Member States may impose additional criteria in reserving the right to participate in public procurement to particular sheltered workshops, provided that they comply with the principles of equal treatment and proportionality.

Internal EU Case. Appeal against disciplinary pension deduction dismissed.

Third-country nationals with a single work permit obtained in Italy are entitled to childbirth and maternity allowances.

In a decision of 16 June 2021 (6 AZR 390/20 (A)), the German Federal Labour Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht, ‘BAG’) referred a question to the ECJ for a preliminary ruling that has been a controversial issue in Germany for some time. The question is whether the possibility of a permanent supply of temporary workers, which is referred to as ‘personnel supply’ (Personalgestellung) in the context of the collective agreement for the public sector, and the exemption from the scope of the German Temporary Employment Act (Arbeitnehmerüberlassungsgesetz, ‘AÜG’) pursuant to Section 1(3) No. 2b AÜG, which allows this provision in the collective agreement, violates the provisions of Directive 2008/104/EC on temporary agency work (the ‘Temporary Agency Work Directive’). Depending on the outcome of the ECJ’s decision, this could have a significant impact on staff leasing often practised in companies operating in the public sector.

The Commission is not bound to give effect to the social partners’ request seeking implementation, at EU level, of the agreement that they have concluded.

The ‘clinic’ has developed sophisticated systems for responding to the challenge of serious mental health conditions. Mental health services combine hierarchical decision-making processes, with clear medical authority, with interventions that are required to be evidence-based to the highest standard. This is a system in which ethical, defensible practice is imperative to protect the public and to protect practitioners from legal liability in the event of adverse outcomes. Restorative justice interventions are powerful ‘medicine’. At their best, they change lives. However, the evidence base for formal restorative justice interventions when ‘administered’ to people with severe mental health difficulties is almost non-existent. It is into this relative vacuum of empirical support that initial steps are being taken to formalise access to restorative justice for mental health populations. This article will consider the challenges for applications of restorative justice in mental health settings and how the gap between the principle of equality of access and actual practice could be conceptualised and bridged. Recommendations include a rigorous commitment to meeting the needs of victims; a focus on the mental health patient’s capacity to consent rather than the capacity to benefit; practice-based evidence development and the inclusion of restorative justice awareness in all mental health practitioner training.

A stand-by shift with a required response within two minutes makes a break qualify as working time.

From the global pandemic to the Black Lives Matter, the Me Too/Times Up and Indigenous reconciliation and decolonisation movements, the systemic and structural failures of current social institutions around the world have all been brought to our collective consciousness in poignant, painful and urgent ways. The need for fundamental social and systemic transformation is clear. This challenge is central to the work of dealing with the past in countries undergoing transition and in established democracies confronting deep structural inequalities and injustices. Rooted in lessons from the application of restorative justice across these contexts, this article suggests that grounding restorative justice as a relational theory of justice is key to understanding and realising the potential of a restorative approach for transformation. It also explores the implications of this transformative imperative for the growth and development of restorative justice

COVID-19 has hit many countries all over the world, and its impact on (party) politics has been undeniable. This crisis situation functions as an opportunity structure incentivising opposition forces to support the government. Not much is known about what drives opposition parties to (not) support the government in crisis situations. This article integrates the literature on rally-around-the-flag, political opportunity structures, party types and party goals. More specifically, we focus on the behaviour of opposition parties towards the government’s crisis response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyse whether and how the party type influences the position of the party vis-à-vis the governmental coalition, focusing on the case of Belgium. We categorise the seven opposition parties in Belgium as challenger or mainstream parties and explain their behaviour on the basis of policy-, office- or vote-seeking motives. Our analysis is based on party voting behaviour, elite interviews and an analysis of the main plenary debates.

Many questions facing legal scholars and practitioners can be answered only by analysing and interrogating large collections of legal documents: statutes, treaties, judicial decisions and law review articles. I survey a range of novel techniques in machine learning and natural language processing – including topic modelling, word embeddings and transfer learning – that can be applied to the large-scale investigation of legal texts