Courts, Security and Trust This article investigates the relationship between trust, security and the judiciary in Romania. Following the democratic transition and European Union (EU) membership, the Romanian legal system faced two crucial tasks: dealing with the past through means of transitional justice, such as lustration (vetting), and dealing with the future through anti-corruption measures that were to strengthen the rule of law and enable economic development. In dealing with both tasks, the Romanian judiciary was essential in making far-reaching decisions whose consequences went far beyond the legal system. In this article, the author examines some of the implications of the decisions in these two areas for the levels of trust within the judiciary and trust in the judiciary.

How Much Trust in Times of Distrust: National Courts, the ECJ and Criminal Cooperation in an Era of Rule-of-Law Backsliding Trust is an essential prerequisite for cooperation between EU Member States and EU institutions and between the Member States. This is especially evident in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). It is undisputable that national courts play a pivotal role in the EU legal order and that their role has become increasingly more prominent in the AFSJ, especially when it comes to the balancing of protection of fundamental rights with the principle of mutual trust. It is in this field that it has become clear that the quality of the rule of law in one EU Member State has strong implications and affects the rule of law and fundamental rights protection in other Member States. In this context, Polish judges sent numerous preliminary references asking the ECJ whether judicial independence is still guaranteed in Poland. Similarly, national courts in other Member States, such as the Netherlands or Ireland, referred multiple questions to Luxembourg in essence asking various times whether the automaticity required by the principle of mutual trust can be maintained in the EU in the light of rule-of-law backsliding and erosion of judicial independence. In this article two different dimensions of trust – that is, the principle of mutual trust and the trust of national courts in the ECJ – are combined to address the question of the extent to which national courts trust the ECJ in relation to preliminary rulings that affect the operation of the principle of mutual trust with respect to the independence of the judiciary.

In (Our) Courts We Trust! Capturing the Dynamics of Trust and Distrust in the Constitutional Judiciary in Poland Under PiS Hybrid Rule The year 2015 marked a profound turn in Poland’s constitutional landscape. Under PiS rule, the country experienced the implementation of highly controversial reforms reorganising the Constitutional Tribunal, Supreme Court and, eventually, the judiciary as a whole. Despite domestic protests and international criticism, for several years the then-ruling party managed to maintain public support, most ostensibly reflected in the 2019 election’s results. The situation radically changed in late 2020, when PiS experienced a 10-point drop in ratings and, importantly, never managed to regain their popularity levels. From that juncture, one could observe one more phenomenon – a rapid decrease in support and trust in the then-already-reorganised Constitutional Tribunal. These shifts in societal attitudes most vividly coincided with one significant event: the Tribunal’s ruling on the termination of pregnancy on the ground of fatal foetal abnormality. Against this background, this article explores a relatively overlooked topic of trust dynamics within hybrid regimes. By using the Polish Tribunal as a testing ground, it reflects on the variability of public trust under PiS rule. By comparing two case studies – the capture of the Tribunal (2015-2016) and 2020 ruling on pregnancy termination grounds – we investigate how PiS tried to manipulate trust and distrust in judiciary in general and in the Tribunal in particular. In this vein, we apply McKnight and Chervany’s conceptualisation. Secondly, we discuss how the public trust in the Tribunal actually shifted and the factors that might have influenced that change, contrary to the former rulers’ wishes.

Plant Blindness and the Law on International Trade in Wildlife While habitat destruction threatens other-than-human life across the planet, overexploitation and illegal trade are the second leading source of threats to wildlife. ‘Wildlife’ though predominantly is taken to mean other-than-human animals, and plants are largely overlooked or ignored even though they are critical to human societies and the health of the planet. Adopting a green criminological analysis, this article provides evidence that legislation governing wildlife use and protection is speciesist and ‘plant blind’. Through a content analysis of 185 countries’ wildlife trade legislation, we find that not all legislation includes plants and that in some legislation different species of plants are regarded differently. This means that there are gaps in the framework of legal protection for some plants, which can have real-world consequences. For instance, lack of protection can lead to reduced conservation for exploited plants, which in turn can increase the loss of biodiversity and further threaten ecosystem health and planetary well-being. Legislative and societal plant blindness needs to be challenged and overturned to help stop the biodiversity crisis.

