Realizing EU ETS Monitoring and Compliance in Poland

 The success of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) as a whole depends on proper national monitoring and compliance mechanisms in each of the 31 participating States. This article will focus on the legal and practical realization of an EU ETS monitoring and compliance system in Poland - being one of the EU member States where the gradual realization of the EU ETS system is meeting strong political resistance.  Keywords: EU Emissions Trading System, Poland, monitoring, compliance, legal implementation

Stateless Indigenous People(s): The Right to a Nationality, Including Their Own

According to the 2007 UN Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples, every indigenous individual has the right to a nationality. The present paper focuses on the right to a nationality as a ‘gateway’ to the recognition of a plurality of other rights. Doing so, two issues are given special attention: 1) the lack of adequate birth registration and the consequences of this ‘false start’ for other rights, such as, again, the right to a nationality. 2) The recognition of indigenous identity papers: while regularly Indigenous Peoples do not want to establish an independent sovereign State, many of them strive for the recognition of their own Indigenous identity papers. The paper discusses some of the advantages and consequences thereof

Bottom up ethics - neuroenhancement in education and employment

Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette experiment that was administered to representative samples of 1000 respondents in the ten countries and the United States. The experiment investigated how the gender of the protagonist, his or her level of performance, the efficacy of the enhancer and the mode of enhancement affected support for neuroenhancement in both educational and employment contexts. Of these, higher efficacy and lower performance were found to increase willingness to support enhancement. A series of commonly articulated claims about the individual and societal dimensions of neuroenhancement were derived from the public engagement activities. Underlying these claims, multivariate analysis identified two social values. The Societal/Protective highlights counter normative consequences and opposes the use enhancers. The Individual/Proactionary highlights opportunities and supports use. For most respondents these values are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that for many neuroenhancement is viewed simultaneously as a source of both promise and concern