Since the EU Directive (EC) No 128/2009 (SUD) was approved by the European Parliament, the establishment of a general framework aimed at securing the sustainable use of pesticides was laid down, and European Union (EU) Member States adopted National Action Plans in accordance with this Directive. Specifically, for EU Member States, pesticides, objectives and quantitative targets were created. Therefore, the EU Commission provided a methodology for risk assessment as the derivation of two harmonised risk indicators: HRI_1 and HRI_2. The present study focuses on HRI_1, as this can be implemented at the country level. Each EU Member State delivers annual harmonised risk indicators values to the Commission based on calculations using their own data and results. However, only the EU Commission can derive this HRI_1 (concatenated) indicator at the EU level. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to shed some light on the modus operandi used by the EU Commission to compile this HRI_1, and it also aims to clarify these calculations. Data originating from twenty-seven EU Member States were analysed. These data were compared to data published on the EU Commission website over time. Possible virtual developments including the modification and evolution of active substance statuses are envisaged.

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.

Socioeconomic disadvantages are amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic all over the world. Public actions and omissions severely affect the poor, alongside their precarious living, health and working conditions. As we slowly prepare for the aftermath of the pandemic, thanks to the progression of vaccination, especially in developed countries, certain measures taken in this context, more specifically the “vaccination certificates”, are likely particularly to affect the poor, who usually also belong to other vulnerable groups such as ethnic minorities or single parents, and could eventually constitute for them a state of permanent quarantine. In this contribution, I argue that COVID-19 vaccination certificates are a slippery slope towards exclusion and stigmatisation of the poor through a bureaucratic system based on privileges that raises important questions in light of the fundamental rights of the people who reside at society’s margins, struggling to conform to the “phantom of normalcy”.

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.

On 20 July 2016, a new legal framework comes into effect for the so-called “food for specific groups”, established by Regulation (EU) No. 609/2013 on food intended for infants and young children, food for special medical purposes, and total diet replacement for weight control (hereinafter, FSG Regulation). The FSG Regulation repeals Directive 2009/39/EC on foodstuffs intended for particular nutritional uses (hereinafter, the PARNUTS Directive). Food intended for sportspeople placed on the market will be affected by the repeal of the PARNUTS Directive as such food has not been included in the FSG Regulation's scope and will have to comply with general EU food law from 20 July 2016. This has a major impact on compositional requirements, product names and claims made on such food. Inter alia, the possibility to make so-called “suitability statements” on food intended for sportspeople, which currently does give manufacturers some margin to make statements that some consider as something similar to claims, is likely to be controversial without the PARNUTS Directive.

The EU institutions and agencies have become increasingly involved in enforcing EU law directly vis-à-vis private actors. A number of such EU entities have also acquired the so-called emergency powers, which allow interference with the legal position of a private party. Given the lack of research in this area, the question that this article addresses is whether relevant safeguards have been introduced to ensure the rule of law in such situations to prevent the abuse of executive discretion by public authorities. What are the relevant safeguards in the emergency in the EU in the first place? Having analysed relevant EU legislation and case law, the article offers a complete overview of all the existing EU entities with the emergency powers and shows a great diversity in the extent to which the EU legislator has regulated procedural safeguards in relevant law. The article discusses what safeguards need to be ensured in an emergency and argues for clarity of legislative frameworks in this respect.

District Court of The Hague, 24 June 2015, The Urgenda Foundation v. The Netherlands, ECLI:NL:RBDHA:2015:7145

The Dutch State has to ensure that the Dutch emissions in the year 2020 will be at least 25% lower than those in 1990.

The parties agree that the severity and scope of the climate problem make it necessary to take measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Based on the State's current policy, the Netherlands will achieve a reduction of 17% at most in 2020, which is below the norm of 25% to 40% for developed countries deemed necessary in climate science and international climate policy.

With this order, the court has not entered the domain of politics. The court must provide legal protection, also in cases against the government, while respecting the government's scope for policymaking. For these reasons, the court should exercise restraint and has limited therefore the reduction order to 25%, the lower limit of the 25%-40% norm.