Valuing Environmental Damages: Fundamental Issues and Methods Ecological destruction is one of the greatest challenges of our times. When it is human-based and directly caused by risky activities, liability can play a role in addition to all other regulatory and market-based tools. From a legal perspective, liability primarily aims for victim compensation, whereas, from an economic perspective, its main goal is deterrence. This can be achieved by inducing potential polluters to invest in care (ex ante) in order to minimise expected losses (ex post). Yet, several issues might undermine the possibility to achieve either compensation or deterrence. The aim of this article is to examine how different methods of damage assessment in litigation can enhance or undermine the goal of environmental liability from an economic perspective. More precisely, the overarching research question is whether the available methods of damage assessment are likely to pursue deterrence in an efficient manner. The article is thus structured in the following way. First, the theory of tort law and economics is reviewed to explain how damages should be theoretically assessed to achieve deterrence. Secondly, drawing on the scholarship of environmental economics, advantages, drawbacks and practical use of traditional methods of environmental damage assessment are illustrated. Lastly, conclusions will be drawn based on the comparison of these methodologies in view of providing judges with a cost-effective and ‘on average’ accurate valuation technique, taking also into account the recent ecosystem service approach to damage assessment.

EU Competition Law and Sustainability EU competition law potentially has a role to play in the pursuit of sustainability goals and the fight against climate change. The need to interpret the EU competition law provisions in a manner consistent with the sustainability objectives that the EU is committed to – the sustainable development goals (SDGs), and the EU Green Deal and derived policies – is emphasised in this article. While agreements between competitors are generally prohibited by Article 101 TFEU, cooperation agreements among market actors pursuing sustainability objectives (sustainability agreements) might in certain situations fall under the cartel exception of Article 101(3) TFEU. In recent years, there have been numerous calls to clarify conditions under which sustainability agreements can be allowed under EU competition law, especially under Article 101(3) TFEU, and there is a heated debate among academics, national competition authorities (NCAs) and the European Commission. After questioning whether the objectives and measures of the agreements are being properly assessed with the current trends (for example, with the willingness-to-pay method), this article will add to the debate another possibility involving a broad interpretation of Article 101(3) TFEU under which the pursuit of sustainability agreements will be facilitated. Such a possibility will largely depend on the objectives of the agreements themselves and may allow a proper consideration of the objectives of a sustainability agreement for certain cases, by focusing on agreements that pursue pre-established objectives derived from international or national standards or concrete policy objectives that are not previously mandatory for the companies involved.

Environment Tax Law to Save the Planet? The EU and Member States of the EU have introduced a number of new fiscal policy measures aimed to combat climate change in the past three years and will introduce more in the coming three years, including but not limited to (national) carbon taxes, airport taxes, plastic taxes, and likely a carbon border adjustment tax and taxation of aircraft fuels. To what extent can measures of fiscal nature standalone aid in preventing climate change in the EU by changing producer’s or consumer’s behaviour? Or in other words: could Environmental Tax Law Save the Planet?

National Security Review of Foreign Investment in China China formally adopted its national security review regime of foreign investment in 2011, which has been updated by the ‘Measures for National Security Review of Foreign Investment’ in 2020. The review mechanism has been developed in the context of China’s attempt at, and practice of, a radical reform of its foreign direct investment (FDI) regulatory regime at large and market access liberalisation in particular, inter alia, a transition from the previous case-by-case review of all foreign investment to currently a principled national treatment in the pre-establishment phase. As a result, the regulatory system has evolved from a generic and catch-all review, to all foreign investment based on implicit and unspecified regulatory objectives, to a review only towards those foreign investment projects that may pose a threat to national security, thus showing more deference to the rule of law. However, this transformation is accompanied by residual ambiguities and vagueness in the current national security review system, some of which may seriously impede an effective enforcement of the review system or give leeway for circumvention of the review. To that end, revision proposals are provided in this article to further clarify the law in order to reduce those procedural ambiguities that go against the fundamental principles of the rule of law.

Exchange of Information, Tax Confidentiality, Privacy and Data Protection from an EU Perspective The call for more transparency in the (tax) world can hardly be overstated. One of the most prominent ways to achieve tax transparency is the exchange of information between countries. Achieving a proper balance between the exchange of information, tax confidentiality and privacy is however quite a challenge. In this article, the authors investigate some of these challenges. For the purposes of this contribution, confidentiality means that the information exchanged is used and disclosed only in accordance with the legal basis on which it was exchanged, while privacy focuses on the right to respect private life and communications, as well as the protection of personal data. More specifically, the authors elaborate on the question as to what extent do the international and European data exchange obligations deserve particular attention in the light of the privacy provisions of Article 8 ECHR and Articles 7 and 8 Charter, when it comes to the use of information for non-tax purposes, the provision to other (Member) States and the exchange of information concerning legal entities.