The ecological transition needs a shift in the definition of the role of the state from a market-correcting to a market-steering actor. This transformation inevitably reverberates within private law, whose institutions participate in distributing the social and economic burdens of sustainability policies. Focusing on the housing sector as a paradigmatic site of tension between environmental imperatives and social justice, the paper examines how measures aimed at improving the energy performance of buildings and promoting urban greening can generate regressive distributive effects, including rising housing costs, green gentrification, and heightened risks of indebtedness and displacement for vulnerable groups. Against this background, the paper argues that private law must be reconceptualised as a tool capable of mitigating these structural inequities.
Ulrike Schultz, Maria Rita Bartolomei, Sara Araújo
This special issue marks the first publication of a long-term international project on gender in customary and indigenous law and proceedings. Emerging from observations of the silence around customary law and differing perceptions of gender inequality in sub-Sahara African legal academia, the project brings together comparative socio-legal research from Africa, Europe and beyond. The contributions examine how colonial legacies, legal pluralism and globalisation shape gendered experiences in areas such as inheritance, land rights, marriage, judicial training, and access to justice. Highlighting women’s agency within plural legal systems, the issue provides new theoretical and empirical insights into the intersections of gender, customary law, and state law.
As traumatic brain injury (TBI) causes the highest level of mortality and disability among all types of mechanical injuries, forensic authorities pay a lot of attention to investigating the circumstances of its receipt. In turn, in order to reproduce the events preceded death from TBI, investigative bodies need to know as precisely as possible the time of hemorrhage formation, which can often be close to the moment of death. Therefore, scientists in the fi eld of forensic medicine are working on the development of express methods that would allow to geta quick and objective answer to the question of establishing the age of the formation of a hemorrhage in the substance of the human brain. The purpose and tasks of the research. To develop, within the framework of the statistical analysis of optical anisotropy maps, universal forensic medical criteria for the determination of time of haemorrages formation due to TBI, cerebral infarction of ischemic and hemorrhagic genesis by the method of diff use tomography of the polycrystalline component of native histological
sections of the brain with algorithmic reproduction of fl uctuations in the value of linear birefringence.
Research materials and methods. Native slices of human brain from the parietal area were taken for the study from the dead with a known time of hemorrhage formation from 1 to 7 days, according to medical documents. The cause of death was traumatic hemorrhage – II group (n=100), ischemic cerebral infarction – III group (n=110), non-traumatic hemorrhage – IV group (n=105), acute coronary insuffi ciency – I group – control (n=20). In the laboratory of the Institute of Physical, Technical and Computer Sciences of the Yuriy Fedkovich Chernivtsi National University, studies of the obtained samples were carried out using a Stokes polarimeter by the diff use tomography method of reproduction of fl uctuations of linear birefringence (FLB).
The evaluation of the obtained results was carried out by means of statistical (statistical moments of the 1st – 4th orders were determined) and informational analysis (the operational characteristics of the strength of the methods were determined: sensitivity, specifi city and balanced accuracy).
The study was carried out in compliance with the main provisions of the GCP (1996), the Council of Europe Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (from 04.04.1997), the Helsinki Declaration of the World Medical Association on the ethical principles of conducting scientifi c medical research with human participation (1964-2013), order of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine No. 690 dated 23.09.2009, No. 616 dated 03.08.2012 at the Department of Forensic Medicine and Medical Law of Bukovinian State Medical University as a fragment of the complex research work of the Department of Forensic Medicine and
Medical Law «Using modern morphological and physical methods for diagnosing the time and cause of death, the occurrence of bodily injuries, the development of their remote and immediate consequences in order to solve the urgent tasks of law enforcement agencies and current issues of forensic science and practice» 0123U101978. The author is a co-performer of the research work.
