Hidden Hunger in Peacetime and Wartime:Retailoring the 'Responsibility to Protect' to Food-Power Discourses in Burundi and North Korea, Between International Politics and International Law

The framework known as ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (“R2P”) has afforded legal endorsement and codification to the doctrine that States hold responsibility under public international law for the protection of their own citizens and of those who reside within their prescriptive jurisdiction. This holds true in peacetime and wartime alike, and it is shaped by an understanding of ‘security’ which increasingly calls for comprehensive and multifaceted assessments (human security) to replace the traditional ones centred on military protection. Within the human security paradigm, the right to food stands at the forefront of a reconceptualization which proceeds beyond the quantity of available (or accessible) food, up to scrutinise its nutritional value more pertinently, and human capabilities in context. ‘Hidden hunger’—the chronic insufficiency of nutrients intake thatvictimises hundreds of millions of children worldwide is currently dismayingly unaddressed in legal scholarship, despite representing a proven trigger of violent spirals which turn countries to conflict and frustrate their Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”). It is therefore essential to analyse the chances to successfully invoke the R2P framework as to intervene in countries whose ruling classes can be identified as the major cause of protracted hidden hunger (either because those regimes keep their population in a condition of civil conflict, or due to those rulers’ individual greed and unconstrained authoritarianism). The case studies of Burundi and North Korea respectively are enlightening to this end, and surprisingly illustrate that whereas, strictly legally, the R2P provides (modest) enhanced room for perpetrators accountability, its political impact restricts the options available for the international community to argue that the wilful production (or passive acceptance) of hidden hunger violates the internationally recognised ‘right to food’, and intervene accordingly whenever necessary

Precedential Value of Judicial Decisions in Increasingly Hybridised Civil Law Systems:Chinese Choreographies at the WTO

Pursuant to Article 63 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), a state may require other treaty parties to disclose their intellectual property case law ‘of general application’. While most domestic judgments in common law are indeed of general application, civil law systems theoretically employ judgments as reference only. Nevertheless, to value consistency and predictability, the hybridisation of civil law jurisdictions is increasingly leading them to devise special lists of judgments that acquire formal or factual binding status on lower-ranked courts. This trend is particularly evident in China, whose Supreme People's Court's ‘Guiding Cases’ join other specific categories of holdings within ‘Judicial Interpretations’ and further guideline documents that are factually binding domestically. When the United States and the European Union requested, through the World Trade Organization, that China disclose the full range of its case law of general application, China responded that civil law jurisdictions do not issue judgments that are binding beyond the parties. This article examines the limitations and merits of the Chinese stance

Neuroenhancement Patentability and the Boundaries Conundrum in Psychiatric Disorders

Patent offices worldwide deny patentability to innovations which stand against the ordre public: does enhancement represent a value-laden societal threat? Patent offices also reject applications for therapeutical methods: when is enhancement also a therapeutical method? One specific class of enhancers, i.e. pharmaceutical neuroenhancers, is particularly complex in this respect: certain molecules can potentially function both as treatment for neuropsychiatric disorders and as recreational enhancers for non-patients’ brain. Hence, the present work advances the debate on enhancement patentability in two directions: ratione loci, by scrutinising China’s stances on enhancement’s safety and morality, compared to the most frequently explored Western jurisdictions, namely the EU and the US; and ratione materiae, by illuminating the porous bioethical boundaries between treatment and enhancement in the domain of neuropsychiatry. It challenges patent offices’ de facto regulatory role in defining and policing citizens’ access to neuroenhancing substances through misplaced or pseudo-scientific intellectual-property narratives of innovativeness and morale

Encoding the Enforcement of Safety Standards into Smart Robots to Harness Their Computing Sophistication and Collaborative Potential:A Legal Risk Assessment for European Union Policymakers

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.<br/