumann); Art. 267 TFEU preliminary references, mandatory for courts of last instance.

NIS2 (Directive (EU) 2022/2555) covers 18 sectors and divides entities into essential and important; incident reporting = 24-hour early warning, 72-hour notification, final report within one month.

GDPR (Reg. (EU) 2016/679): six lawful bases, DPIA for high-risk processing, breach notification within 72 hours, fines up to €20 million or 4% of worldwide turnover; DSA (Reg. 2022/2065) applies in full from 17 February 2024 and DMA (Reg. 2022/1925) imposes gatekeeper obligations.

European Green Deal: 2050 climate neutrality made binding by the European Climate Law, delivered through the 'Fit for 55' package, the EU ETS, the Effort Sharing Regulation and CBAM.

AI Act (Reg. (EU) 2024/1689) entered into force on 1 August 2024 and applies a four-tier, risk-based approach: unacceptable, high-risk, limited-risk (transparency) and minimal-risk.

Application timeline: prohibited practices from 2 February 2025; general-purpose AI and governance from 2 August 2025; high-risk Annex III systems from 2 August 2026; high-risk Annex I product components from 2 August 2027.

Prohibited practices include social scoring, manipulative or subliminal techniques, exploiting vulnerabilities, emotion recognition in workplaces and schools, untargeted facial-image scraping, and most real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces.

High-risk Annex III areas: biometrics, critical infrastructure, education, employment, access to essential private and public services, law enforcement, migration and border control, and administration of justice.

Penalties: up to €35 million or 7% of worldwide turnover for prohibited practices; up to €15 million or 3% for most other obligations; up to €7.5 million or 1% for supplying incorrect information to authorities.

General-purpose AI models must provide a training-data summary, comply with copyright policy and publish transparency information; models trained above 10^25 FLOPs are presumed to pose systemic risk, triggering evaluations and incident reporting.

Governance: the European AI Office inside the Commission enforces GPAI rules and coordinates the European AI Board, a scientific panel and an advisory forum; national market surveillance authorities enforce the rest.

AI literacy duties (Art. 4) apply from 2 February 2025; public bodies and certain private deployers of high-risk AI must carry out a fundamental rights impact assessment before first use.

Definition of an AI system: a machine-based system that infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations or decisions.