The Civil Society Forum of the Eastern Partnership four years on: Progress, challenges and prospects. CEPS Special Report, January 2014

Established in 2009, during the Eastern Partnership Summit in Prague, the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum supports the development of civil society organisations from the EU-28 and the six Partnership countries, namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. After four years of operation, the Secretariat of the Forum’s Steering Committee commissioned CEPS to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of its programme. This report singles out the institutionalisation and socialisation inculcated among its members as the Forum’s greatest accomplishment. In contrast to its internal developments, it argues that the external policy successes of the Forum remain modest. This report is the first attempt to conduct an in-depth assessment of the Forum's Annual Assembly, the Steering Committee and its Secretariat, the Working Groups and National Platforms. Ten actionable recommendations are put forward aimed at improving the Civil Society Forum’s standing and performance.

Populism in the EU: new threats to the open society? CHALLENGE EUROPE Issue 22 - Challenges and new beginnings: Priorities for the EU's new leadership, September 2014.

In May 2014, around one in four Europeans voted for protest parties and anti-establishment candidates in the first pan-European poll since the euro crisis began. The rise of populism across Europe has brought more extremism of various kinds into the European Parliament. It could change the balance of power between the institutions, and be detrimental to EU policies, legislation and funding that nurture open societies. This chapter will consider the impact of xenophobic populist parties, who have also become increasingly anti-EU, not considering here the extreme left Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who entered the Parliament.

The Implementation, Application and Effects of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Information Society. CEPS Special Report No. 120, 19 November 2015

This study provides an ex-post evaluation of the EU copyright framework as provided by EU Directive 29/2001 on Copyright in the Information Society (InfoSoc Directive) and related legislation, focusing on four key criteria: effectiveness, efficiency, coherence and relevance. The evaluation finds that the EU copyright framework scores poorly on all four accounts. Of the four main goals pursued by the InfoSoc, only the alignment with international legislation can be said to have been fully achieved. The wider framework on copyright still generates costs by inhibiting content production, distribution and creation and generating productive, allocative and dynamic inefficiencies. Several problems also remain in terms of both internal and external coherence. Finally, espite its overall importance and relevance as a domain of legislation in the fields of content and media, the EU copyright framework is outdated in light of technological developments. Policy options to reform the current framework are provided in the CEPS companion study on the functioning and efficiency of the Digital Single Market in the field of copyright (CEPS Special Report No. 121/November 2015).