Research results. As part of the statistical analysis of the data of the diff use tomography method, universal forensic criteria (markers) for determining the age of the formation of hemorrhages were established – asymmetry and excess, which characterize the temporal transformation of the coordinate distributions of the random values of the optical anisotropy parameters for cases of TBI, death due to brain infarction of ischemic and hemorrhagic genesis. It was established that degenerative- dystrophic changes and necrotic destruction of the polycrystalline structure formed by optically active spatially structured protein fi bers of nervous tissue are objectively manifested in statistically reliable linear (within 120 hours) changes in the magnitude of the statistical moments of the 3rd and 4th orders, which characterize the asymmetry and excess of distributions of random values of the FLB value of fi brillar networks with the increasing age of the formation of hemorrhages.
Conclusions. Statistical analysis of temporal transformation of maps of optical anisotropy of nervous tissue revealed universal criteria (statistical moments of the 3rd and 4th orders) for forensic assessment of the age of formation of hemorrhages of various genesis. By monitoring the time change in the magnitude of statistical moments of the 3rd and 4th orders, which characterize the asymmetry and excess of distributions of random values of the magnitude of fl uctuations in the manifestations of optical anisotropy of nervous tissue, were determine the duration (120 hours) and the ranges of linear changes in the values of the following universal detection parameters of occurrence of hemorrhages in case of TBI (SM4:0,33 − 3,31); brain infarction of ischemic genesis (SM3:0,33 − 2,21; SM4:0,48 − 3,5) and brain infarction of hemorrhagic genesis (SM3:0,28 − 1,96; SM4:0,39 − 2,7). Diagnostic accuracy is 1.5 h ± 20 min.
Cyber resiliency engineering is a technical approach embraced by countries and regions such as the United States and Europe to implement digital transformation and address network security challenges under new circumstances. It aims to keep the barriers to entry high for digital technologies based on the cyber resilience standard and to improve the digital infrastructure security capability of China from both the application service and device supply sides. This study focuses on the impact and challenges brought by the initiatives of cyber resiliency engineering in the United States and Europe on the development of new-generation network information technology in China. It starts from a concept introduction of resilience, cyber resilience, and cyber resiliency engineering. Subsequently, it elaborates on the application progress of cyber resiliency engineering in the United States and Europe in terms of policy drivers, strategic considerations, and development dilemmas. Moreover, the study goes further to propose a dynamic heterogeneous redundancy architecture based on an endogenous security and safety (ESS) theory. It describes and illustrates the intrinsic mechanism, basic concepts, and application methods of cyber resilience empowered by ESS. Furthermore, we propose that China should accelerate innovation to offset the combined effects of cyber resiliency engineering in developed countries, introduce a cyber resilience policy and law system with Chinese characteristics, establish corresponding regulatory systems to clarify the network security responsibilities, establish a quantifiable, verifiable, and credible testing and evaluation system, and boost the holistic implementation of cyber resilience with a multi-pronged approach including financial marketization, hoping to ystematically enhance the cyber resilience and strength of China.
Germany was one of the first EU members to harmonize its legislation with the provisions of the European Union Directive no. 1023/2019 on preventive restructuring frameworks. The Law on Stabilization and Restructuring of Enterprises (StaRUG) introduced several new institutes through a modular approach with the aim of preventing insolvency. It entered into force on 1st January 2021 and provided a pre-bankruptcy procedure, as a novelty, rearranged procedure of personal administration of debtors in bankruptcy and the mediation procedure in restructuring. This enables business entities to timely determine the existence of circumstances that may jeopardize business, but also established the obligation to act appropriately in a timely manner. The instruments of the new legal framework are the adoption of the restructuring plan in court proceedings, the court examination of the contents of the restructuring plan, the court moratorium on executions and the court confirmation of the restructuring plan, as well as adoption of the plan in the mediation procedure. The aforementioned reform further strengthened the principles of consensualism in insolvency law. Also, this law represents a good model for other EU states and for candidate states in the process of harmonization of legislation with EU regulations as well. The aim of this paper is to provide an insight into the new institutes in German legislation, to analyze them and to give a critical review of their application in practice.
