There is much to be welcomed concerning the role blockchain technology can play in modernising and enhancing international trade, creating a more level playing field and reducing costs. However, it goes without say that the technology also brings with it the risk of abuse leading to trade-based money laundering. This article explores how anti-money-laundering legislation should respond to the use of blockchain technology in shipping and trade. Maritime trade poses unique challenges because of several significant factors: the fact that it concerns large sums but many linked trading transactions over the same goods; its use of documents and involvement of numerous faceless entities; and its cross-border setting. Drawing on tried and tested forms of blockchain technology-based trade transactions, this work examines the fault lines in the current regulatory system and questions how best these gaps should be remedied. It also stresses that even states that have banned the issue and trade of cryptoassets might not be immune to these new challenges.

The digital health ecosystem is rife with opportunities to improve healthcare through data-driven services in the European Union (EU). The value of health data, in the multiple forms in which they come (from health records to lifestyle data collected by smartphones or wearables), can truly emerge when they are allowed to flow in the ecosystem within a governance framework supported by all relevant stakeholders, with trust as the common and clear thread underpinning it. The coronavirus pandemic has provided an additional impetus for change, showing the importance of coordination and adequate communication between Member States and quality data to inform decision-making. Significant challenges remain, however, in order to achieve a fully integrated European digital health ecosystem, including: (1) the potentially diverging rules set by Member States at the national level and the need for an EU framework for the secondary use of health data; (2) the need for transparency and accountability for sustaining a data-sharing framework involving public authorities, research organisations, industry and citizens; and (3) the need for interoperable data and processes. Taking stock of these challenges, this article puts forward policy recommendations to enable the provision of pan-European data-driven healthcare services and to build a transparent and trustworthy framework for citizens.

The world is currently facing the worst pandemic in a century and we were caught unprepared. COVID-19 has proven highly contagious and with severe consequences that are still unfolding. As of 16 April 2020, there were over 2 million confirmed cases and over 136,000 related deaths reported worldwide.1 Over 1 million of those confirmed cases were in the preceding 14 days, with the USA accounting for nearly half of those. Furthermore, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is now warning that the world is about to suffer the worst economic recession since the Great Depression in the 1920s.2

Climate change and the pursuit of sustainability and sustainable business might be regarded as among the world’s “wicked problems”, especially as they are multi-dimensional problems. Achieving corporate accountability in this context is also difficult when corporate structures are complex as they operate globally and through supply chains. At the European level, under the Green Deal, the Sustainable Finance Initiative and the Sustainable Corporate Governance Initiative include new reporting requirements to amend and expand the scope and application of the 2014 Non-Financial Reporting Directive, alongside changes to directors’ duties to ensure they take account of stakeholders’ needs and environmental and human rights due diligence requirements. This paper will argue that these legislative and regulatory efforts are to be welcomed, but the complexity of the regulation threatens to undermine its potential impact. It may therefore be necessary to reduce some of the complexity of the regulatory arrangements. However, some complexity may increase resilience and adaptability for responding to the risks involved in the uncertainty and unpredictability of climate change and in dealing with complex corporate structures. The answer is to provide robust regulation that will prompt the corporate behaviours required to avoid the catastrophic trajectory we currently face.

A multitude of medical products are being developed and produced as part of efforts to tackle COVID-19. They are varied in nature and range from test kits to tracing apps, protective equipment, ventilators, medicines and, of course, vaccines. The design, testing and manufacture of many of these products differs from production in normal times due to the urgency of the situation and the rapid increase in demand created by the pandemic. This article considers the legal issues arising as a result of the production of emergency products, particularly from a products liability perspective. To what extent do existing concepts under the European Product Liability Directive, such as defect, causation and the various defences, permit the pandemic to be taken into account when a Court is considering issues of liability? What is the impact on liability of the modified regulatory regime? In light of that discussion, the case for alternative responses is examined from a comparative and European perspective, including the issue of Government indemnities for the manufacturers of products, legal exemptions from liability and alternative no-fault compensation schemes.

On 17 March 2021, the European Commission put forward its Proposal for a Regulation on Digital Green Certificates, which would facilitate European Union (EU) cross-border movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Regulation on the EU Digital COVID Certificate was adopted on 14 June 2021 and it will start to apply from 1 July 2021. This article examines the main declared goals of the new Regulation – the first being that Digital COVID Certificates facilitate safe cross-border movement, the second being that they preclude more restrictive national measures, the third being that they prevent discrimination and the fourth being that they coordinate Member States’ actions. In so doing, it highlights the main benefits and weaknesses of the Regulation, but it also goes beyond the Regulation by tackling broader questions of EU law that will be of relevance even once the pandemic is over. In this respect, the paper highlights the importance of science in assessing the proportionality of pandemic-related measures and of choosing the least restrictive and the most individualised options when restricting free movement due to public health reasons. It also identifies the effects EU certificates will have on Member States’ regulation of national COVID-19 certificates, notably those designed for other purposes than cross-border travel, and it shows that there is a thin line between the EU’s and national competences in this area.

