This article offers some general thoughts on the rule of law in international economic law. It begins by briefly defining the rule of law and indicating the legal sources on which it is based. It then shows that the TFEU, confirmed by the case law of the Court of Justice, requires the rule of law to be respected in the conduct of the Union’s commercial policy. However, although the rule of law may be favourable to international trade and investment, it is not indispensable to them. The rule of law is conducive, but not essential, to trade and investment. For businesses, the risks associated with a weak respect for the rule of law represent a cost, which they take into account when setting the price of their products. Finally, it should be remembered that the principles of the rule of law do not apply in the same way in the domestic sphere as in international law. This article is intended as a panoramic introduction to the relationship between the rule of law and international economic law. More specialised studies are published later in this issue, including analyses focusing on trade or investment or national perspectives, such as that of China.

Since its inception, the inter-state dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organisation has generally been praised for effectively protecting the rule of law in international trade relations. While the relatively recent dismantling of this system does not necessarily mean the end of the WTO nor of the binding nature of its rules, the current crisis may be a good opportunity to reconsider the role of the rule of law in international trade relations and the ways in which it could further be accommodated. One suggestion, occasionally raised in the past, would be strengthening the enforcement of WTO rules by opening it to private action, either before national courts or through international adjudication. After all, the latter has been widely available to foreign investors covered by thousands of international investment agreements in force for decades. This contribution recalls the reasons behind the current lack of private enforcement of WTO law and argues that developments in international trade relations and experiences with investor-state dispute settlement are likely to work against rather than in favor of its introduction in the foreseeable future. Increased transparency and institutionalisation of non-state actors’ role in trade enforcement is therefore recommended instead.

The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement) disciplines WTO Members’ health regulations to prevent their misuse for protectionist purposes. In doing so, its obligations reflect several elements of the rule of law, including legal certainty, non-arbitrariness and non-discrimination, as well as a recognition of the rights of individuals. Through its obligations of non-discrimination, transparency and scientific justification and the scope it leaves for Members to prioritise the protection of health over trade liberalisation, the SPS Agreement can be regarded as entailing a rule-of-law approach. However, cognisant of the limits to the rule of law when transposed to the international level, it is important to avoid an overly “judicialised” approach to the disciplines of the SPS Agreement, and in particular its reliance on scientific justification to prevent arbitrariness in sanitary and phytosanitary regulation. Otherwise, there is a risk of intruding too far into the regulatory autonomy of States, weakening the “compliance pull” of the agreement and thus inadvertently undermining the rule of law in this area. An approach that instead recognises the inherent subjectivity and uncertainty in science and respects Members’ divergent priorities in health regulation would go further in engendering support for the rules-based system of international trade.

Public and political controversies over Investor–State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) have prompted reform processes in international investment law, at bilateral, regional and multilateral levels, with different actors shaping the future of international investment governance. In its essence, the options for the ISDS reform reflect the diverging perspectives on the rule of law in international law. Ultimately, they present a choice about who should control power over States’ action in issues of public importance – the States who have created the system, or international investment tribunals who have shaped the legal development of the system. This paper considers the application of the rule of law as a normative meta-principle to international investment law and its dispute settlement, and it sheds light on different perspectives of this concept, as they shape the ongoing ISDS reform(s).

In the currently volatile global economic environment, China’s perspectives on the rule of law in international economic law are of significance. In principle, China shares developing countries’ attitudes towards international economic law. China also seeks to play a constructive role in the development of international economic law, endorsing a flexible and pragmatic approach. China has concluded international trade and investment treaties designed to constrain its policy space and is an active supporter of the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement and investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms, with a good record of compliance. Recent trade tensions demonstrate challenges for the international rule of law but also emphasise the role of law in overcoming political challenges.

Trade and sustainable development (TSD) chapters in international trade agreements include labour provisions with a view to prevent a “race to the bottom” and reaffirm the existing international labour commitments. When properly formulated and implemented, these provisions could have positive normative impacts on the international and domestic rule of law. This article provides a critical analysis of the evolution of labour standards in international trade agreements, particularly focusing on the European Union’s (EU) approach, in comparison with the approach in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). More specifically, it considers ways in which trade agreements contribute to the improvement of labour standards in domestic legal systems. While EU trade agreements embrace minimum standards under international labour law rather than higher standards that apply in the EU legal order, the article argues that there is at least a normative shift towards a more efficient implementation of labour rights through EU agreements, which could make a limited contribution to the rule of law.

