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.

Challenge

The Gauselmann Group, one of the largest producers and operators of games of chance in Europe, called on Alber & Geiger when faced with a number of threatening gambling regulations in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Netherlands, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Alber & Geiger had to convince the European Commission to make a counterintuitive political risk in confronting a powerful Member State, Germany and concurrently convince the European Commission that our interpretation would stand up to CJEU scrutiny.

Strategy

Given the limited scope of directly ascertainable EU competence, the strategy employed an abstracted analytical formula to show that the various regulations were legally incoherent. It demonstrated that the laws of the Member States contradicted their own main goals on a substantive level. It utilized the jurisprudential architecture of the CJEU in lieu of their crystallization.

The multifaceted strategy also incorporated an economic dimension. Concurrently, the same technique allowed us to demonstrate that the money laundering directive could not arbitrarily encompass all the gambling operators without distinction of risk volume and activity.

Results

Ultimately, we managed to convince the European Commission to act. Its omission to launch infringement proceedings had been rebuked. Alber & Geiger was able to safeguard fundamental liberties and freedoms by bringing EU instruments into a new field and challenging archaic but powerful structures. We were also able to hold the scope of the money laundering directive back, establishing a distinction between casinos and other gambling operators.

Challenge

Alber & Geiger was tasked with supporting entry into the EU for clients whose families suffered intimidation and coercion in their respective home countries. This would require us to obtain student visas for the UK. Their applications to leading UK universities had failed before. In a short space of time we had to support their applications.

We had to deal with the specific entities and their own distinct decision making processes. This had to be done with political sensitivity, and we had to rely on the integrity of the system to ensure that political influences did not have a bearing on their entry into the UK.

Strategy

The strategy required an expedient understanding of the nooks and crannies inside the UK education system. It used careful neutral language to ensure that their applications were not misconstrued. It relied on the basis of our firm’s intrinsic aptitudes.

We worked to break down and analyse the discretionary selection criteria of each university. The documents thoroughly assimilated the ‘criteria language’ of the universities into their narrative. In this case we had to effectively co-ordinate through the network of statutory instruments and satisfy the executive concerns they were designed to address.

Results

The result was the safe arrival of the families into the UK and their admission into top tier universities. The transferable nature of our skills is constantly being tested by the ever changing institutional framework of Europe.