Laws doi: 10.3390/laws15020033

Authors: Jennifer Morgan

This paper analyses the existing international refugee framework in light of the emergence of alternative so-called ‘safe and legal routes’ devised by the UK government—in particular, the bespoke Ukraine visa schemes—and considers the practical implementation of a Safe Passage Visa programme in the UK. It will consider how safe routes may benefit at-risk people when provided alongside the protection afforded under the Refugee Convention. It will also evaluate the persistent failure of UK government policy that focuses on deterrent-only aims but has been unsuccessful in reducing irregular journeys to the UK. The paper will then explore the case for a ‘Safe Passage Visa’, focusing on the practical challenge of implementation and the potential impact of its development on the workings of the asylum system in the UK, including the potential reduction in irregular entry and other benefits. The paper argues that there is an imperative need to take action to safeguard and protect human lives in transit whilst asserting that this must be conducted in a way that complements and enhances the principles enshrined in the Refugee Convention.

Laws doi: 10.3390/laws15020032

Authors: William Fernando Martínez Luna Ana María Moreno Ballesteros Edgar José Ruiz Dorantes

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are transforming the commercialisation of digital art by establishing unique blockchain identifiers that ensure authenticity and certify subsequent transactions. However, the transfer of control over an NFT does not automatically include the transfer of the associated copyrights, thereby creating legal uncertainty as to what rights are actually acquired. This interdisciplinary project between engineering and law proposes the design of a smart contract, based on the ERC-721 standard, to manage the transfer of property rights linked to digital artworks represented as NFTs. The accompanying legal contract incorporates essential clauses covering the identification of the parties, a description of the artwork and its link to the token, pricing, royalties, and the terms of rights transfer. The proposal seeks to integrate blockchain technology with existing legal frameworks, offering an innovative solution that strengthens legal certainty in the transfer of copyright within digital environments.

Laws doi: 10.3390/laws15020031

Authors: Stefanie Schmahl

The interplay between the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is of particular importance, as children today make up around 41% of all refugees. The Refugee Convention grants subsidiary international protection for persons who have legally or de facto lost the protection of their home state because it either persecutes them or exposes them to persecution by non-state actors. The Convention contains various substantial guarantees for recognized refugees and persons seeking refugee status. However, it does not contain any explicit provision on refugee children. This is precisely where Article 22 CRC comes into play, which states that refugee children are entitled to “appropriate protection and humanitarian assistance”. The essay delineates the definition of what is meant by a “refugee child” in the light of both Article 22 CRC and Article 1A(2) of the Refugee Convention. Furthermore, it works out that Article 22 CRC can strengthen the Refugee Convention’s scant commitment to children’s rights. This is particularly evident in the CRC’s requirements for the treatment of children in asylum procedures, which are not addressed at all in the Refugee Convention.

Laws doi: 10.3390/laws15020030

Authors: Alexandropoulou Antigoni Themistokleous Antigoni

The Digital Services Act (DSA) represents a landmark regulatory context aiming to secure a safer, trusted and more transparent digital environment. While the DSA establishes a harmonised regulatory framework for intermediary services across the EU, its enforcement system relies significantly on national regulatory authorities, leaving member states a degree of institutional autonomy in designing the supervisory structures. This article examines the implementation of the DSA in Cyprus and discusses the national legal framework adopted through primary and secondary legislation. It analyses the powers, legally mandated tasks, rights, and obligations of the digital services coordinator in Cyprus including its supervisory, investigatory, and enforcement competences as well as the sanctioning mechanisms. This article provides a comprehensive legal analysis of the coordinator’s operation and contributes to the academic debate on the national implementation of the DSA as a horizontal legal tool of intermediary services and digital platforms accessed by European citizens.

Laws doi: 10.3390/laws15020029

Authors: Bernadett Solymosi-Szekeres

The legislative framework of labor law is generally described as gender-neutral based on universal presumptions about employment availability, work productivity, and the ability to work without interruption; in actuality, this gender-neutral framework remains contingent on the existence of the non-menstruating body. This paper analyzes the concept of menstruation as the blind spot in labor law, exploring whether the gender-neutral framework of the legal system has the ability to achieve true gender equality while turning a blind eye to the cyclical body, which has been identified to negatively impact the lives of many menstruators. Methodologically, this research takes a normative approach, incorporating feminist legal theories, principles of substantive equality, and socioeconomic and medical studies on menstruation. The results of this research prove that the concept of menstruation cannot be described or characterized by frameworks such as illness or disability, leaving the normative regulatory space for menstruators to experience structural inequality. The formal equality of labor law rules thus produces unequal effects in practice by privileging an implicit model of uninterrupted work capacity. This article concludes that the legal silence surrounding menstruation is not neutral but reinforces gendered patterns of disadvantage. Making menstruation visible within labor law is therefore not a matter of special treatment but a necessary step towards substantive equality and embodied gender justice, and a prerequisite for any future regulatory responses aimed at addressing workplace inequality.