International environmental law rarely refers to the rule of law. However, in fostering inter-state cooperation, international environmental agreements oblige parties to prohibit, restrict or control various activities that are harmful to the environment. The application of these constraints at the national level requires the rule of law to be taken into account.

Legal scholarship in the realm of international economic law has a blind spot: the practice of international trade. Cargo and container shipping is the blood and guts of international trade, and it is fuelled by bunker oil – a hydrocarbon mixture of the dirtiest petroleum-based products. Worryingly, there is empirical evidence of bunkers being intentionally contaminated with waste oils. This fraudulent contamination violates numerous international, national, and EU rules on waste management and poses immense risks to the health of planet and people alike. These same acts of fraud are also extremely profitable, and they facilitate the smooth functioning of our global economy. The fraud is itself not just incentivised in the tight-margins reality of international trade, but it is facilitated by the lack of proper legislation and the vulnerability of the existing means of enforcement in the areas where there is legislation to comply with. Economic operators often use falsified documents to market fuel oil that should be considered as waste. Systematic wrongdoing of this kind is detrimental to the environment and risks eroding the rule of law in both its formal and substantive conceptualisations.

This article focuses on copyright issues pertaining to generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, with particular emphasis on the ChatGPT case study as a primary exemplar. In order to generate high-quality outcomes, generative AI systems require substantial quantities of training data, which may frequently comprise copyright-protected information. This prompts inquiries into the legal principles of fair use, the creation of derivative works and the lawfulness of data gathering and utilisation. The utilisation of input data for the purpose of training and enhancing AI models presents significant concerns regarding potential violations of copyright. This paper offers suggestions for safeguarding the interests of copyright holders and competitors, while simultaneously addressing legal challenges and expediting the advancement of AI technologies. This study analyses the ChatGPT platform as a case example to explore the necessary modifications that copyright regulations must undergo to adequately tackle the intricacies of authorship and ownership in the realm of AI-generated creative content.

Not since 2018 and the “New Deal for Consumers” package has the European Union (EU) seemed so close to stepping up the enforcement of consumer protection rules. The European Commission is expected to unveil a new “consumer enforcement package” by the end of the year, which should include revisions of the Regulation on Consumer Protection Cooperation, the Directive on Consumer Alternative Dispute Resolution and the Regulation on EU Online Dispute Resolution. In parallel, the Representative Actions Directive came into force recently. This paper examines these different initiatives and assesses whether these evolutions can truly be the first steps towards a brighter future for the enforcement of consumer protection rules in the EU or whether they are likely to remain a series of missed opportunities.

This article analyses how emergency legislation has affected law-making and regulatory quality principles (RQPs) before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2021) from stakeholders’ perspectives. It takes Slovakia as a case study, as this country was considered a high performer in the adoption of RQPs before the crisis, while empirical findings suggest a subsequent decline in their use. We argue that formal RQPs are not deeply embedded and are vulnerable to crises. In doing so, we conceptually distinguish between standard (fully following the RQPs), emergency (modified to accommodate crisis) and non-standard law-making (violating formal rules and the RQPs). In the transition from a crisis to a post-crisis context, the deployment of both emergency and non-standard law-making has become relatively permanent without proper justification having been provided. This reinforces the notion that RQPs and governance legitimacy became less important for the executive than in the pre-crisis period and emergency and non-standard regulatory law-making became institutionalised as new norms of swift law-making. All of these factors prevent stakeholders from being informed and from engaging in deliberation, which jeopardises the legitimacy of post-crisis law-making governance.

Increasing interest from stakeholders has brought new focus on risk governance and risk regulation, such as the regulator’s execution of duty and tangible results on safety and environmental protection in oil and gas industry. One recent example, from 2019, is the Office of the Auditor General Norway’s (OAG) investigation of the Petroleum Safety Authority’s (PSA) follow-up on health, safety and the environment in the petroleum industry, where the regulatory regime in Norway resting on functional requirements was questioned. Simplistically speaking, there are two current traditions or main schools in regulatory regimes: use of functional requirements associated with co-regulation and use of normative requirements associated with prescriptive regulation. In this paper, we introduce a generic model from an attribute perspective on contrasting, gauging or evaluating the two different regulatory regimes. Furthermore, this approach may explain the controversy regarding the favouring of functional or prescriptive regulatory regimes by the different players in the industry. Our case is based on regulations relating to offshore oil and gas operations, in particular focusing on the Norwegian sector. We use the OAG’s investigation of the PSA and the public reaction as our material because this material is proposed to provide a thorough and valid description of how the effects of the Norwegian regulatory regime are perceived from the outside. We believe that the generic concept presented here is applicable when performing investigations in other industries involved in hazardous activities.