Law of Europe, Comparative law. International uniform law
ABSTRACT The European Union (EU) has become the main driver for environmental policy output for its member states whose number has more than tripled over the past four decades. The EU’s deepening and widening has led researchers to expect more non-compliance with EU environmental legislation. In fact, however, the implementation gap has narrowed over the past 25 years. Except for Southern enlargement, taking on new member states has not exacerbated the EU’s compliance problem in the field of environmental policy. Nor has the expansion of the environmental acquis. This is explained by the European Commission’s strategies of managing and enforcing compliance. EU environmental policy has become less demanding on member states since it increasingly tends to amend existing rather than set new legislation. Simultaneously, the Commission has developed new instruments to strengthen member state capacities to implement EU environmental legislation.
The article is devoted to the analysis of youth civic education, civic engagement, and civic competence
in international and national contexts. Over the last decades these themes have acquired importance
in research, policy and practice in many parts of the world, including the EU and Ukraine. Citizenship,
citizen, civic virtues, civic culture, civic competence are singled out by the authors as the key concepts of
the discussed phenomena. Civic competence is defined as a path for a person to be included into a certain
political or social community; it is the knowledge and exercising of the rights and duties of this community;
it is a civic self-identification and a quality of a personality that necessitates his/her active participation in
political or public life and characterizes his/her community involvement; it is a moral value that is based
on the sense of patriotism, respect for human rights, sense of duty, responsibility, tolerance, solidarity.
The genesis and the formation of the citizenship from the time of Aristotle to the present has passed the
way from seeing it as a critical engagement with others; understanding and exercising one’s own rights
and freedoms, and towards realizing the necessity of interdependence of the world nations and the world
equality.
The second part of the article substantiates the importance of youth civic education for both Ukraine
and other countries as young people greatly influence the future of their nations. The main structural
components of civic education that are presented by the authors include understanding key concepts,
fostering respect for law, justice, democracy and common good, encouragement of thought independence.
It develops skills of reflection, enquiry and debate.
The article also presents the models of civic education for secondary and higher schools and highlights
the problems related to the formation of civic education in Ukraine. The emphasis is placed on the use of
serious video games as a promising tool for the formation of civic competence actively used in Western
Europe. Examples of social projects based on serious video games, web platforms and mobile devices
aimed at solving social problems of the society include Nutriciencia project, Ukrainian GameHub project,
Hidden in the Part game. Conclusions are made about the need to recognize civic education not only as a
subject of the curriculum, but as an integral part of educational policy – central to both educators and the
society as a whole, both on the international and national levels.
(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2021 6(2), 933-940 | Article | (Table of Contents) I. Introduction: the added value of the archive for legal researchers. - II. Travelling across time and across cases: transversal Project insights. | (Abstract) This Article engages with a core objective of the Court of Justice in the Archives Project: how best to demonstrate and evaluate the potential of the Historical Archives of the Court of Justice for the purposes of deepening and furthering legal research. It considers two forms of novelty in that light: first, finding out things that are "literally" new; and, second, being alerted to analytical possibilities that arise from looking deeply into a case dossier. To illustrate these instances of research novelty, the Article identifies themes - as well as questions - emerging from the individual reports and from the transversal analysis made possible through the Project, highlighting particular strengths or "added value" factors in that context. It also reflects on the limits of the Archives from the perspective that not all Court of Justice mysteries can, or should, be uncovered.
ABSTRACT There have been important changes in the enforcement of European Union environmental law over the last 25 years. Environmental law has traditionally been reliant on the European Commission, but the Commission has started to withdraw from enforcement. Instead, it is undertaking efforts to ‘outsource’ enforcement to environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) by systematically promoting access for such groups to national courts. While the Commission has indicated that it sees centralised and private enforcement as substitutes, the advantages and drawbacks of each mechanism are evaluated and it is concluded that both mechanisms have an important role to play. In particular, the private enforcement of EU environmental law is dependent on national opportunity structures that are unlikely to ever be fully liberalised and harmonised by EU procedural law. Private enforcement is therefore not a panacea for compliance problems, and the growing absence of a central enforcing authority is a cause for concern.
