The EU legal system offers interest groups an alternative means of influencing EU policy. However, in order to do so successfully, interest groups require financial resources to activate the system and legal expertise to substantiate their claims. Since public authorities can often bypass or contain individual rulings, they also need the ability to follow up on court proceedings with either more litigation or political pressure to achieve durable policy change. These obstacles often prove formidable. In what could be termed a neo-pluralist approach to ensure universal access to the legal system, the European Commission is in the process of establishing a support infrastructure for groups seeking legal redress. This paper investigates whether the Commission measures represent an attempt to gain influence on the legal strategies of interest groups, or whether to the new infrastructure will genuinely allow interest groups better ‘access to justice’.
