This article examines the concept of materiality in sustainability reporting, tracing its development from financial materiality to the adoption of double materiality under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). It explores the distinction between financial and impact materiality, highlighting the regulatory and ideological shifts that have shaped their integration. The discussion also includes the challenges companies face in implementing double materiality, such as data collection complexities, methodological inconsistencies, and the risks of selective disclosure. Additionally, the article contains an analysis of potential solutions, including additional regulatory guidance, independent oversight, and best practices for balancing transparency with strategic reporting. Ultimately, the author argues that double materiality represents a significant transformation in corporate governance, and that there exists concrete measures to be taken by both companies and regulators to improve the application of the CSRD.

The article examines the European Union’s neutrality toward Kosovo’s statehood and its influence on the EU’s enlargement process and engagement strategy in view of internal divisions among the EU Member States over Kosovo’s recognition. It assesses how the EU’s mantra of neutrality shapes the dimensions of EU actorness, balancing differences among EU Member States while ensuring Kosovo’s inclusion in the EU enlargement process. Next, the article explores how the EU engages with Kosovo despite the lack of unanimous recognition of Kosovo’s statehood from five EU Member States, arguing that neutrality unfolds both as a legitimising principle and an authorisation mechanism. Our hypothesis is that neutrality has enabled Kosovo’s incremental involvement in the enlargement process without undermining the EU’s internal cohesion. Drawing on three illustrative examples, notably, the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, the Stabilisation and Association Agreement and the CJEU’s interpretation of EU-Kosovo SAA Agreement, the article demonstrates the variations of the concept of neutrality and its impact in maintaining Kosovo’s attachment to enlargement policy. The findings suggest that neutrality has been instrumental in authorising the EU missions in Kosovo and in sustaining Kosovo’s European trajectory.

The green transition promoted by the European Green Deal (EGD) is not simply a matter of achieving climate neutrality by 2050. This macro-objective enshrined in European Climate Law (ECL) is complemented by the objectives of zero pollution and ecological resilience. These three intertwined objectives further manifest themselves in a myriad of sub-objectives, which are to be achieved through an array of interconnected regulatory and financial measures falling with the scope of energy, industrial, transport, external trade, agricultural and environmental policies. The genius of the EGD reform lies precisely in the fact that it articulates a number of complementary objectives whilst also operating within the framework of several EU policies. The aim of this article is to assess whether the 160 legislative instruments implementing the EGD amount to greenwashing of EU economic policies or whether they are in actual fact testament to a paradigm shift. This issue is all the more topical now that several simplification proposals have been proposed by the European Commission.

Exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals is linked to negative health impacts, including non-communicable diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular diseases and cancer. This disease burden compromises consumer safety and costs the European Union an estimated €163 billion per year. Given these stakes, the importance of effectively regulating EDCs in food is paramount. Yet regulators face difficult challenges: scientific uncertainty, the ubiquity of EDCs in food products, and pressure from economic and political interests all complicate legislative responses. From a risk regulation perspective, the core problem is how to protect public health from EDC risks in food amidst these uncertainties and constraints. This paper addresses the problem by examining the current EU regulatory framework for managing EDCs in the food supply chain, identifying gaps and weaknesses, and proposing improvements to better safeguard public health. From this risk regulation perspective, the paper highlights the benefits of ensuring regulatory action keeps pace with scientific evidence, leveraging the General Food Law Regulation for a comprehensive approach to EDCs, and developing sector-specific EDC regulation across the food supply chain.

Tokens can serve as containers for rights, thereby facilitating the transfer of such rights. On tokenisation platforms, especially in the context of decentralised finance (DeFi), it is assumed that when a token containing a right is transferred, the right itself is transferred as well. This paper uses the “token container model” as a conceptual framework to examine whether European private law frameworks on transfers of rights are compatible with such token-based transfers. Specifically, it explores the rules on the transfer of rights in movables, the rules on the transfer of rights in immovables, and the rules on assignment of claims. This analysis reveals substantial legal obstacles to the use of tokens in transferring absolute rights or claims.

Tokenised assets are expected to transform finance, yet their legal treatment remains a source of uncertainty. This article presents an analytical framework for categorising legal structures of tokenised assets, addressing a gap in academic literature and regulatory approaches. We introduce a taxonomy based on the legal relationship between tokens and their underlying assets. In complete tokenisation tokens embody legally enforceable rights. It comprises direct tokenisation, where tokens are the primary form of the asset, and indirect tokenisation, where asset-backed tokens are created through intermediary structures. In contrast, incomplete tokenisation results in tokens that function as “digital twins” with limited or no legal value.

Our analysis reveals that the effectiveness of tokenisation depends on the robustness of this legal bond. We compare how these categories impact tokenisation features, including asset transferability, legal certainty, and composability. Furthermore, we identify limiting factors in current regulatory frameworks, such as form requirements, ownership models, and identity mechanisms. Drawing examples from various legal systems and asset classes, including financial instruments, property rights, and digital assets, this work provides a foundation for evaluating tokenisation strategies, with practical insights for regulators and market participants.