Over the course of twenty years, the practice of the temporary posting of workers from one Member State to another where the said workers do not integrate into the host country’s labour market has become a widely discussed topic in the European Union that creates a split between its Member States. The paper considers the issue of posted workers within the EU, approaching it from the perspective of law, as well as politics. Through critical analysis of EU case law and legal documents, the authors identify an issue that goes well beyond the divide between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Member States, given that within each country there are different beliefs about the appropriate level of state (or EU) intervention in the market regarding the posting of workers. In order to prove this hypothesis, the authors use Croatia as a case study, where interviews were conducted with Croatia’s most prominent opposing poles regarding this issue. Finally, the authors give a final evaluation of the issue at hand and underline the timeless conflict between workers’ rights and business competitiveness.
Significance The detection of frauds is one of the most prominent applications of the Newcomb–Benford law for significant digits. However, no general theory can exactly anticipate whether this law provides a valid model for genuine, that is, nonfraudulent, empirical observations, whose generating process cannot be known with certainty. Our first aim is then to establish conditions for the validity of the Newcomb–Benford law in the field of international trade data, where frauds typically involve huge amounts of money and constitute a major threat for national budgets. We also provide approximations to the distribution of test statistics when the Newcomb–Benford law does not hold, thus opening the door to the development of statistical procedures with good inferential properties and wide applicability. The contrast of fraud in international trade is a crucial task of modern economic regulations. We develop statistical tools for the detection of frauds in customs declarations that rely on the Newcomb–Benford law for significant digits. Our first contribution is to show the features, in the context of a European Union market, of the traders for which the law should hold in the absence of fraudulent data manipulation. Our results shed light on a relevant and debated question, since no general known theory can exactly predict validity of the law for genuine empirical data. We also provide approximations to the distribution of test statistics when the Newcomb–Benford law does not hold. These approximations open the door to the development of modified goodness-of-fit procedures with wide applicability and good inferential properties.
A theoretical framework to describe and assess the advancement of innovation ecosystems in the contemporary European Union is more than necessary in order to map actors and processes, and thus provide a more comprehensive and dynamic approach. For actors, the reframed innovation helix perspective is applied, while the multilevel perspective is used for processes. At each innovation progress stage, other actors should have a slightly different role, be more active and important, and also relate to each other in a different manner. The emergence and density of intermediary actors are seen as important aspects. From the process perspective, the innovation application and also its adoption at the sociotechnical landscape level are seen as crucial. Thus, collective intelligence with societal implications and consideration for the environment evolve into the key ingredients of an advanced innovation ecosystem in the European Union.
(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2017 2(2), 791-793 | (Abstract) On its judgement of 21 December 2016, joined cases C-203/15 and C-698/15, Tele2 Sverige, the Court of Justice of the European Union took an important step in deterring massive data gathering and retention for law enforcement purposes. The Court stressed that the indiscriminate collection of personal data through communication channels could not be the rule under the Charter of Fundamental Rights and in line with the scope of Directive 2002/58, as well as with the principles of EU law. However, it might have gone too far in attempting to illustrate which objective criteria may be used to limit the retention, as a preventive measure, of traffic and location data. The Court resorted to a geographical standard in which national authorities determine a high risk of preparation for or commission of serious crime in certain areas and thus instruct service providers to retain data of people positioned there. As such, the Court has pursued a trail that raises ethical, social, and legal concerns. What is more, the judges did not justify their option, such as regarding the link between geographical profiling and effective crime deterrence. This Highlight exposes some of the problems of having the Court of Justice preferring such a criterion, especially regarding the objectivity it was aiming at and the potential discrimination against data subjects.