Water stress is a growing concern in Europe, partly due to the changing climate context. Despite the cross-cutting impacts that water availability has on different areas under the competence of the European Union (EU), there is not currently a comprehensive and systematic legal framework addressing this issue. The purpose of this article is therefore to examine the EU legislation that concerns the measures aimed at mitigating these risks. To this purpose, it is first examined how droughts and water scarcity are framed within EU legal acts. Based on such an overview, the analysis is directed to the mechanisms developed at the EU level for monitoring, identifying and forecasting water stress risks, as well as the legal provisions relating to the planning tools. The remainder of the article is devoted to the regulation of preventative measures for water scarcity and drought risk reduction, following the water hierarchy resulting from COM(2007) 414.

On 8 June 2023, the European Commission published a long-awaited proposal for the establishment of an interinstitutional ethics body, meant to restore the public’s faith in the European Union’s administration following the Qatargate corruption scandal. Alas, the Commission’s proposal outlines a body that lacks investigative and sanctioning powers, has minimal administrative capacity and for the most part relies on the institution’s own policing. Put simply, it falls short of the promises made by the Commission’s President in her 2019 political guidelines, and much shorter of what was expected as a remedy to the European Union’s recent ethics-related scandals. In this short piece, we reflect on the Commission’s proposal for an inter-institutional ethics body in light of the overall ethics framework in the Union and provide a brief analysis of the Commission’s missed opportunity and of what could have been.

Grand challenges are shaping twenty-first-century politics. Threats connected to health, climate, demographics and welfare are increasingly intruding on the lives of citizens. Still, governments are often found off-guard, and policymakers need strategies grounded in longer-term perspectives. Strategic foresight (SF) helps us to design and shape policies to prepare to withstand shocks, anticipating and adapting to changes. However, as governments work towards embedding SF into their policymaking processes, the empirical evidence suggests that applications are still piecemeal and predominantly limited to the agenda-settings and policy formulation stages. In this article, we argue that to drive anticipatory governance, foresight needs to be applied at all stages of the policy cycle, including in evaluating policies to draw lessons for future interventions. We maintain that considering SF systemically throughout the policymaking cycle, from agenda setting to evaluation, strengthens anticipatory governance.

Until robots and humans mostly worked in fast-paced and yet separate environments, occupational health and safety (OHS) rules could address workers’ safety largely independently from robotic conduct. This is no longer the case: collaborative robots (cobots) working alongside humans warrant the design of policies ensuring the safety of both humans and robots at once, within shared spaces and upon delivery of cooperative workflows. Within the European Union (EU), the applicable regulatory framework stands at the intersection between international industry standards and legislation at the EU as well as Member State level. Not only do current standards and laws fail to satisfactorily attend to the physical and mental health challenges prompted by human–robot interaction (HRI), but they exhibit important gaps in relation to smart cobots (“SmaCobs”) more specifically. In fact, SmaCobs combine the black-box unforeseeability afforded by machine learning with more general HRI-associated risks, towards increasingly complex, mobile and interconnected operational interfaces and production chains. Against this backdrop, based on productivity and health motivations, we urge the encoding of the enforcement of OHS policies directly into SmaCobs. First, SmaCobs could harness the sophistication of quantum computing to adapt a tangled normative architecture in a responsive manner to the contingent needs of each situation. Second, entrusting them with OHS enforcement vis-à-vis both themselves and humans may paradoxically prove safer as well as more cost-effective than for humans to do so. This scenario raises profound legal, ethical and somewhat philosophical concerns around SmaCobs’ legal personality, the apportionment of liability and algorithmic explainability. The first systematic proposal to tackle such questions is henceforth formulated. For the EU, we propose that this is achieved through a new binding OHS Regulation aimed at the SmaCobs age.

Increasing interest from stakeholders has brought new focus on risk governance and risk regulation, such as the regulator’s execution of duty and tangible results on safety and environmental protection in oil and gas industry. One recent example, from 2019, is the Office of the Auditor General Norway’s (OAG) investigation of the Petroleum Safety Authority’s (PSA) follow-up on health, safety and the environment in the petroleum industry, where the regulatory regime in Norway resting on functional requirements was questioned. Simplistically speaking, there are two current traditions or main schools in regulatory regimes: use of functional requirements associated with co-regulation and use of normative requirements associated with prescriptive regulation. In this paper, we introduce a generic model from an attribute perspective on contrasting, gauging or evaluating the two different regulatory regimes. Furthermore, this approach may explain the controversy regarding the favouring of functional or prescriptive regulatory regimes by the different players in the industry. Our case is based on regulations relating to offshore oil and gas operations, in particular focusing on the Norwegian sector. We use the OAG’s investigation of the PSA and the public reaction as our material because this material is proposed to provide a thorough and valid description of how the effects of the Norwegian regulatory regime are perceived from the outside. We believe that the generic concept presented here is applicable when performing investigations in other industries involved in hazardous activities.

The purpose of this contribution is to briefly present the content of the EU–US Data Privacy Framework recently adopted by the European Commission and then to assess whether it meets the expectations expressed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its Schrems II judgment and related case law.

