Evidence of Abuse of Power During a Complaint Process Related to a EU Call for Projects

In 2023, António Guterres, current Secretary-General of the United Nations, highlighted that estimates indicate we will be reaching only 15% of planned SDGs targets by 2030, and many are going in reverse.
At the same time, multiple studies and meta-analyses have observed a progressive decline of breakthrough innovation after the 1970s by 5% per year.

In the attached document, I provide evidence of a case of power abuse in European institutions related to a public EU call for projects in the innovation sector, defined as rejection through inadequate reasoning as indicated by European guidelines on Complaints About Proposal Rejection .

The applicant submitted a project proposal to the Creative Innovation Lab 2021 managed by Creative Europe. The applicant complained about an abuse of power by the MEDIA Strand in dealing with his redress request, defined by Europe as inadequate reasoning of the conclusions. The European Ombudsman refused to open an investigation stating that there
were "no grounds" to open an enquiry.

My investigation, initiated after accessing files under Regulation 1049/2001, documents a pattern by both the EACEA and the European Ombudsman of failing to address the core argument of the complainant. Specifically, the MEDIA Strand showed a pattern of avoiding the core argument—the correct integration of the audiovisual sector in the project application—first by mentioning a post-hoc set of restrictions, and then through unsupported speculative reasoning (constituting abuse of power). The European Ombudsman, in turn, granted credence to this speculation without asking for evidence and without acknowledging that the complainant's core argument remains unresolved.

The episode highlights important challenges related to innovation and sustainability, as the rejected project has been acknowledged as a top innovation in multiple European competitions, by initiatives like the Horizon-2020 CLIC Startup Competition (top-9 international projects), the Italian Alliance for Sustainable Development (Innovability School, top-14 Italian projects in all sectors), and the Startup Europe Accelerathon (top-4 European projects in the Cultural & Creative Industries). It should be noted that Startup Europe Accelerathon is an initiative by Startup Europe, a program created by the European Commission to identify and promote those projects that best support European priorities like LIFE or the New European Bauhaus.

This presents important challenges at a general level, as the UN has highlighted our difficulties in reaching our planned targets, and it is a question whether we can actually reach our targets if some promising ideas risk being sabotaged from within our institutions due to inattentive reviews or abuses of power. If that were true, it would not be surprising that we cannot reach our SDGs. In particular, there is a general consensus that we do not have much time and we should speed up our efforts in relation to sustainable development, so losing our chances to innovate due to internal errors may cost us a lot.