Investment arbitration is based on international agreements and operates in parallel to the EU legal and judicial system. Therefore conflicts between EU law and investment protection are possible. These may result from the substantial investment protection standards, but also from the operation of a parallel system of judicial protection. The EU law position on such conflicts will depend on whether the investment agreement was concluded between Member States, between Member States and other countries, or between the EU and other countries.

This article analyses the recent reform to the EU’s genetically modified organisms (GMO) regime which allows Member States to restrict the cultivation of GMO on their territory for reasons that do not relate to issues of health and safety or the environment. By allowing for national differentiation – although on legally questionable grounds – new Article 26b of Directive 2001/18/EC has been presented as a solution to overcome the impasse in GMO decision-making. However, this article finds that the reform fails to provide a solution for the EU regime’s most pressing problem, namely its disregard for scientific uncertainty and disagreement.

The EU’s openness towards stakeholders is central to the legitimacy of its law-making. With the rapid globalisation of EU legislative activities, openness towards actors from third countries requires analysis. With reference to the notion of ‘lobbying’, this article outlines a framework for identifying the role of third country actors in EU policy processes. The two arguments brought forward suggest that third country lobbying is facilitated by the openness of Union law- and policy-making, and that third country actors contribute to EU decision-making at all stages. The article concludes with a set of questions that third country lobbying raises concerning the EU’s legitimate law-making authority in Europe and beyond.

The European Council emerged as the dominant institution in the special legislative procedure that led to the adoption of the European Union’s Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) Regulation for 2014–20, even though it is not mentioned in Article 312(2) TFEU as an actor in the procedure and Article 15(1) TEU states that it ‘shall not exercise legislative functions’. This article assesses the role played by the European Council in the MFF process for 2014–20 in light of the post-Lisbon Treaties and draws attention to the legal ambiguities that persist, as well as the practical challenges that will face the other Union institutions, notably the European Parliament, in seeking to counter that dominance in future MFF procedures.

Here I reflect on the role of subjective or intentional elements in EU economic law prohibitions, particularly in relation to rules concerning public administration. From a normative perspective, it is desirable to suppress the need for an assessment of subjective intent and to proceed with an objectified enforcement of such prohibitions. With this in view, I consider public procurement and Member State aid rules as two examples of areas of EU economic law subjected to interpretative and enforcement difficulties due to the introduction – sometimes veiled – of subjective elements in their main prohibitions. I establish parallels with other areas of EU economic law – such as antitrust, non-discrimination law and the common agricultural policy – and seek benchmarks to support the main thesis that such intentional elements need to be ‘objectified’, so that EU economic law can be enforced against the public administration to an adequate standard of legal certainty. This mirrors the development of the doctrine of abuse of EU law, where a similar ‘objectification’ in the assessment of subjective elements has taken place.

I draw on the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union to support such ‘objectification’ and highlight how the Court has been engaging in such interpretative strategy for some time. The paper explores the interplay between this approach and more general protections against behaviour of the public administration in breach of EU law: the right to good administration in Article 41 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the doctrine of State liability for infringement of EU law. I conclude with the normative recommendation that the main prohibitions of EU economic law should be free from subjective elements focused on the intention of the public administration.

The concept of a European prosecution service operating within a single legal area as proposed by the 1997 Corpus Juris study aimed to tackle impediments to the prosecution of budgetary fraud cases in the transnational context. Subsequent compromises shifted the focus of negotiations from creating a European prosecution service with uniform powers to the integration thereof into the divergent national legal systems. This paper analyses relevant documents up to the draft endorsed by the 2015 Luxembourg Presidency and concludes that the scene is set for autonomous and binding Union decisions to prosecute budgetary fraud at national level. Nonetheless, the low-level of Europeanisation coupled with an increasingly complex model and no real scheme to tackle the fragmentation of national criminal laws fail to enable effective and consistent prosecutions of EU budgetary fraud.

This article examines the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, in order to assess the effectiveness of the remedies provided and procedures followed by the Immovable Property Commission (IPC), a mechanism that was established by Turkey in order to remedy displaced Greek Cypriots. It recommends changes for the improvement of the IPC and argues that with their adoption, the Commission could act as a blueprint for the establishment of similar remedying bodies in other frozen conflicts as well. Such institutions are not only important in terms of states’ compliance with their human rights obligations, but can also contribute to the resolution of the underlying conflict itself.

The EU’s current renewable energy legislation sets a binding EU target for renewables as a share of overall energy consumption, allied with binding national targets for renewables as well. Yet the precise implications of having imposed such ‘mandatory’ binding targets have received little attention to date. This contribution examines the history and evolution of such targets, the context within which they must be pursued and applied, and some of the problems in and prospects for their enforcement and effectiveness. Comparisons are drawn with other areas of EU law where appropriate and some tentative lessons learned, as well as challenges still to be faced, are offered by way of conclusion.

This article analyses the interaction between the application of mutual recognition in criminal matters and the right to liberty. The main argument is that the current content of the right to liberty in EU law is unsuitable for mutual recognition procedures. As for the structure of this article, firstly, the main features of mutual recognition as a method of inter-state cooperation in criminal matters are outlined. Secondly, the approach of the European Union (especially the Court of Justice) to the right to liberty is clarified. Thirdly, four mutual recognition instruments are analysed in light of the right to liberty: namely, the Framework Decisions on the European Arrest Warrant; the Transfer of Prisoners; the Probation Measures; and the European Supervision Order (ESO). The assessment confirms that the higher level of automaticity in judicial cooperation introduced by mutual recognition requires a rethink of the existing understanding of the right to liberty in EU law.

This paper analyses how the Court of Justice of the European Union resolves conflicting situations surrounding intellectual property rights (IPR). More specifically, it looks into how it approaches clashes of IPR with other fundamental rights and economic freedoms and with what consequences. Building upon previous literature, I advance the argument that the resolution of the conflict, by means of the proportionality interest-balancing exercise, pursues a pro-harmonisation agenda not only in the obvious context of free movement, but also in the setting of fundamental rights. I show that the recent Coty Germany ruling is likely to accelerate this trend because of its recognition of positive obligations of the Member States in the context of fundamental rights. It is argued that this could also be used by national courts to improve an existing IPR framework, in particular by filing preliminary references that question legislators’ choices such as non-implementation of permissible exceptions and limitations. After highlighting the importance of maintaining a separation between different policy levels (secondary law vs Charter), I outline why Coty Germany is a very worrying reading of Article 17(2) of the EU Charter, and suggest that this could be remedied by synchronising its interpretation with the Court’s doctrine of ‘specific subject matter’ in the context of free movement.

While ideas on ‘earned citizenship’ have been around in discussions on the coexistence of freedom of movement and nationally-bounded welfare states in the European Union, both the concept and the process it entails have hardly been explored in connection to EU (case) law. This contribution identifies earned citizenship as a technique of government in the broader political strategy of neoliberal communitarianism, requiring Union citizens to ‘earn’ access to the welfare system through an emphasis on their individual responsibility to fulfil the economic, social and cultural conditions of membership. Analysing economically inactive Union citizens’ access to social assistance benefits, it argues that earned citizenship has been visible since the Court’s early citizenship jurisprudence, but has been reconstructed with the recent Dano-line of case law.