European policymakers have long sought to strike an appropriate balance between supporting EU-native cultural production and pursuing the objectives of internal market harmonisation. To this end, the 2018 reform of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) introduced a set of measures for on-demand audiovisual media (VOD) providers, including catalogue quotas, prominence requirements and financial contributions. However, the coherence and effectiveness of these provisions remain highly contested. In particular, national implementations of financial obligations have produced adverse effects. They have intensified fragmentation among Member States and enabled them to prioritise domestic works over non-national European productions. Such fragmentation of the European audiovisual market will also preserve a heterogeneous ecosystem of producers, making it exceedingly difficult for a local service to scale and evolve into a pan-European platform. Consequently, despite the ambitions of EU policymakers, the emergence of European champions capable of competing with foreign players on an equal footing is likely to remain elusive. Moreover, the AVMSD rules on financial obligations create opportunities for regulatory gaming, insofar as Member States use the policy goal of fostering cultural and linguistic diversity as a convenient pretext for subsidising their local economies.

Occupational accidents impose devastating human and economic costs worldwide, yet evidence on how judicial decisions affect workplace safety remains scarce. This study provides the first causal evidence on this relationship by examining Argentina’s landmark Aquino ruling (2004), which eliminated employers’ exemption from civil liability for workplace accidents. Using an event study design with provincial panel data (1997–2021), we exploit the differential impact of increased employer liability on workplace accidents versus commuting accidents (in itinere) as our identification strategy. Results show that workplace accidents decreased significantly by 16–27% following the judicial decision, with larger reductions in provinces with higher initial number of accidents. Importantly, we find no evidence of moral hazard effects when examining accidents that are difficult to detect and verify. The findings demonstrate that judicial decisions creating immediate economic liability can generate substantial behavioral responses even in developing country contexts with limited enforcement capacity, suggesting that liability-based approaches may effectively complement traditional regulatory strategies for improving workplace safety.

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) reveal a mismatch between the EU’s individual-centric data protection shell and automated systems’ ability to affect entire groups of people, sealed within that shell. AI routinely processes data about groups, while the GDPR still allocates rights and remedies to identifiable individuals. This design produces a structural collective redress gap where injunctions may be obtained without individual mandates (GDPR Art. 80(2), RAD Art. 8), but compensation remains tied to identifiability. Here, I show how the GDPR’s model (consent, data subjects’ rights, Art. 80) fits in and why it fails against AI’s capacity to de-anonymise and infer traits about persons whose data were never collected or volunteered. I then examine the AI Act 2024/1689. Although it repeatedly refers to “groups of persons,” trilogue negotiations removed the Parliament’s key collective remedy tools, leaving only ex‑ante risk and transparency duties. The example of online behavioural advertising or affinity profiling illustrates how AI‑designed groups fall outside the scope of meaningful GDPR or AI Act remedies. I argue for a right to group protection and propose four main revisions: a definition of groups, a mechanism for a group complaint and redress, group-level impact assessment requirements and group data protection by design.

This paper examines the regulatory challenges and opportunities surrounding the introduction of autonomous inland shipping in Europe. As regulators navigate this shift, they must strike a balance between innovation, safety, legal certainty and private actors’ interests. Drawing on principles guiding innovation, such as outcome-based, risk-based and adaptive regulation, as well as the precautionary, proportionality and technological neutrality principles, the paper proposes a framework for developing regulatory responses. It also analyses the relevance of EU horizontal digital regulations, including the AI Act and the Data Act, in shaping the governance of autonomous systems in inland waterways. The paper explores how the existing divisions of regulatory competence between European institutions and river commissions may hinder harmonisation, and proposes mechanisms to improve regulatory and judicial coherence in a multilevel governance context.

Hybrid threats represent a continued challenge to the European Union, combining disinformation campaigns with cyber-attacks as a means of destabilising the Union and its Member States, undermining legitimacy and public trust. With social media platforms at the centre of disinformation efforts, as well as potential sites for cyber-attack disruption, the ability to control narratives and disseminate content are essential to hybrid threat actors. Fake Activity Markets (FAMs) are websites offering services that can be used to generate fake engagement, in turn allowing for coordinated inauthentic behaviour online. These websites also constitute a cybersecurity threat in themselves, involved in distributing malware, harvesting user data or comprising information systems. This article seeks to explore the EU approach to hybrid threats and coordinated inauthentic behaviour using FAMs as a case study, highlighting the potential threats to the EU’s social and cyber resilience posed by these actors, the potential regulatory responses, and the ways in which the von der Leyen II Commission’s renewed emphasis on hybrid threats could provide for a more robust ecosystem for countering coordinated inauthentic behaviour.

This article argues that platform capitalism generates a distinct legal problem that existing regulatory frameworks, designed to address disinformation and censorship, structurally fail to recognise: attention fragmentation. The commodification of attention produces a form of distraction that undermines the preconditions legal accountability itself depends on. Platform capitalism’s business model rewards engagement, and the dominant architectures reward a fragmented modality of engagement in particular, producing subjects who have internalised the logic of self-optimisation that Han identifies as psychopolitics. Through a theoretical genealogy from Debord’s externally imposed spectacle to Han’s psychopolitical internalisation, this article explains why distraction resists conventional legal intervention. Turning to environmental governance as a particularly stark illustration, the article reveals four structural vulnerabilities that make environmental regulation systematically susceptible to attention collapse: temporal mismatch, monitoring dependency, breakdown of accountability chains and asymmetric harm distribution. The article identifies possible policy interventions but emphasises their structural limits; legal reform cannot guarantee attention when the economic system profits from its commodification and fragmentation. The effectiveness of law in the age of platform capitalism depends on confronting the alignment between extractive capital’s interest in deregulation and platform capital’s dependence on engagement-driven fragmentation.

This paper analyses the General Court’s judgments of 25 June 2025 (RWE and Uniper) regarding the reviewability of ACER regulatory acts. The General Court endorsed a “hybrid approach,” excluding acts of general application from the jurisdiction of the Board of Appeal and subjecting them solely to judicial review under Article 263(4) TFEU. The study highlights how this interpretation creates significant procedural gaps and bureaucratic burdens for private parties. By contrasting these rulings with the more flexible standing criteria recently adopted by the Court of Justice (e.g., Nicoventures Case), the paper argues that the current framework fragments the EU system of judicial protection and undermines the principle of procedural economy in highly technical sectors.

A medicinal herbal tea classified as a traditional herbal medicinal product cannot, in principle, be marketed with the organic logo. The position may be otherwise where such an indication on the packaging has been approved by the competent authority on account of the beneficial effect of the organic production on the therapeutic characteristics of the medicinal product.