In the early 2000, cybersecurity breaches were classified as “Internet crimes” and therefore managed through the tools of the criminal justice system. The Budapest Convention on Cybercrime forged new incriminating provisions and new procedural guidelines, updating the categories of criminal law and criminal procedure for the digital age. This style, unfortunately, has proved to be insufficient. To face the growing number of threats, the EU has shifted towards a much more preemptive, administrative-law-based approach to cybersecurity, with a view to protect critical infrastructure and industries from disruptive attacks. The criminal layer, however, has not been replaced: the relevant, international instruments are still there, and they have been recently extended to cover more ground. The essay will examine the new wave of legislation on cybercrime such as the United Nations Cybercrime Treaty, trying to identify the interactions and the frictions between two different contrast strategies to abusive cyber operations.

The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based surveillance technologies such as facial recognition for national and public security purposes in the area of law enforcement raises serious concerns regarding the potential risks of abuse and arbitrariness it might entail, in the absence of adequate safeguards. At an international level, the impact of biometric identification systems on the protection and promotion of human rights and fundamental freedoms has been consistently emphasised by international organisations, human rights monitoring mechanisms and the civil society, particularly with regards to the risk of mass surveillance possibly resulting in the infringement upon the right of privacy and freedom of assembly. This contribution will assess the international human rights and standards applicable to the use of these technologies for national security purposes especially in the context of peaceful protest by assessing the position of the European Court of Human Rights in Glukhin v Russia (11519/20) and recent regulatory attempts.

This article examines the role of customary international law in regulating SRM by analysing competing interpretations of the customary law principle of prevention and their implications for SRM governance. Existing customary law limitations are largely overlooked in current policy and expert discussions around the future of SRM, which seemingly proceed on the basis that there are no universally applicable limitations for states to develop SRM technologies should they decide so. The paper contrasts this view and argues, from a positivist point of view, that the customary principle of prevention does pose certain limits for states even before SRM-caused transboundary environmental harm occurs. It distinguishes between a retrospective and future-oriented dimension of the prevention principle, and it depicts three scenarios for how the prevention obligation may limit the development and deployment of SRM technology depending on how States (and international legal advisors) conceptualise the temporal scope and normative content of the prevention principle. The article also examines the implications of the different configurations of the customary law obligation for an eventual SRM treaty.

Energy has been a fundamental precondition for human survival, economic development, and preserving dignity throughout history. At the same time, the increasing digitalisation of energy systems, especially in the EU’s energy transition, creates new challenges, especially concerning rights such as data protection and privacy. Although European Law restricts the right to energy as a consumer right, it expressly recognises data protection and privacy as fundamental rights. This article outlines the theoretical, historical and legal foundations of the right to energy and analyses the implications of digitalisation for its realisation while also addressing emerging concerns about data protection and privacy rights. Furthermore, it identifies the tension points between the Recast Electricity Directive (RED) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and provides recommendations for a legal framework that harmonises the abovementioned rights.

The future of Ukraine depends on its relations with the EU. What is the law governing accessions? What are the main challenges facing Ukraine on the path towards EU membership? Going through the pre-accession scrutiny in times of war, Ukraine sets a unique precedent, where more experimentation could be possible to mitigate a huge risk that the EU repeats and amplifies the same mistakes it made in the Western Balkan countries – making the region a hostage of its contradictory and lethargic politics for too long. The evolution of EU enlargement law and the legal-political framework surrounding accessions across the different rounds of EU enlargement demonstrates that EU law is flexible while the practice of its application is volatile and deeply political. Enlargement practice shows that applying pre-accession conditionality may cause significant delays, while not delivering the results expected of it. A new approach to regulating accessions to the EU needs to be tested out before it is too late. This approach should build on Article 49 TEU and seek at least some depoliticisation of the enlargement process to guarantee the rule of law without dubious pre-accession techniques. Such an approach would speed-up accessions while making EU enlargement more predictable, serving the interests of Ukraine and other partners.

Cybersecurity is a concern to be tackled not only by individual States but also by the European Union as a whole. Building on the recent adoption of Regulation (EU) 2025/38, the so-called Cyber Solidarity Act, the study intends to analyse the creation of a supranational capacity to prevent and respond to cyber incidents, by answering the following questions: how and to what extent is solidarity concretely declined in the act in question? How do the mechanisms provided for by this act concretely interact with the Member States’ prerogatives in the broader security domain?

European constitutions differ greatly in the depth to which they deal with emergencies: while many constitutions devote more or less detailed regulation to emergency regimes, others almost completely neglect these issues or dedicate only some very short and vague references to emergency situations and powers. This article aims to carry out a systematic comparison of the emergency-related provisions of forty European constitutions, focusing on (1) the level of detail of the regulation, (2) the emergency regimes addressed, and (3) the restrictions on fundamental rights. As the study points out, only two out of the forty constitutions are completely silent on emergency powers. However, the remaining thirty-eight constitutions show wide variation in the level of detail of the emergency regulation; the vast majority of the emergency regimes are related to war or armed attack (or the danger thereof), to internal crises threatening the constitutional order, and to natural disasters. Concerning fundamental rights, the examination of the constitutional texts confirms that twenty-five out of the forty constitutions encompass some provisions on the restriction of these rights in a state of emergency.