The technical, natural science-based approach, with a focus on the likelihood of possible consequences and damage potential, has been adapted to deal with risks, such as genetically modified organisms, or newly synthesised materials, which cannot be managed merely by existing technocratic procedures. For a number of years already, professional risk assessment and management communities have advocated for a change, claiming that major controversies, crises and scandals around food, environmental health and technological innovations have necessitated a reshaping of traditional risk regulation towards a more integrative risk governance.1 In this approach risk experts, policy-makers, stakeholders and civil society organisations (CSOs) are working together towards identifying risks, generating and evaluating options, and coming to a strategy. This is reflected, for example, in the analytic-deliberative approach embodied in the modified IRGC Risk Governance Framework2 that includes concern assessment in parallel with the more conventional risk assessment. Decision-makers need to understand the nature and strengths of societal concerns and consider them alongside more technical recommendations for action. The ideas by the IRGC have a social science basis, but more or less at the same time in the natural science oriented risk assessment community comparable ideas and concepts have been developed. From the 1990s onwards, the US-based National Research Council (NRC) published several reports on how risk assessments should remain credible and authoritative in times of scientific uncertainty and strong competing interests.3 In 2005, the “European” International Risk Governance Council published their white paper, which addressed similar challenges. In this article we focus on the IRGC risk governance framework.4

Despite the popularity of risk governance frameworks amongst scholars and policy-makers, there has been little research done that shows how major institutes for risk research and assessment try to implement the underlying risk governance principles. This is surprising, since such institutes are necessary actors in this process. New technologies show opportunities, but also raise a number of risk-related social, economic and political issues. The governance of these risks is a challenge: the stakeholders and public involved hold vested positions; values are at stake; and the science is complex, uncertain or even incomplete. Yet, the expectations of policy-makers that institutes for risk research and assessment can adequately deal with these risks are often high. On the one hand, it is acknowledged that these risks can be complex, uncertain or ambiguous and need approaches in line with risk governance principles; on the other hand these institutes are also expected to deliver clear and unambiguous answers.5 Operating within this precarious field of tension, the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) has become an important actor in the implementation of risk governance principles in the Netherlands. The institute has an open attitude towards risk governance principles and new approaches, and has been at the forefront in supporting the Dutch government in developing its national risk governance strategy.6 Moreover, RIVM has its own strategic research budget, from which projects can be funded in which risk researchers and staff members can experiment in ways to translate risk governance principles into practice.

In this article, we want to shed more light on the process of applying risk governance principles in an institutional setting like the RIVM. The importance of the institutional context has already been addressed by Renn and Walker,7 but only in conceptual terms. Boholm, Corvellec, and Karlsson8 have given a more descriptive perspective on day-to-day risk governance in institutional settings. In a similar way, we investigate actual dealings with risk issues as they unfold in the RIVM context.

Most European countries’ constitutional obligations guarantee and protect public security and fundamental rights. One aspect and often a prerequisite for the protection of public security and individual rights is the protection of critical infrastructure (CIP). CIP is of great importance in Switzerland, which is inevitable in an economically and technologically sophisticated and densely populated country.

Responding to the need to make democratic governance more anticipatory, during recent decades parliaments have increasingly made efforts to involve elected legislators directly in addressing future risks and envisioning long-term developments. At the level of general democratic-institutional principles, engaging legislators in national-level foresight is expected to enhance the general legitimacy of future-regarding policymaking almost automatically by broadening the scope of democratic actors involved in policy work. However, even the basic mechanisms through which the impact of legislature-based foresight activities could traverse to policymaking remain largely uncharted and unknown. To develop a preliminary framework for detecting and comparing such mechanisms, we draw from the experiences of the most institutionalised and influential legislature-based foresight unit, the Committee for the Future in the Finnish Eduskunta. We extract three general mechanisms through which parliamentary future committees could make a valuable contribution to national-level strategic foresight: (1) they can improve the quality of future-regarding policymaking by broadening and consolidating national foresight “ecosystems”; (2) they can strengthen the transparency and accountability of the foresight work of political executives; and (3) they can enhance the legitimacy of anticipatory governance by connecting broader democratic publics to foresight work through more inclusive participatory processes.

The European Commission’s 2020 draft Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability set the ambitious goal of achieving a “Toxic-Free Environment”. Those ambitions were harshly criticised by a team based in Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (or BfR); they claimed that toxicological risks from chemicals had already been minimised and were optimally regulated. This paper outlines evidence to support the Commission’s implication that the European Union’s chemicals regulatory regime is suboptimal. It also criticises the BfR team’s contentions by reference to empirical findings (eg concerning tumours, congenital anomalies and the toxicity of mixtures) and by disentangling their conceptual confusions.

The global obesity epidemic was in focus at the 7th Summer Academy on Global Food Law and Policy in Gexco/Bilbao in July 2015. It approached this accelerating public health concern from the angle of risk regulations as linked to processing, trade, marketing and choice/consumption of foodstuffs, addressing also risks of negative impacts on public health at the consumer end. A wealth of expertise enlightened participants about current developments regarding EU and US legislation on risk assessments and risk management.