The Supreme Court of Lithuania recently affirmed that the courts have no competence to assess the merits of an employer’s decision to restructure and make staff redundant, as the decision was at the employer’s discretion to make.

A company’s obligation to participate in the building industry’s Social Welfare Fund did not breach the company’s right to freedom of association, nor its right to protection of property.

The Danish Supreme Court has ruled that a provision in a collective agreement allowing employers to pay reduced allowances for working in the evenings, on nights and at weekends to employees under the age of 25 in full-time education and working no more than 15 hours a week was not in conflict with the Danish Anti-Discrimination Act since it was justified by a legitimate aim.

The Employment Appeal Tribunal (‘EAT’) has upheld an Employment Tribunal’s (‘ET’s’) finding that Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’) was not engaged when an employer used private material obtained by the police during a criminal investigation as part of an internal disciplinary investigation into one of its employees. This material had been taken from the claimant’s phone by the police, who then provided it to the employer (stating that it could be used for the purposes of their investigation). The facts in this case were unusual. Whether or not an employee has a reasonable expectation of privacy in similar circumstances will depend on all the facts, including the source of the information, whether the employee has expressly objected to its use, and whether the relevant conduct took place in, or was brought into, the workplace.

The questions referred to the ECJ in this particular case on the interpretation of Clause 6(1) of the Framework Agreement on parental leave (employers must “consider and respond to” employees’ requests for changes to their working patterns) are inadmissible.

The focus in this article is the ‘criminalisation’ of youth hanging around with the emergence of bans on hanging around. A critical social constructivist approach is used in this study, which draws predominantly on qualitative primary data collected between the late 1980s and 2010s. The article compares indigenous with immigrant youth, which coincides with, respectively, youth in rural communities and youth in urban communities. This study shows that there is discrimination of immigrant youth, which is shaped by several intertwining social phenomena, such as the ‘geography of policing’ – more police in urban areas – familiarity, sharing biographical information (in smaller communities), and the character of the interaction, normalising versus stigmatising. In further research on this topic we have to study (the reaction to) the transgressions of immigrant youth, and compare it with (the reaction to) the transgressions of indigenous youth, which is a blind spot in Dutch criminology.

In 2012, China revised its Criminal Procedure Law (2012 CPL). One of the major changes is its official approval of the use of victim-offender reconciliation, or ‘criminal reconciliation’ in certain public prosecution cases. This change, on the one hand, echoes the Confucian doctrine that favours harmonious inter-personal relationships and mediation, while, on the other hand, it deviates from the direction of legal reforms dating from the 1970s through the late 1990s. Questions have emerged concerning not only the cause of this change in legal norms but also the proper position of criminal reconciliation in the current criminal justice system in China. The answers to these questions largely rely on understanding the role of traditional informal dispute resolution as well as its interaction with legal norms. Criminal reconciliation in ancient China functioned as a means to centralise imperial power by decentralizing decentralising its administration. Abolishing or enabling such a mechanism in law is merely a small part of the government’s strategy to react to political or social crises and to maintain social stability. However, its actual effect depends on the vitality of Confucianism, which in turn relies on the economic foundation and corresponding structure of society.

In today’s global economy, a noticeable trend is that the traditional state-law-centred legal framework is increasingly challenged by self-regulatory private orders. Commercial norms, commercial arbitration and social sanctions at the international level have become important alternatives to national laws, national courts and legal sanctions at the national level. Consisting of transnational commercial norms, both codified and uncodified, and legal norms, both national and international, a plural regime for the governance of transnational commercial transactions has emerged and developed in the past few decades. This article explores the interaction between various kinds of norms in this regime, identifies the effects of this interaction on the governance of transnational commercial transactions and shows the challenges to this interaction at the current stage. The central argument of this article is that the interaction between social and legal norms, namely incorporation and internalisation, and the three effects derived from incorporation and internalisation, namely systematisation, harmonisation and compliance enhancement, are evident at both the national and international levels. In particular, the emergence of codified transnational commercial norms that are positioned in the middle of the continuum between national legal norms and uncodified transnational commercial norms has brought changes to the interaction within the international dimension. Although the development of codified transnational commercial norms faces several challenges at the moment, it can be expected that these norms will play an increasingly important role in the future governance of transnational commercial transactions.

Ever since the launch of the first space object, discarded bits and pieces ranging from disused payloads and spent upper stages to single bolts and tiny flakes of paint have been cluttering outer space, making valuable and widely used orbits and trajectories to and from earth increasingly unsafe for future use. The response of the international community to this immediate threat to the sustainable use of outer space has been slow and haphazard and remains limited to non-binding guidelines and technical recommendations for space debris mitigation. Recent events such as the 2007 Chinese ASAT test and the 2009 collision between an active American and an in-operational Russian communications satellite demonstrate that more needs to be done in order to develop a strong international regime on active debris remediation. Given the complexities of these issues and the lengthy nature of international negotiations, one should not expect a comprehensive legal regime for space debris mitigation and remediation to materialize any time soon. As it is in the own interest of its users to preserve outer space for future exploration and use, the regulation of debris mitigation by space agencies may well prove a valuable alternative as a starting point for binding remediation rules. Since new international initiatives in this respect are lacking, the present article looks at the various space actors in Europe and at the role some of them may play in developing global rules of space debris remediation.

Recent and on-going efforts by individual or groups of states aim to organize parliamentary mechanisms and substantive issues concerning space law. The article addresses organizational matters of the Legal Subcommittee (LSC) of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) and particularly the debate between procedure and substance. The article enquires whether amending the parliamentary process can be expected to yield results in the absence of agreement to proceed on substantive matters. Whilst highlighting the achievements of COPUOS and its LSC in the progressive development and codification of space law, attention is paid to salient decisions concerning organizational matters, taken with respect to the COPUOS and its LSC spanning the period 1990 to 1999 and post 1999 to present. Analysis is undertaken of reasons for presumed decline, alongside current and future perspectives that shall influence COPUOS and its LSC in their respective law making functions.