Healthcare systems are increasingly exploiting the advantages of Internet of Things technologies: cloud-connected devices with perceptive sensors can gather very accurate health data from people even if they do not get to the hospital or private clinics. For potential innovators of new medical IoT devices, the legal framework applicable was until now limited to the application of the General Data Protection Regulation and the Medical Devices Regulation.

This paper will investigate what will happen when medical IoT-generated data are shared to create new products or services according to the framework now depicted by the Data Act and the European Health Data Space.

Given that the EHDS and the Data Act are both aimed at facilitating the secondary use of (health) data, the contribution will compare the two processes set up to establish a roadmap to solve health-data sharing theoretical and practical queries.

The implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, rather than the regulation itself, is holding back technological innovation. The EU’s data protection governance architecture is complex, leading to contradictory interpretations among Member States. This situation is prompting companies of all kinds to halt the deployment of transformative projects in the EU. The case of Meta is paradigmatic: both the UK and the EU broadly have the same regulation (GDPR), but the UK swiftly determined that Meta could train its generative AI model using first-party public data under the legal basis of legitimate interest, while in the EU, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) took months to issue an Opinion that national authorities must still interpret and implement individually, leading to legal uncertainty. Similarly, the case of Deepseek has demonstrated how some national data protection authorities, such as the Italian Garante, have moved to ban the AI model outright, while others have opted for investigations. This fragmented enforcement landscape exacerbates regulatory uncertainty and hampers EU’s competitiveness, particularly for startups, which lack the resources to navigate an unpredictable compliance framework. For the EU to remain competitive in the global AI race, strengthening the EDPB’s role is essential.

Emergency law serves the dual purpose of granting public authorities the powers to respond to emergencies whilst simultaneously limiting the use of such powers so as to prevent their abuse. To this end, it is crucial that emergency law clearly outlines its own scope by delimiting the grounds that permit the invocation of emergency powers. This article argues that defining those grounds requires distinguishing emergency from normalcy and disentangling it from the broader notion of crisis. Accordingly, the contribution investigates the extent to which a definition of emergency can be accommodated within EU constitutional law. To do so, it draws on examples from European emergency law, understood as encompassing both EU Member States’ laws and the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”). The article shows that the vague emergency terminology employed in the EU Treaties hinders the identification of a horizontal definition of emergency and risks casting doubt on the constitutional legitimacy of emergency responses by the Union and its Member States.

Some fishing vessels breach maritime laws by operating with their mandatory tracking systems (Automatic Identification System (AIS)) switched off. Marine insurers act as enablers of this practice since these vessels cannot operate without insurance. This article explores why insurers in England take on the risk of insuring them and assesses how the insurers are operating against the regulatory framework in doing so. It identifies the solutions that could raise standards in marine insurance and lead to increased legal compliance by the insured vessels. This would consequently enhance maritime safety, while increasing transparency in fisheries across all oceans. Importantly, by discouraging vessels from going dark, any illegal activities underlying the non-transmission of AIS data, such as human, drug or weapon trafficking, illegal fishing or sanctions evasion, would also be curbed.

Since the eighteenth century, animal breeding has significantly evolved, culminating in the use of gene editing (GE) technologies like CRISPR-Cas9. These technologies offer unprecedented capabilities to modify animal genomes, potentially revolutionising breeding practices by achieving desired traits much faster compared to traditional selective breeding (SB). Because breeding programmes focussed on productivity traits have often compromised animal welfare, this article provides an analysis of the ethical issues underpinning the use of GE in animal breeding, and the current laws regulating such practices. In doing so, this article critically examines the European Union (EU)’s regulatory framework for SB and GE in farm animals, highlighting significant gaps and inconsistencies. Specifically, the use of GE animals is currently regulated under the EU’s GMO legislation, while SB is more loosely regulated, posing substantial risks to animal welfare. The authors advocate for a regulatory framework that prioritises animal welfare goals and proposes reforms to enhance animal protection objectives by ensuring a more consistent and humane approach to farm animal breeding.

This article considers the application of the precautionary principle as understood in EU law to EU decision-making on geoengineering, in particular solar geoengineering. It finds that the situation is riddled with more complexities than first appears; (i) the principle is used to argue against research, even though more research is usually itself seen as precautionary response; (ii) the risks of research are claimed to lie in its political impact, whereas the principle is traditionally applied to direct physical risks; (iii) while there are legitimate precautionary arguments against geoengineering, it is itself put forward as a precautionary measure and there are precautionary arguments in favour too. Drawing on case law and scholarship we conclude that the precautionary principle can nevertheless be applied and will lead to a procedural requirement to do comprehensive reviews of relevant scientific knowledge before decision-making. This leaves wide – but not unbounded – discretion but may still be valuable in providing a frame for reasoned public debate. We also apply our findings to the recent expert reports on Solar Radiation Modification and show that they have failed to apply precaution correctly.