What could a European Union (EU) response mechanism to health emergencies look like in the context of a more integrated Health Union? Despite an increased EU role in the preparedness, monitoring and coordination of health emergencies over the past two decades, Member States’ responses to the first wave of COVID-19 were surprisingly uncoordinated. In light of calls to improve cooperation regarding future health emergencies, this article discusses the creation of EU surveillance, preparedness and response mechanisms for health emergencies. Using insights from previous research and secondary literature, we highlight gaps in the existing serious cross-border health threats regulatory framework and discuss opportunities for further EU action. Based on a comparison with other EU crisis management mechanisms (the Banking Union, risk preparedness in the electricity sector and food safety), we discuss different crisis decision-making and coordination models and their potential applicability to the health sector. We then formulate several propositions to strengthen Decision 1082/2013/EU on serious cross-border health threats to streamline ex ante pandemic preparedness and organise emergency responses.

COVID-19 has demonstrated the fragility of EU free movement rules when we are faced with an unknown virus of such magnitude and strength that it threatens our lives, health systems, economies and society. The aim of this text is to show the dynamics between the threat of COVID-19 and the rules imposed as a response to the pandemic, which have impacted the functioning of the EU internal market and the Schengen area. The text will concentrate on the application of the precautionary principle and public health restrictions, caused by COVID-19, to free movement of persons in the EU. The analysis will lead to three conclusions. First, it will be shown that the decisions to apply free movement restrictions and the logic followed in the EU COVID-19-related documents can be viewed as a triumph of the precautionary principle. Second, it will be argued that implementing the precautionary principle has a transformative effect on the application of the principle of proportionality in EU law. Finally, it will be shown that COVID-19 has emphasised and increased the difference between the conditions for the applicability of public health restrictions when compared to restrictions based on public policy and public security grounds.

This article discusses some of the challenges posed by the introduction of COVID-19 certificates as a privileged tool for opening up mobility and access in order to restore a semblance of normality to social life. While at present there is no international consensus either on how – or why – such certificates should be used or on how they should be designed and applied, a growing number of countries have already introduced COVID-19 certificates in one form or another. Yet the scientific community as well as the World Health Organisation (WHO) have expressed caution, noting that such certificates might disproportionately discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion and socioeconomic background, as well as on the basis of age due to the sequencing of the vaccine rollout. Indeed, while the new COVID-19 certificates may appear to promise a magical solution enabling us to free up global mobility and reopen economies, they actually risk creating new borders and new forms of inequality through an exclusionary sorting and profiling mechanism that delimits “safe” from “unsafe” bodies, based on differential access to “immuno-privilege” – but also differential forms of “bio-securitisation”. They also provide an illusion of pandemic safety – assuring citizens that through the “fetish” of the certificate “safe travel” can magically be reinstated. Securing territories and populations has always been, in Foucauldian terms, a matter of “making a division between good and bad circulation and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad”. We can therefore reasonably expect growing contestation, including before courts, around COVID-19 certificates in their different national and international iterations, as their inherently discriminatory nature and other unintended consequences such as those stemming from the use of persuasive – as opposed to the more traditional coercive – governmental power begin to unfold in their performative trajectory.

In modern Western societies the societal emphasis on risk and the minimization of it frequently leads to a call for increasing risk regulation. This mechanism is referred to as the vicious circle of risk regulation, and might cause a variety of problems such as overregulation and breaches of individual privacy. Different solutions have been put forward to break the vicious circle: a greater emphasis on individual citizens’ responsibility, a more rational approach in which governments calculate the greatest safety yield for a given budget and greater democracy: citizen participation in risk and safety related decision making processes. As each approach involves serious disadvantages the authors argue that a well-considered, unhurried approach might be the best way forward. Leadership is largely about timing and with regard to risk management after critical events taking one's time seems crucial indeed.

The scaling of urban climate action and its governance is rapidly becoming a central focus in the urban climate governance literature and policy debates. Building on the broader scaling literature and inspired by related initiatives in other fields, this article calls for the development of a systematic “science of scaling” for urban climate governance. Such a science of scaling may help to give a better understanding of how well-performing urban climate action and its governance can be multiplied, accelerated and broadened (ie horizontal and vertical scaling and scaling out, up and down), and it may help to uncover scaling trajectories towards systemic change in cities (ie deep scaling).