This article analyses how emergency legislation has affected law-making and regulatory quality principles (RQPs) before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2021) from stakeholders’ perspectives. It takes Slovakia as a case study, as this country was considered a high performer in the adoption of RQPs before the crisis, while empirical findings suggest a subsequent decline in their use. We argue that formal RQPs are not deeply embedded and are vulnerable to crises. In doing so, we conceptually distinguish between standard (fully following the RQPs), emergency (modified to accommodate crisis) and non-standard law-making (violating formal rules and the RQPs). In the transition from a crisis to a post-crisis context, the deployment of both emergency and non-standard law-making has become relatively permanent without proper justification having been provided. This reinforces the notion that RQPs and governance legitimacy became less important for the executive than in the pre-crisis period and emergency and non-standard regulatory law-making became institutionalised as new norms of swift law-making. All of these factors prevent stakeholders from being informed and from engaging in deliberation, which jeopardises the legitimacy of post-crisis law-making governance.

Not since 2018 and the “New Deal for Consumers” package has the European Union (EU) seemed so close to stepping up the enforcement of consumer protection rules. The European Commission is expected to unveil a new “consumer enforcement package” by the end of the year, which should include revisions of the Regulation on Consumer Protection Cooperation, the Directive on Consumer Alternative Dispute Resolution and the Regulation on EU Online Dispute Resolution. In parallel, the Representative Actions Directive came into force recently. This paper examines these different initiatives and assesses whether these evolutions can truly be the first steps towards a brighter future for the enforcement of consumer protection rules in the EU or whether they are likely to remain a series of missed opportunities.

Administrative Tribunal of Luxembourg, 15 July 2022, case no 44377 and Court of Appeal of Luxembourg, 31 March 2023, case no 47873C

On 15 July 2022, the Administrative Tribunal of Luxembourg annulled the decisions by which the Luxembourg Minister for Agriculture, Viticulture, and Consumer Protection had banned all glyphosate-based products. On 31 March 2023, the Court of Appeal upheld the ruling of the Administrative Tribunal. The ground of annulment was the breach by the Luxembourg State of the adversarial principle enshrined in Article 9 of the Grand-Ducal Regulation of 8 June 1979. Yet, for the sake of completeness, the Administrative Tribunal and the Court of Appeal verified the compliance of the decisions banning glyphosate-based products with Articles 36, 41 and 44 of Regulation no 1107/2009. Against this backdrop, this case note provides a critical assessment of the rulings of the Administrative Tribunal and the Court of Appeal from the perspective of European Union law. This analysis might prove to be useful as it enables us to shed light on the conditions allowing Member States to withdraw the authorisation of plant protection products under Regulation no 1107/2009 as well as to identify the hurdles that Member States might need to overcome when banning glyphosate-based products from their territory.

This paper focuses on the legal adoption and possible implications of the proposed per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) restriction. In the case of PFAS, this restriction puts value on the regulatory efforts to implement far-reaching and ambitious targets amid a high level of scientific uncertainty. The purpose of this paper is to present a report rather than conducting an in-depth analysis of the mentioned field. Overall, the paper argues that such a daring decision might be justified by the precautionary principle. However, the implementation might raise opposition from the stakeholders’ side and might take longer than initially anticipated, most likely with additional derogations concerning essential goods that do not currently have safe alternatives.

This article focuses on copyright issues pertaining to generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, with particular emphasis on the ChatGPT case study as a primary exemplar. In order to generate high-quality outcomes, generative AI systems require substantial quantities of training data, which may frequently comprise copyright-protected information. This prompts inquiries into the legal principles of fair use, the creation of derivative works and the lawfulness of data gathering and utilisation. The utilisation of input data for the purpose of training and enhancing AI models presents significant concerns regarding potential violations of copyright. This paper offers suggestions for safeguarding the interests of copyright holders and competitors, while simultaneously addressing legal challenges and expediting the advancement of AI technologies. This study analyses the ChatGPT platform as a case example to explore the necessary modifications that copyright regulations must undergo to adequately tackle the intricacies of authorship and ownership in the realm of AI-generated creative content.

Online gambling emerged in the 1990s in the midst of a process of market liberalisation. Here, scholars have argued that the gambling industry actively seeks state regulation to authorise and legitimate its activities. Why then, since the emergence of the online gambling industry, have trade associations continually sought to develop responsible gambling codes of conduct? In this paper, I address this puzzle by documenting and tracing the development and deployment of responsible gambling codes of conduct by trade associations from the emergence of the online gambling industry in the early 1990s and through processes of increased market liberalisation at the national level and market integration at the European Union level. I argue that online gambling trade associations deploy responsible gambling codes of conduct at particular moments of opportunity to shape their members’ external legal and regulatory environment and to reproduce and embed a particular understanding of how gambling-related risks should be regulated.

