Transparency is widely acknowledged as a core value in the governance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. However, scholarship on AI technologies and their regulation often casts this need for transparency in terms of requirements for the explanation of algorithmic outputs and/or decisions produced with the involvement of opaque black-box AI systems. Our article argues that this discourse has re-interpreted and reshaped transparency in fundamental ways away from its original meaning. The target of transparency – in most cases, the provider of AI software – determines and shapes what is made visible to the outside world, and there is no external check on the validity and accuracy of such mediated accounts and explanations, opening transparency up for manipulation. Through a theoretically informed and critical analysis of the transparency provisions in the European Union’s AI Act proposal, the article shows that the substitution of transparency with mediated explanations faces important technical constraints, creates opportunities and incentives for both providers and public-sector users of AI systems to adopt opaque practices, and reinforces secrecy requirements that gag accountability in practice. An approach to transparency as disclosure thus becomes necessary, even if not sufficient in and of itself, to ensure the accountable development and use of AI technologies in the European Union. Transparency needs to be reclaimed as a core concept, accountability tailored and reinforced and the necessity for secrecy re-examined and cordoned off.

This article provides a general introduction into the concept of accountability and its potential relevance to international and European legal scholarship. It argues that the scale of the shifts in governance and public authority away from the territorial state towards different forms and levels of governance, within and beyond the parameters of the traditional nation state, call for shifts in accountability relationships beyond that applicable within the confines of the territorial state. This, in turn, requires a rethinking of the concept, aims and forms of accountability as that can apply in international and European law. The articles explores five elements of the concept of accountability: the aims of accountability, the actors involved in processes of accountability, the institutions to which accountability must be rendered, the process of accountability, and the levels of accountability. In each of the aspects, the concept of accountability allows to move beyond traditional concepts such as liability and responsibility and to gain a better understanding of proper responses to abuses of power resulting from shifts in authority

Following the dramatic No votes in the French and Dutch referendums on 29 May and 1 June 2005, a need was felt in the European constitutional law profession to react to the shock.

EuConst invited members of its Board and members of the European Constitutional Law Network to write a short comment about possible and possibly salutary effects of the events on the ways of European scholarship and teaching. Below are the reactions received. Authors are all members of ECLN and/or the Board of EuConst.

The contributions to this issue of EuConst by Jacques Ziller, Sacha Prechal and Herman van Gunsteren carry their comments on the events incorporated.