The Politics of Precaution by David Vogel, and the edited volume, The Reality of Precaution each compare the United States with Europe over a range of regulatory areas. Vogel claims that the US and Europe changed places in recent years with Europe becoming more precautionary than the US. The edited volume covers a wider range of topics and finds that the results are mixed. The evidence of diversity in the edited volume appears convincing, but this essay argues that both volumes too narrowly focus on the precautionary principle. Rather it argues for a broader context that confronts precaution both with the proportionality principle, which is a mainstay of European Union law, and with the limitations of cost/benefit analysis and Impact Assessment. It unpacks the normative underpinnings of these concepts to suggest a broader frame for policy analysis.

This article argues that European Union (EU) risk regulation of hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) was both a trigger and formative factor in the development of similar Chinese regulation. The attractiveness and global interdependence of the EU market in EEE impelled a response from Chinese policy-makers. Fostering the domestic industry's global competitiveness was one of the driving factors behind Chinese substance restriction regulation. Additionally, symbolic emulation and growing domestic environmental problems related to waste EEE infl uenced the Chinese policy agenda. Chinese substance restriction rules are not, however, a mere copy of EU regulation. The limited domestic capacity of the Chinese economy, administration, and legal structure to adopt policies similar to those of the EU explains, to a large extent, the emergence and partial persistence of differences between EU and Chinese risk regulation. In the course of the implementation and evaluation of Chinese substance restriction regulation, lessons learned from the EU’s experience increasingly contributed to shaping the policy, leading to growing convergence.

Digital vaccination certification involves making many promises, few of which can realistically be kept. In this paper, we demonstrate how this phenomenon constitutes various forms of theatre – immunity theatre, border theatre, behavioural theatre and equality theatre – doing so by drawing on perspectives from technology regulation, migration studies and critical geopolitics. Technological theatre and political theatre often serve valid functions, but these forms are problematic for several reasons. First, they involve real-world infrastructures that, while unlikely to accomplish the task at hand, will nevertheless last a long time and be repurposed. They therefore constitute governance by data infrastructure, diverting action and control away from elected legislators to for-profit contractors. Second, vaccine certification effectively legitimises inequalities between countries and people by formalising ways to distinguish between the vaccinated and non-vaccinated and to exclude the latter, thus reinforcing both mobility and connectivity divides. It serves as a way to (further) close borders and to regulate, through code and infrastructure, access to public goods such as employment and public space. Finally, the project of certification displaces a more important action, namely addressing the radical inequality in countries’ ability to combat the pandemic.

Human rights due diligence (HRDD) is the main (voluntary) process through which companies can assess and address negative human rights impacts. In recent years, however, mandatory HRDD requirements are increasingly seen as a more effective way to persuade more companies to better address human rights risks in their global value chains (GVCs). This study investigates whether such mandatory legislative initiatives can positively impact workers’ rights in GVCs as an essential part of those human rights that should be addressed in HRDD. The study provides an in-depth analysis of the legal framework of workers’ rights in GVCs. It then uses the French vigilance law as a case study to empirically investigate the effects of a mandatory HRDD duty for companies using a simple difference-in-differences analysis with data from the Refinitiv database from 2014 to 2020. The study shows that there are indications that the French vigilance law positively impacts corporate human rights conduct. This finding particularly holds for the practices of companies that can be considered “laggards”, which can imply that legislators need to increase the mandatory requirements to further improve responsible corporate conduct.

As a part of its Better Regulation agenda, the European Commission increasingly stresses the link between different types of regulatory evaluations. Predictions made by Impact Assessments (IAs) could be verified during ex–post legislative evaluations, while ex–post evaluations in turn could recommend amendments to be studied in future IAs. This article combines a dataset of 309 ex–post legislative evaluations (2000-2014) and a dataset of 225 IAs of legislative updates (2003-2014) to show how many ex–post evaluations of the Commission use IAs and vice versa. This way, it explores if the Commission's rhetoric of a ‘regulatory cycle’ holds up in practice. Building on the literature of evaluation use, we formulate the hypotheses that the timeliness, quality and focus of the IAs and evaluations are key explanations for use. Our results show that so far only ten ex–post evaluations have used IAs of EU legislation, while thirty three IAs have used ex–post legislative evaluations. Using Fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we find that timeliness is a necessary condition of the use of ex–post evaluations by IAs, suggesting that for the regulatory cycle to function properly, it is crucial to complete an ex–post evaluation before an IA is launched. Future research could repeat our analysis for evaluations of non–regulatory activities or study the causal mechanisms behind our findings.