Challenge

Alber & Geiger was hired by Nuseed to promote Carinata, a cover crop designed for biofuel production, in the EU Renewable Energy Directive in Brussels. Our team was required to ensure the approval of Carinata’s GHG savings. On top, we were mandated to pave the way for Carinata’s classification as an advanced biofuel towards the EU institutions.

Strategy

We targeted lawmakers in the European Parliament and officials in the European Commission. We presented arguments highlighting Carinata’s benefits, especially in producing high-quality and low greenhouse gas fuels. Carinata’s sustainability was emphasised during our outreach, while concerns over threatening food production and land-use were mitigated.

Results

Our engagement helped remove the yearlong impasse and paved the way for the acknowledgment and approval of Carinata’s GHG savings. Alber & Geiger’s engagement with EU officials and lawmakers increased understanding of the properties and benefits of Carinata. Also, it helped create advocates for a review of the existing list of advanced biofuels, and laid the groundwork for the inclusion of all crops that fulfil the criteria, to create a level playing field.

Challenge

Our client, a Lottery Association, was faced with a network of monopolistic EU Member State laws and regulations that impeded the ability of its members – all private lottery operators – to exercise EU market freedoms. Alber & Geiger was enlisted to steer the developing legal framework in the field of gambling law and tear down restrictions of private lotteries in Europe. The challenge was to politically link the freedom of establishment with cross border lotteries based on the CJEU’s decisions on gambling freedom.

Strategy

The strategy was built upon the respected Opinion of our Chairman on the Gambelli case when he was a Advocate General at the CJEU. The Opinion was used as a roadmap for judicial and legislative change during this seminal mandate. It articulated the narrow circumstances where a restriction on freedom of establishment would be justifiable by general interest concerns.

The strategy was structured on all levels according to the integral components of the Opinion. It utilized the intellectual resources of our firm to co-ordinate the legislative dialogue in a direction that facilitated the creation of a EU wide free gambling market. We provided components of the machinery as well as oiling the cogs of law reform.

Results

We provided long term, fixed judicial capital for our client and legislative change. Due to the ongoing successful execution of our strategy, recent judgments of the CJEU with respect to German and Austrian gambling restrictions have been echoing the Opinion.

The CJEU now professes that in order to justify monopolistic state gambling regulations legislation must “ensure a particularly high level of protection” and a “coherent” gambling market. There must now be specific and narrow circumstances to legitimize curtailments to the freedom of establishment in the gambling market. This CJEU strategy must now be followed by the European Commission when checking EU Member States’ gambling restrictions.

Challenge

We were hired by the Council for a Democratic Iran (CDI) to raise political awareness and build support for the CDI before the EU. The hurdle here was to promote the very specific foreign policy position of the CDI, with the Member States governments, with conflicting positions on Iran. The subtle CDI policy locus fell in between confrontation and accommodation. This had to be done in a universal, politically neutral manner.

Strategy

The strategy relied on a data collection and dissemination process based on our distinct EU lobbying infrastructure. We gathered a detailed pool of information from a holistic range of institutional, local, NGO and inter-governmental sources.

Subsequently our team translated the data to be compatible with the policy structures of the EU institutions. We tailored the message to different audience catchments of Member States. Overall the strategy outlined an accurate overview of the scale of repression and human rights violations in Iran. Concurrently it promoted positive transnational tools to tangibly shape policy accordingly.

Results

CDI’s message was successfully transplanted into the divergent attitudes of the EU Member States and EU institutions. We helped CDI contribute to greater coherence in the perception of Iranian politics and policies. Ultimately we prevented the subtleties of diplomacy from concealing the human rights violations in Iran. This created a context for more constructive and bold communications from media outlets and government officials with respect to the repressive actions.