EU Funding Withdrawal

A Good Advice Doesn’t Always Say Yes

In April 2025, a Brussels-based network representing a variety of economic actors across the EU received the kind of letter no advocacy organisation wants to receive. Several funding calls it had championed on behalf of its members were cancelled by the European Commission with little explanation, weeks after the evaluation deadline had closed. 

Applicants who had already committed significant time and resources to their proposals were left with short, largely unexplained cancellation notices – some of them, the network noted, inconsistent with one another. For an organisation whose job is to hold Brussels to its own commitments, the sequence of events raised an obvious question: did any of this break the rules?

The network brought that question to Pro Publico, which connected them with the Brussels office of the global law firm Crowell & Moring LLP, where associate Jean-Baptiste Blancardi and partner Vassilis Akritidis took on the legal advice.

Testing an idea before betting the advocacy strategy on it

The network’s request was specific. It wanted to know whether the Commission’s cancellation of the funding calls complied with the procedural and timeline requirements of the EU Financial Regulation, whether any legal or administrative route existed to demand transparency, and whether the Commission could be held to account for failing to follow through on its own commitments.

This is, in effect, what pro bono legal support is for: giving an organisation without in-house legal capacity the ability to properly test an idea before staking scarce advocacy resources on it. As the network’s Director put it when reflecting on the collaboration, pro bono assistance matters because it lets smaller organisations without the means for a lawyer’s expertise access that expertise – in this case, to find out whether the legal pressure route under consideration was actually worth pursuing.

A useful answer, even when it isn’t the one you wanted

The advice that came back was not the vindication the network may have hoped for. The legal grounds available did not support the kind of accountability action it had been exploring. That is, on its face, a disappointing outcome. But as its Director made clear, disappointing and unhelpful are not the same thing.

What Crowell & Moring’s analysis gave the network instead was clarity – and a genuinely new tool. In the course of the advice, the network learned about the “principle of non-regression,” a concept it had not previously used in its advocacy but which it now considers a valuable addition to its arguments going forward. In other words: the legal route closed, but the engagement opened up a different one (political and advocacy-based rather than contentious) grounded in an argument the network now has in its toolkit.

As its Director summed it up: “we did learn about arguments we could use, which is very useful in our advocacy.” Knowing that a particular line of pressure works politically but not legally is not a failure of the process. It’s exactly the kind of clarity that stops an organisation from spending months pursuing a route that was never going to hold up – resources it can now direct elsewhere.

What this collaboration shows about the value of pro bono legal support

Not every pro bono engagement ends with a favourable legal opinion, a policy win, or headline litigation. Some of the most valuable ones end with an organisation understanding precisely where the legal ceiling sits – and being freed up to focus its energy on the arguments that will actually move the needle. For this network, that meant walking away without the accountability mechanism it had hoped to find, but with a sharper, better-informed advocacy strategy and a legal concept it hadn’t previously had access to.

That is, in its own way, exactly what pro bono legal support is meant to deliver: not a guaranteed outcome, but genuine expertise, applied honestly, to help a civil society organisation make better-informed decisions about where to spend its limited resources.

Pro Publico matches civil society organisations across Europe with law firms offering free legal assistance. Do you need legal or advocacy support to advance a public interest?