In recent years, various innovations aimed at counteracting perceived presentism and democratic decline have emerged. One primary concern is the issue of inadequate representation in parliaments, which has prompted the development of various proposals for reforming the selection mechanisms of parliamentarians. In this context, lottocracy (selection of representatives at random) and proxy democracy (selection models based on self-selection and flexible nominations that determine the relative influence of representatives) are candidates as selection rules to open democratic representation. Herein, I examine the normative and contextual trade-offs underpinning lottocracy and proxy democracy. While both systems outperform electoral alternatives on the dimensions under study, they induce tensions that are often overlooked. Nonetheless, clarifying the normative compromises is crucial to addressing the challenges facing democratic systems and to informing the deployment of the future of representative democracy.

This paper critically evaluates the European Commission’s proposed AI Act’s approach to risk management and risk acceptability for high-risk artificial intelligence systems that pose risks to fundamental rights and safety. The Act aims to promote “trustworthy” AI with a proportionate regulatory burden. Its provisions on risk acceptability require residual risks from high-risk systems to be reduced or eliminated “as far as possible”, having regard for the “state of the art”. This criterion, especially if interpreted narrowly, is unworkable and promotes neither proportionate regulatory burden nor trustworthiness. By contrast, the Parliament’s most recent draft amendments to the risk management provisions introduce “reasonableness” and cost–benefit analyses and are more transparent regarding the value-laden and contextual nature of risk acceptability judgments. This paper argues that the Parliament’s approach is more workable and better balances the goals of proportionality and trustworthiness. It explains what reasonableness in risk acceptability judgments would entail, drawing on principles from negligence law and European medical devices regulation. It also contends that the approach to risk acceptability judgments needs a firm foundation of civic legitimacy, including detailed guidance or involvement from regulators and meaningful input from affected stakeholders.

High pharmaceutical pricing practices in Europe have been increasingly on the radar of the European Union, academia and civil society as a risk to Member State health budgets. It is therefore hardly surprising that, in recent years, competition authorities have resuscitated the excessive pricing prohibition contained in Article 102(a) TFEU. Focusing on this phenomenon, this piece highlights the diverse ways in which the United Brands test has been applied in pharmaceuticals by conducting a comparative study of the decisional practice of national competition authorities. Several observations and arguments are then derived therefrom, demonstrating that, while difficult (most notably in respect to patent-protected products), competition authorities and courts have established sophisticated ways of determining whether a pharmaceutical price is excessive in the sense of Article 102(a) TFEU. These findings should encourage hesitant competition authorities and private plaintiffs to at least carry out preliminary investigations when they suspect excessive pricing in pharmaceuticals is taking place.

Mass-casualty terrorism and terrorism involving unconventional weapons have received extensive academic and policy attention, yet few academics have considered the broader question of whether such behaviours could pose a plausible risk to humanity’s survival or continued flourishing. Despite several terrorist and other violent non-state actors having evinced an interest in causing existential harm to humanity, their ambition has historically vastly outweighed their capability. Nonetheless, three pathways to existential harm exist: existential attack, existential spoilers and systemic harm. Each pathway varies in its risk dynamics considerably. Although an existential attack is plausible, it would require extraordinary levels of terrorist capability. Conversely, modest terrorist capabilities might be sufficient to spoil risk mitigation measures or cause systemic harm, but such actions would only result in existential harm under highly contingent circumstances. Overall, we conclude that the likelihood of terrorism causing existential harm is extremely low, at least in the near to medium term, but it is theoretically possible for terrorists to intentionally destroy humanity.

The European Climate Pact provides opportunities for individuals, communities and organisations to declare their commitment to climate action. This study analyses the publicly available web profiles of the European Climate Pact Ambassadors (PAs) as of January 2023. First, it explores the extent to which people who volunteer as PAs demonstrate commitment to young and future generations. Second, it investigates whether PAs who self-identify as young people are more likely than other PAs to justify their mandate by referring to the interests of young and future generations. Third, it examines whether PAs who self-identify as young people are more likely to indicate other young people as the target audience of their activities. The manual coding and quantitative analysis of the PAs’ web profiles revealed that members of older generations as well as parents and grandparents are most likely to rationalise their engagement in the programme by referring to young and future generations. The data also showed that young people do target other young people when they act as PAs, but they are not the only group to do so. When compared to individuals with other professional identities, educators are also more likely to flag young people as their target audience.

Personal autonomy is at the core of liberal societies, and its preservation has been a focus of European Union (EU) consumer and data protection law. Professionals increasingly use artificial intelligence in consumer markets to shape user preferences and influence their behaviours. This paper focuses on the long-term impact of artificial intelligence on consumer autonomy by studying three specific commercial practices: (1) dark patterns in user interfaces; (2) behavioural advertising; and (3) personalisation through recommender systems. It explores whether and to what extent EU regulation addresses the risks to consumer autonomy of using artificial intelligence in markets in the long term. It finds that new EU regulation does bring novelties to protect consumer autonomy in this context but fails to sufficiently consider the long-term consequences of autonomy capture by professionals. Finally, the paper makes several proposals to integrate the long-term risks affecting consumer autonomy in EU consumer and data protection regulation. It does so through an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from legal research and findings in the study of long-term thinking, philosophy and ethics and computer science.