The European Union adopted region-wide binding legal norms and a multifaceted legal approach to human trafficking. This chapter explains that the EU has competence (legal authority or jurisdiction) over human trafficking because trafficking is seen as a crime that moves across borders. By contrast, the EU needs another source of competence to tackle forced labour in supply chains. These different sources of competence over different drivers of unfree labour resulted in a proliferation of gendered governance strategies. Pushed by the Council of Europe’s Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, the EU incorporated the rights of trafficking victims. The chapter illustrates how victim’s rights were subsumed under the EU’s primary goal of hardening Member States’ borders against undesirable outsiders, exemplified by migrant sex workers. The EU also promoted a corporate sustainability due-diligence directive and a product ban targeting unfree labour in supply chains, thereby extending EU values beyond Member States’ borders.

This chapter examines transnational efforts to uphold the rule of law by regional courts and organizations.  While not originally the primary focus of regional trade regimes and human rights systems in Africa, Latin America, and Europe, these institutions have now taken on a thicker set of obligations toward protecting the rule of law (along with democracy and other related concepts).  The result is that supranational and international organizations have become important actors confronting real-world threats to the rule of law. The chapter compares developments in Europe, Africa, and Latin America.

This chapter launches the contemporary section of the book. The overarching argument is that despite the binaries leveraged by leaders and analysts alike, political contestation in the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth and twentieth, is not reducible to an “Islamist vs. secularist” cleavage. Instead, contestation and key outcomes are driven by shifting coalitions for and against pluralism, notably, an Islamo-liberal/secular liberal coalition that marked the sixth major, pluralizing alignment since the Tanzimat reforms. It would transform state and society, even though the coalition itself proved short-lived as democratization stalled against a backdrop of debates over Islamophobia, the headscarf, minority rights, freedom of expression, media freedoms, and sweeping show trials.

In this chapter, I first examine how the rule of law has been defined in legal theory, and how it has been distinguished from the rule by law, which is a distortion thereof (Section 3.1). Second, I assess how the rule of law has been conceptualised in the context of the European Union, as this book focuses primarily on the EU legal order (Section 3.2). In this regard, I also draw on the acquis of the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe is a distinct jurisdictional order, yet it heavily influenced the ‘EU’ conceptualisation of the rule of law, and the EU regularly relies on Council of Europe sources in its own legal practices. Finally, I draw on these findings to identify the rule of law’s core principles and to distil the concrete requirements that public authorities must fulfil to comply therewith (Section 3.3). Identifying these requirements – and the inherent challenges to achieve them – will subsequently allow me to build a normative analytical framework that I can use as a benchmark in Chapter 4 to assess how algorithmic regulation impacts the rule of law.

This chapter explores how the imposition of unprecedented sanctions against Russia following the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the constant cat-and-mouse game of enforcement and evasion that ensued have altered the secondary sanctions landscape. More specifically, it examines to what extent, notwithstanding its longstanding and entrenched opposition to far-reaching US secondary sanctions, the European Union has gradually moved towards adding a ‘secondary’ layer to its own sanctions toolbox. The chapter first exposes the EU’s ambiguity towards extraterritoriality, both within and without the sanctions domain. It subsequently zooms in on a number of specific EU measures, namely the imposition of the so-called ‘price cap’ on Russian oil, the adoption of far-reaching import and export restrictions, including the prohibition to import certain Russian products even after these are located or have already been processed in third countries, and the threat of financial sanctions against, and criminal prosecution of, non-EU persons that facilitate the circumvention of EU sanctions against Russia. It then offers some concluding observations.

The lawfulness of carbon border adjustment measures (CBAMs) under general international economic law and particular economic agreements is explored; specifically, if their international lawfulness can be determined by thinking of them as countermeasures necessary to implement climate change obligations. As there are no non-discriminatory obligations under customary international law, it is argued that CBAMs are lawful under general international law, but under particular international economic agreements they can be seen as countermeasures lawfully taken in response to breaching the obligation to curb GHG emissions, allowing their justification as a breach of primary non-discriminatory economic obligations, particularly the national treatment principle under the GATT and GATS. This shifts the burden of proving necessity/proportionality to the State in breach of the obligation. CBAMs are fundamentally lawful measures and can only give rise to compensation if it they are unnecessary/disproportionate. This chapter also assesses whether they can be thought of as erga omnes contractantes obligations under international economic agreements, particularly the GATT and the GATS.

This chapter discusses the building blocks of the European Union’s strategy for climate neutrality. Carbon pricing in the EU is described, focusing on the EU ETS and on the forthcoming CBAM. Then the roles of electrification and clean molecules in the future European energy system are discussed. Finally, sustainable finance priorities, capacities, and regulatory instruments put forward by the EU are reviewed, before a brief conclusion.

This chapter aims to inform reflection on business self-regulation (or corporate social responsibility, CSR) in addressing climate change by drawing on developments in ‘business and human rights’ and the experience accumulated in the European Union (EU). Despite dissimilarities in addressing the environmental and human right impacts of business operations, there are commonalities around incentives, impacts and regulatory dynamics of CSR that help clarify its expected place in global governance. This analysis revisits long-standing claims about CSR in light of current legal and market evolutions. The main finding is that the notion of CSR has been fundamentally transformed in the last 20 years. What is the change, what are the drivers enabling such change, and what are the expected impacts on corporate compliance and sustainability performance? The analysis contributes to the regulatory governance area, including regarding climate change, and promotes cross-fertilisation among the social and environmental areas in CSR.

