The article explores the evolution of administrative withdrawal power (or self-review) in Italian law, European Union law, and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) system, starting from the premise of a growing divergence among their respective models of review. In the Italian legal order, ex officio annulment has been progressively constrained by an increasing recognition of the legitimate expectations of the addressee of a favourable administrative act. In EU law, by contrast, no general obligation of administrative self-review can be identified. Instead, specific, functionally oriented forms of mandatory reconsideration have emerged, in which national second-level powers are reshaped considering the principle of effectiveness of EU law. This is particularly evident in the area of recovery of unlawful State aid, but also in certain threshold sectors where the intensity of EU constraints puts pressure on the ordinary domestic regime of ex officio annulment. The paper analyses the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the boundaries of procedural autonomy, as well as the Convention-based dimension of the obligation to comply with the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. Attention is devoted to a comparative overview of selected European legal systems. The analysis shows that administrative self-review can no longer be framed as a unitary category but should rather be understood as a differentiated legal technique serving distinct functions related to legality, competition, and the protection of rights.

The global pandemic crisis has uncovered the most vulnerable nerves in our socio-economic network, making it clear that there is a need to frame the relationship between the spread of the coronavirus and the ecosystem fracture. Each ecosystem has a balance that allows it to provide resources and renew itself until it reaches a sort of breaking point (the so-called “tipping point”). The Coronavirus, together with the progressive loss of biodiversity and resources to react, risks becoming our tipping point.