Until robots and humans mostly worked in fast-paced and yet separate environments, occupational health and safety (OHS) rules could address workers’ safety largely independently from robotic conduct. This is no longer the case: collaborative robots (cobots) working alongside humans warrant the design of policies ensuring the safety of both humans and robots at once, within shared spaces and upon delivery of cooperative workflows. Within the European Union (EU), the applicable regulatory framework stands at the intersection between international industry standards and legislation at the EU as well as Member State level. Not only do current standards and laws fail to satisfactorily attend to the physical and mental health challenges prompted by human–robot interaction (HRI), but they exhibit important gaps in relation to smart cobots (“SmaCobs”) more specifically. In fact, SmaCobs combine the black-box unforeseeability afforded by machine learning with more general HRI-associated risks, towards increasingly complex, mobile and interconnected operational interfaces and production chains. Against this backdrop, based on productivity and health motivations, we urge the encoding of the enforcement of OHS policies directly into SmaCobs. First, SmaCobs could harness the sophistication of quantum computing to adapt a tangled normative architecture in a responsive manner to the contingent needs of each situation. Second, entrusting them with OHS enforcement vis-à-vis both themselves and humans may paradoxically prove safer as well as more cost-effective than for humans to do so. This scenario raises profound legal, ethical and somewhat philosophical concerns around SmaCobs’ legal personality, the apportionment of liability and algorithmic explainability. The first systematic proposal to tackle such questions is henceforth formulated. For the EU, we propose that this is achieved through a new binding OHS Regulation aimed at the SmaCobs age.

This paper explores the possibility of developing a framework to assess the quality of Impact Assessments (IAs) by examining the common elements found in the existent academic literature around this concept, the stocktaking exercises carried out by the European institutions and the opinions of the Regulatory Scrutiny Board. At this intersection, we find that diversity in the interpretation and application of the guidelines is not only acceptable but also necessary in tailoring IAs to the needs they represent. Our findings are relevant because a universal framework that avoids focusing solely on assessing quality not only will provide much-needed coherence in this field but will also raise awareness about the normality of variability in the application of any European Union guidelines, thus reflecting the inherent nature of the IAs.

The recent commercial release of a new generation of chatbot systems, particularly those leveraging Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, has caught the world by surprise and sparked debate about their potential consequences for society. While concerns about the existential threat posed by these technologies are often discussed, it is crucial to shift our focus towards the more immediate risks associated with their deployment. Such risks are further compounded by the lack of proactive measures addressing users’ literacy and the for-profit model via which these chatbots are distributed. Drawing on research in computer science and other fields, this paper looks at the immediate risks triggered by these products and reflects on the role of law within a broader policy directed at steering generative artificial intelligence technology towards the common good. It also reviews the relevant amendments proposed by the European Parliament to the European Commission’s proposal for an AI Act.

The European Union (EU) increasingly develops and implements policies infused with salient and sometimes conflicting values – for instance, in migration and criminal law cooperation. However, policy implementation studies have not frequently considered how such complex value trade-offs may affect practical implementation within Member States. This article therefore quantitatively and temporally examines the practical implementation of an EU flagship criminal law measure: the simplified extradition system known as the European Arrest Warrant (EAW). Using data on EAWs decided upon by the Dutch Amsterdam District Court, we test the impact of value trade-offs by examining whether (newly introduced) safeguards for the protection of requested persons adversely affect system efficiency (measured through case turnover times). The results suggest that the design of legal tests and adjustments made to the EAW system over time through the Court of Justice of the European Union affect the balance between fundamental rights protection and efficiency in the practical implementation of the EAW.

This article explores the proposed amendments to the AI Act, which introduce the concept of “groups of persons”. The inclusion of this notion has the potential to broaden the traditional individual-centric approach in data protection. The analysis explores the context and the challenges posed by the rapid evolution of technology, with an emphasis on the role of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It discusses both the potential benefits and challenges of recognising groups of people, including issues such as discrimination prevention, public trust and redress mechanisms. The analysis also identifies key challenges, including the lack of a clear definition for “group”, the difficulty in explaining AI architecture concerning groups and the need for well-defined redress mechanisms. The article also puts forward recommendations aimed at addressing these challenges in order to enhance the effectiveness and clarity of the proposed amendments.