Africa’s unique vulnerability to climate change has become entrenched as a central theme in international climate politics and has precipitated a transformation in climate policy on the continent from relative disorganisation to effective and unified cooperation in the span of barely 30 years. In the same period, Africa has also emerged as one of the fastest growing and most promising regions in the world economy. In light of these developments, and spurred by an international discourse of ‘energy transition’, a new wave of European foreign direct investment headlined by renewable energy has crested – with Africa in its sights. This contribution will explore the efficacy of such investments as a vehicle for ‘exporting’ European climate policy, and the extent to which these policy aims are compatible with similarly massive investments into Africa from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). By interrogating the focus of energy investments from Europe and the PRC, both in terms of stated aims and actual outcomes, it will posit that the success of Africa’s energy transition will depend in large part on the PRC’s sincerity about its domestic and international climate ambition.

Can ‘digitalisation’ (the process of running business through procedures that take place in digital format) contribute to the green transition? If so, to what extent? The European Union (EU) has recently embraced the idea of synergically combining climate policies and digitalisation, whereby the digital transformation becomes a key tool to achieve net zero carbon emissions. Arguably, while there are manifold advantages in improving, for instance, energy distribution via smart grids, digitalisation also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. It is therefore necessary to strike the right balance and understand how to best harness digitalisation to implement the green transition. Notably, it is essential that the EU monitor the impact of digitalisation on the overall energy demand to avoid an excessive increase in energy consumption. Arguably, the EU can profitably couple a holistic embracement of digitalisation as the panacea to climate challenges with a ‘learn-by-doing’ approach, setting a variety of real-world experiments across supply chains to test the viability of its digital policy, in close collaboration with stakeholders.

Russia is one of the main oil and gas producers and one of the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide globally. Its energy policies are still underpinned by the necessity of establishing ‘spheres of influence’ and are not on track to achieve the objectives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement. Politically, war in Ukraine is arguably a consequence of this approach and discloses for the European Union (EU) the possibility of a diversification of its energy sources to achieve security of supply, which unlocks the opportunity of accelerating the green transition envisaged in the European Green Deal. Legally, given that they are not at war with Russia, the EU and its Member States could invoke the energy supply crisis and the political misalignment between the Russian energy policy and the Green Deal, rather than war per se, as a justification to abandon consolidated long-term energy contracts and accelerate the green transition.

While most sovereign entities have committed to greening their economies and investment under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), several of them are also bound by obligations contracted under the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), which protects investors in renewables and fossil fuel alike. Arguably, such a situation triggers a ‘regulatory clash’ that has the potential to impede the implementation of net zero carbon policies, such as the European Green Deal. This contribution contextualises the ECT within the framework of the UNFCCC and scopes the potential conflict between such regulatory regimes. Particularly, in light of the so-called ‘sunset’ clause, the contribution concludes that a suitable avenue to resolve the clash is establishing a preferential track for investment in clean energy under the ECT. On this basis, fundamental solutions are envisaged for greening investment, by applying model de lege ferenda proposals for a substantive and procedural modernisation of the ECT.

It is uncontested that the European Union (EU) – endowed with distinct international legal personality (pursuant to Article 47 of the Treaty on European Union) and being a subject of international law – is bound by relevant norms of customary international law (CIL). Rules of CIL form an integral part of the EU legal order, and the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) must use CIL at least as an interpretive tool. Still, the CJEU’s interpretations of CIL norms and the interpretative methods and techniques it employs have received little attention in legal scholarship. This chapter aims to map and understand the ways in which the CJEU interprets CIL rules and compares them to those that exist for the interpretation of treaties under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

While energy production (the energy sector) has undergone huge efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, transportation and heating are next to be tackle. Hydrogen could be a solution for one of them, the heating sector. This chapter focuses on the Netherlands as a case study to investigate the (absent) legal framework and the regulatory challenges that the development and deployment of hydrogen in the heating markets face. After an overview of the EU regulatory framework, it delves into the specificities of Dutch legislation. The Netherlands is a suitable object of study because it has instituted concrete initiatives from which the energy supervisor, the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM), has created a temporary framework. The analysis reveals significant gaps and inconsistencies in the regulatory landscape and offers concrete suggestions for sector-specific regulation. In addition, the chapter discusses the implications of the regulatory framework for market participants and their behaviour, as well as the role of competition law and potential sector-specific rules in ensuring a level playing field for all market actors. The Dutch experience could potentially generate a model that other EU Member States could follow.

Chapter 8 concludes the book with a study of Ukrainian refugees’ migration to Europe after Russia’s brutal attack on their country in February 2022. It shows that publics and elites across Europe’s political spectrum sustained extraordinary levels of support for the refugees’ inclusion, and deploys the book’s analytical framework to explain why. The EU’s Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) provided Ukrainian citizens with immediate and collective protection and full social rights in EU member states. Public opinion data and political parties’ (including populists’) programs are used to account for positive reception of the refugees, based on their multiple sources of deservingness. Relying on UNHCR, OECD, and other studies of refugees’ reported experiences the chapter assesses progress in their social inclusion as well as deficiencies. It considers welfare nationalist grievances that have arisen in Europe and shows that governments have responded to them as ‘normal politics’ rather than by scapegoating the refugees. The chapter ends by comparing European responses to the MENA and Ukrainian refugee migrations, and externalization agreements to address the continuing problem of migration to Europe from MENA and other third countries.