[Elina Hammarström is Associate Legal Adviser in the International Commission of Jurists’ Europe and Central Asia Programme] In May 2024, the European Union adopted the final text of the new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum (EU Pact), consisting of ten legislative texts reforming the EU migration and asylum system. As a whole, the EU Pact, which will enter into force in...
[Karolína Babická is a Senior Legal Adviser at the International Commission of Jurists. Cristina Giacomin is a Legal Intern at the International Commission of Jurists] Overview In the past two years, the Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) of the Council of Europe (CoE) has worked on the Framework Convention (FC) on Artificial Intelligence, Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law. The final...
[Johanna Trittenbach is a PhD Candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University. Jessica Dorsey is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Utrecht University and Otto Spijkers is a Lecturer of International Law at Amsterdam and Leiden University College (AUC and LUC).] Introduction On 12 February 2024, the Court of Appeal in The Hague ordered the Netherlands...
[Dr Claire Lougarre is a Lecturer in Law at Ulster University, School of Law. Her primary research expertise lies at the intersection of human rights law and health, with a particular interest in the right to health, as well as in sexual and reproductive health & rights.] Introduction According to Article 3(5) of the Treaty on European Union (TEU), the European Union...
[Kate Mackintosh is the Executive Director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights at the UCLA School of Law, and was deputy co-chair of the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide.] In an exciting development for proponents of a new international crime of ecocide, the European Parliament on Tuesday agreed a text for the new Environmental Crimes Directive (“Draft...
[Jaap Hoeksma focuses on the nature and functioning of the EU. He has recently published The Democratisation of the European Union.] Seventy years after the start of the experiment with pooling sovereignty, the European Union turns out to embody the most significant innovation of the modern state system so far. The hallmark of the EU in its present form is that it...
A few days ago, the European Law Institute published its final report on ecocide. The report not only provides a definition of ecocide, it also contains Model Rules for an EU Directive and a Council Decision that ELI hopes will both "contribute to the inter-institutional negotiations in the EU on the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and...
[Jaap Hoeksma focuses on the nature and functioning of the EU. His new book: The Democratisation of the European Union will be published in January 2023 by The Hague Eleven.] Seventy years after the start of the process of European integration, the EU is still being portrayed by politicians and academics alike as an ‘unsolvable conundrum’. Despite strenuous efforts, theorists have...
Via its Minister for the Environment, the Belgian government has announced that it intends to incorporate the crime of ecocide into its Penal Code: A concept now recognized in the national penal codes of 10 countries (Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Vietnam and France), the crime of ecocide refers to all illegal actions that lead to the...
[Tiina Pajuste is Professor of International Law and Security at Tallinn University. She has held previous research positions at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights (University of Helsinki) and the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (University of Cambridge), where she was part of the Legal Tools for Peace-making Project. The views expressed in this paper are...
Until this summer, Brigid Laffan was director and professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and director of the Global Governance Programme at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence, where she has worked since 2013. In 2018, Politico ranked Laffan, a long time professor of political science who grew up in Ireland, among the women who shape Europe....
[Jed Odermatt is Lecturer at the City Law School, City, University of London, where he is co-convenor of the International Law and Affairs Group (ILAG) and member of the Institute for the Study of European Law (ISEL). The opinions expressed herein are the author’s alone.] The Russian Federation has demanded that Ukraine should renounce potential NATO membership. Early on in the...