Power abuse during a complaint procedure in a EU call for projects
In 2021, I submitted a 70-page proposal to the
Creative Europe "Creative
Innovation Lab" call. The project was rejected due to a
peer-reviewer’s factual error claiming the mandatory audiovisual
sector was not integrated in the proposal, despite its clear
inclusion.
Following the official Guidelines on
Complaints About Proposal Rejections, I reported this as an error that unjustly disqualified the
proposal due to a reviewer's misinterpretation. However, an
EACEA officer dismissed my redress request using a dialectic
play; through a double negative, he
argued that the peer-reviewer did
not state that the sector was "not included," but rather that its inclusion was "not
demonstrated." Through this reasoning, the officer denied
that both variations effectively result in the sector being
excluded from the scope of the application. By doing so, the
officer avoided responding to the core argument of the redress
request—clarifying whether the audiovisual sector was integrated
or not—resulting in a substantial penalization for reasons
outside the applicant's control.
To illustrate:
consider a call for projects promoting innovative ideas for
fruits. You submit a proposal for tomatoes, which are
botanically fruits. However, the peer-reviewer deems the
proposal ineligible because they associate tomatoes with
spaghetti sauce and thus classify them as vegetables. You report
this as a factual error, yet the redress request is denied
through inadequate reasoning: the agency speculates that the
reviewer correctly understood the fruit's potential, but
that the application simply "lacked detail."
The
case is significant because the project had already received
international recognition as a top European innovation,
including the
Startup Europe Accelerathon—part of
Startup Europe, an initiative created by the
European Commission to identify the
best projects supporting collaborative efforts toward
Europe's priority goals. This situation highlights how
forms of power abuse can directly stifle innovative ideas and
work against the interests of the community and the European
Union itself.
Following the same guidelines, which
define rejection through inadequate reasoning as a form of power
abuse, I ultimately reported the problem to the
European Ombudsman, an organization
with the mandate to investigate cases of power abuse by EU
institutions and agencies. The European Ombudsman declined to
open an investigation for "no grounds," without
specifying which grounds were missing.
This raises
questions about the utility of complaint mechanisms if they can
be treated with a lack of seriousness by the authorities
supposed to handle them for the sake of innovation, risking that
the actions of a single person may unfairly stifle individual
effort and broader community goals for sustainability in Europe,
remaining unaddressed while undermining individual rights and
the careers of taxpayers. The duty of a reviewer or public
officer is to evaluate an application in the interest of the
community and the applicant, rather than their own. This case,
therefore, raises serious concerns about the accountability of
reviewers and the possibility that they may remain perpetually
unaccountable, which has significant repercussions on
innovation.
Find the full investigation with evidence
on
Zenodo.
How power abuse can actively undermine innovation and career
opportunities:
a case in Austria
In 2020, I conceived and designed a postdoctoral research
project for an fellowship by the
Austrian Science Fund (FWF) dedicated
to promoting young researchers. The project's core
hypothesis was centred on the notion of "entropy."
Eventually, my prospective mentor proposed a change in Principal
Investigator (PI), with the understanding that I would lead the
project as originally planned.
However, within two
months of receiving formal authority, the PI excluded me from
decision-making. He dismissed my approach to entropy as nonsense
and removed the concept from the project entirely. The promotion
of young researchers—the foundational goal of the project
proposal informing my intellectual work—became arguably
unnecessary, as I was pressured to dedicate less time to my
research and more to his new ideas.
I reported the
problem through official whistleblowing channels. However, the
case remained partially uninvestigated. The funding agency
claimed that data protection regulations prevented them from
accessing relevant email correspondence and, perhaps because of
that, found no misconduct. However, they granted me research
freedom. I subsequently reported the issue to the
Austrian Agency for Scientific Integrity
(OeAWI), who dismissed all evidence predating the FWF decision
and accused me of providing misleading and inaccurate
allegations for subsequent integrations.
Eventually,
those "nonsense" ideas were published and officially
praised by the
Journal of New Music Research
for their innovative character. In December 2025, the journal
Die Musikforschung of the German Society of Musicology (GfM) has
opened an investigation into a publication authored by the PI
emerging from the project.
This case illustrates how
abuses of power can undermine innovation in addition to
impacting the lives and careers of individuals, risking
remaining unaddressed even when reported through formal
whistleblowing channels. It calls into question the very purpose
of whistleblowing frameworks if key evidence is dismissed or
left unaccounted for, and it highlights the risk of potentially
weaponizing the complaint process against the whistleblower.
Find
my "Allegations of a Hostile Research Environment at the
University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG)" on
Zenodo.