This chapter introduces Review Bodies as accountability mechanisms for fundamental rights violations by the EU executive. As an umbrella concept, Review Bodies includes all actors except courts that, upon individual petition, independently review potential fundamental rights violations by EU actors. For the EU, these Review Bodies are the European Ombudsman, Boards of Appeal, and Fundamental Rights Officers. Albeit vested with weaker authority than courts, Review Bodies offer two crucial elements for comprehensive access to justice. First, Review Bodies are complementary to courts, meaning that they are often more accessible and more specialized. Second, Review Bodies focus less on individual issues of legality but on structural problems that produce repeated fundamental rights violations. In principle, this would place Review Bodies in a prime position to advance executive accountability in the EU. However, too often, Review Bodies are underfunded and lack the ‘teeth’ to discipline EU executive actors. Therefore, to improve access to justice and remedy structural problems engrained into the Union’s burgeoning executive power, authority and funding of Review Bodies should expand and other actors, especially courts, should team up with Review Bodies to effectuate their structure-focused expertise through the ‘teeth’ of judicial authority and public pressure.

This chapter explores online dispute resolution (ODR) as a possible mechanism for redressing fundamental rights violations by the EU. ODR as a form of redress mechanism is one of the main solutions that the EU has repeatedly proposed for the private sector when there were signs of problems with access to justice and the violation of individuals’ rights. This has been the case in consumer law with the ODR Regulation. The chapter gives an overview of various existing ODR mechanisms that could provide ideas for an EU fundamental rights ODR platform. Examples range from pre-trial ODR for small claims to out-of-court dispute settlement bodies under the DSA and the Meta Oversight Board. Embedding a fundamental rights ODR mechanism in the EU system would face challenges both in terms of the legal basis and its actual implementation. The European Ombudsman or the Fundamental Rights Officers of the EU Asylum Agency and Frontex could be a possible institutional choice for administering such an ODR mechanism.