Hitting the right target: EU and Security Council pursuit of terrorist financing

This article analyses one specific instance of the use of targeted sanctions to combat the financing of terrorism by the European Union on behalf of the United Nations Security Council. The case raised a number of issues involving the use of sanctions against non-state actors and provoked a legal challenge at the European Court of Justice. These European court cases have been portrayed as a challenge to the use of targeted sanctions by the Security Council to maintain international peace and security. The fundamental critique here is that targeted sanctions must adhere to due process and the rule of law in order to protect individual human rights.     

Data protection in Europe – Some thoughts on reading the academic manifesto

The commentary by academics on the proposed European General Data Protection Regulation in [2013] 29 CLSR 180 has provoked thoughts in response. The responder strongly agrees with the doubts expressed about the definition of personal data, anonymisation and the identifiability of individuals. On the other hand, he disagrees with the views on consent and legitimacy and proposes support for a risk-based approach to data protection. He suggests that data protection does not need to be defended from the attack that it stifles business, but is justifiable for its assertion of fundamental rights. In conclusion, he shares the criticism of the European Commission's delegated and implementing powers and is concerned that the Regulation will be rushed to a conclusion for reasons of political ambition.     

Internet of things – Need for a new legal environment?

The Internet of Things as an emerging global, Internet-based information service architecture facilitating the exchange of goods in global supply chain networks is developing on the technical basis of the present Domain Name System; drivers are private actors. Learning from the experiences with the “traditional” Internet governance it is important to tackle the relevant issues of a regulatory framework from the beginning; in particular, the implementation of an independently managed decentralized multiple-root system and the establishment of basic governance principles (such as transparency and accountability, legitimacy of institutional bodies, inclusion of civil society) are to be envisaged.     

Interactional Aspects of Intimate Partner Violence Result in Different Help-Seeking Behaviors in a Representative Sample of Women

This article reports a study of the possible impact of sociodemographic and interactional aspects of intimate partner violence (IPV) on help-seeking behavior. Do different sociodemographic groups of IPV survivors use different professional supports and treatments? Do different professional support and treatment agencies come predominantly in contact with women who have been subjected to different characteristics of IPV? Do different interactional IPV variables predict whether IPV victims contact the police, a family doctor, or a psychologist or psychiatrist? A representative sample of 157 women recruited from family counseling, the police, and shelters in Norway was interviewed. Three of seven sociodemographic variables showed statistically significant differences among the recruitment groups. No significant differences in characteristics of IPV were found among the recruitment groups. However, there were significant differences between the main categories (physical, psychological, and sexual) of IPV and interactional IPV factors concerning help-seeking. Our findings indicate that the help-seeking of IPV survivors is differentiated and interaction-specific and that they respond adequately to the different interactional consequences of IPV.     

Interviewing serious offenders: Ms. Egghead meets Mr. Gumshoe

Organised crime, due to its intricate nature, is a very challenging as well as less accessible research field. Although difficult to conduct a methodical research on this topic, organised crime, nevertheless, offers a unique opportunity to utilise an interdisciplinary research methodology. This paper describes (multiple) triangulation as an appropriate method for researching the role of culture in the advancement of ethnic Albanian organised crime groups in Europe. Triangulation, for the purpose of the described project, has been used to obtain confirmation of findings through convergence of different perspectives. Interviewing offenders is one of the research methods more thoroughly explained in this paper. The paper too explores some advantages of snowball technique used for interviewing less accessible research subjects. It also discusses various dilemmas, security-related or not, researchers are faced with when intending to interview serious offenders.

Trust,regulation, and redistribution why some governments overregulate and under-redistribute

For many social scientists, government intervention is linked to low levels of social trust and corruption, while others associate it with high trust and low corruption. We aim to reconcile these contrasting views by distinguishing the opposing effects of trust on two alternative types of government intervention: regulation and redistribution. We argue that distrusting individuals demand more governmental regulation (H1) but less government redistribution (H2), and this could be one of the mechanisms explaining why countries with low levels of trust tend to both overregulate and under-redistribute. And the effects of trust on policy preferences are conditional on the quality of institutions. The higher the level of quality of government in a particular region, the more high-trusting individuals will like government redistribution and dislike government regulation that restricts the operations of free markets (H3). We test these hypotheses with data from the latest round of the European Quality of Government Index (EQI) survey, which covers 77,000 individuals from 185 regions of 21 EU member states.     

Is experimentalist governance self-limiting or self-reinforcing? Strategic uncertainty and recursive rulemaking in European Union electricity regulation

Is experimentalist governance (XG) self-limiting or self-reinforcing by virtue of its relationship to strategic uncertainty as an essential scope condition? This article tackles this important but understudied question by elaborating a series of idealtypical pathways for the temporal evolution of XG in specific policy domains, ranging from reversion to hierarchical governance through endogenous reduction of strategic uncertainty at one extreme to institutionalization of experimentalism as a multipurpose governance architecture at the other. It then goes on to test the empirical validity of these contrasting theoretical expectations about the long-term relationship between XG and strategic uncertainty through a process-tracing analysis of electricity regulation in the European Union over a series of policy cycles since the 1990s. Building on and extending previous research in this domain, this article's findings strengthen empirical confidence in the theoretical expectation that XG is self-reinforcing, while diminishing confidence in the claim that it is self-limiting.     

Magnetic law: Designing environmental enforcement laws to encourage us to go further

The European Union has some of the world's most ambitious and highly developed environmental laws on its books, but their effectiveness is severely compromised by non-compliance. With the UNECE Aarhus Convention (1998), Europe launched an innovative legal experiment, democratizing environmental enforcement by conferring third party citizens and environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) with legal rights of access to environmental information, public participation, and access to justice in environmental matters. Based on some 2000 surveys and over 150 interviews with stakeholders from three Member States – France, Ireland, and the Netherlands – we adopt a holistic, 360° perspective, capturing the views of regulated parties, NGOs, and the general public on this private governance experiment. Our data provide important new insights into the practical effectiveness of Europe's laws enabling private environmental enforcement, its (intended and unintended) effects on farmers' compliance decisions in the vital area of nature conservation, and how law might be used to stimulate pro-environmental predispositions.     

Disaggregating public-private governance interactions: European Union interventions in transnational private sustainability governance

Transnational private sustainability governance, such as eco-certification, does not operate in a regulatory or jurisdictional vacuum. A public authority may intervene in private governance for various reasons, including to improve private governance's efficient functioning or to assert public regulatory primacy. This article argues that to properly understand the nature of public-private governance interactions—whether more competitive or complementary—we need to disaggregate a public authority's intervention. The article distinguishes between four features of private governance in which a public authority can intervene: standard setting, procedural aspects, supply chain signaling, and compliance incentives. Using the cases of the European Union's policies on organic agriculture and biofuels production, the article shows that public-private governance interaction dynamics vary across these private governance features as well as over time. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the importance of active lobbying by private governance actors in influencing these dynamics and the resulting policy outputs.     

The Concept of the Supremacy of the Constitution

The article compares and assesses the idea of the supremacy of the constitution found in Germany with the competing British tradition of parliamentary sovereignty. It concludes by examining the need for a supreme constitutional law in the European Union.