Fast Fashion, Slow Transition
In the new ultra-fast fashion era, garment production cycles are accelerated to new heights, while the quality of the garments deteriorates. Key characteristics of the industry are its reliance on cheap manufacturing, overconsumption and short-lived garment use. This blog post will set out who is responsible for the protection of human rights from climate change within the textile industry. In a second step, this blog post aims to analyse the EU Strategy, focusing on the intersection between environmental and social rights in the textile industry.
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Intellectual Property and the Human Right to a Healthy Environment
With the effects of climate change escalating, there has been a notable increase in discussions about the, at first glance, not obvious impact of IP protection on environmental sustainability. At the same time, considerations of human and fundamental rights in the context of IP protection are increasingly shaping the legal discourse. Given these two major trends in IP law – growing attention to environmental sustainability as well as to human and fundamental rights – it seems that the time is ripe to explore what the human right to a healthy environment might mean for IP.
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Omnipresent History
Present-time politics are, to an unprecedented extent, shaped by struggles over how to remember the past: Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine is led in the name of history; Germany’s wrestling with the war in Gaza is largely determined by its memory of the Holocaust, to give just two examples. However, historical narratives have not only swept into politics, but also into law.
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“This Is Not a Foreign Agents Law”
On Tuesday, 12 December 2023, the Commission adopted its long-awaited Defence of Democracy package, which includes a Proposal for a Directive on Transparency of Interest Representation on behalf of Third Countries. Dubravka Šuica, Commissioner for Democracy and Demography seemed eager to clarify what the Directive is not. Šuica emphasised that the Directive “is not a foreign agents law”. But the more a statement is repeated, the less credible it appears. Rather, the opposite appears to be true. And so, the devil is not in the name, it lies in enforcement. Despite the Commission’s assertion that full harmonisation of the Directive prevents Member States from gold-plating or potentially worse activities, the Commission has limited control over how Member States apply and enforce their national laws. This is the biggest risk of the proposal.
Continue reading >>Taking Revenge for Dissent
Hungary’s latest judicial reform in May 2023 came in response to EU decisions to suspend the country’s access to funds due to serious rule of law concerns. The reform aimed, among other things, to strengthen the independence of the Kúria, the Supreme Court of Hungary. Experience to date shows that while on the level of formal legal rules, some improvements towards the rule of law have been made, in actual daily practice, the opposite is happening: While steps have been taken to restore the independence of the Kúria, the Chief Justice is working on further eroding the independence of individual judges.
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