Laws doi: 10.3390/laws15020028

Authors: Sarah Singer

This paper explores the ‘criminalisation’ of asylum in recent UK law and policy, most notably the 2022 Nationality and Borders Act (NABA) and 2023 Illegal Migration Act (IMA), and the ways in which this framework has fed through into recent legislative and policy measures. Whilst the development and expansion of criminal offences relating to irregular entry and arrival may be considered the most overt form of ‘criminalising’ people on the move, in this paper it is argued that the criminalisation of asylum in the UK today should not only be understood through the prism of crimmigration measures which are expressly penal in nature, but also through an array of measures which, although framed as administrative and civil, are similarly punitive in character and serve the criminal punishment rationale of retribution and deterrence. The legislative framework of the NABA 2022 and IMA 2023 has paved the way for this progressive ‘criminalisation’ by sanctioning those arriving irregularly to the UK to claim asylum. This trend has been continued in recent law and policy, and progressively expanded in a manner that increasingly sanctions refugees for the very fact of having claimed asylum in the UK.

Part I surveys the ways in which courts use tradition in different constitutional and interpretive modalities. Part II explores the instrumental reasons courts and other lawmakers resort to tradition. Part III supplies the basic definitional parameters of a more fact-bound, empirical notion of tradition. At the very least, tradition—in any non-rhetorical form—has a phenomenological, demographic, and temporal component. This observation may seem trivial, but the simplicity of these parameters disguises significant complexity about what phenomenon to code, among what demographic, and over what duration. Part IV discusses the implications of adopting a definition of tradition along the lines explored here and outlines procedural devices to apply this more rigorous notion of tradition. The Article concludes by explaining the benefits of a more empirically grounded notion of tradition, even if the factual truth of a tradition cannot itself dictate a normative conclusion.

This Article focuses on a source base that historians routinely rely upon but that courts have shied away from: personal accounts of past perceptions and experiences, drawn from diaries, letters, oral histories, and other types of testimonials. Professional historians highly value such sources, even though they require caution, because they often provide glimpses of the past that are missing from more formal or “official” documentary records. In doing so, they enrich and sometimes even transform our answers to important historical research questions. Courts, by contrast, tend to resist these sources, even when they might be relevant to the historical inquiry at hand. This Article illustrates such resistance via examples from the realms of disability and reproductive rights, both of which currently receive weak constitutional protection.

The Article closes by underscoring that, when judges engage in historical interpretation, they are not simply making law; they are also making history, upon which other courts and the broader public may rely. This reality implies responsibility. Judges could lean into that responsibility by bringing a critical eye to the traditional “high law” historical sources that are most readily available and by shepherding into the record voices and perspectives that enrich our collective understanding of the American past.

Laws doi: 10.3390/laws15020027

Authors: Tommaso Spasari Paolo Bailo Emerenziana Basello Giuliano Pesel Giovanna Ricci

Recent Italian developments in end-of-life governance have intensified debate on self-determination, medically assisted suicide, and the constitutional limits of healthcare regulation. This article is a narrative review combined with doctrinal legal analysis and medico-legal commentary. It examines Tuscany’s Regional Law No. 16 of 14 March 2025 within the broader Italian framework shaped by Law No. 219/2017, Constitutional Court Judgment No. 242/2019, and the subsequent constitutional review culminating in Judgment No. 204/2025. The article pursues three aims: to reconstruct the national legal framework governing end-of-life decision-making in Italy; to analyse the structure and constitutional implications of the Tuscan statute; and to assess the medico-legal relevance of the persistent uncertainty surrounding life-sustaining treatments as an eligibility criterion. The analysis highlights two distinct but interconnected issues: the constitutional boundary between regional healthcare organisation and matters requiring nationally uniform safeguards, and the unresolved interpretation of life-sustaining treatments in clinical and legal practice. In light of Judgment No. 204/2025, the article argues that regional procedural intervention may reduce administrative uncertainty, but cannot replace coherent parliamentary legislation capable of clarifying substantive criteria, limiting territorial variability, and reinforcing the role of palliative care within end-of-life pathways.

Laws doi: 10.3390/laws15020026

Authors: Ahmed M. Khawaldeh

Cyberattacks and data breaches expose individuals and firms to liability in civil courts. Despite regulators’ efforts to standardize cybersecurity laws, judges, justices and attorneys have offered a plethora of interpretations to the same laws, causing a great deal of confusion. The current investigation utilizes the Jordanian civil code to illustrate how complex liability becomes in data breaches cases. Through a comprehensive examination of liability rules 256–291 within the civil code, the Supreme Courts’ liability precedents, and the new personal data protection law, this analysis finds that liability could be established under strict conditions. Liability claims in Jordanian courts must satisfy the standing doctrine, the presence of injury requiring compensation, and causality, and must demonstrate the clear links between data breaches and the harm/injury suffered. The novelty of the personal data protection law in Jordan is likely to impact how liability is interpreted and established in cybersecurity cases.

Laws doi: 10.3390/laws15020025

Authors: Rebecca Parry Hakan Sahin

There have been multiple examples in recent years of nationalisation being used as a strategy for protecting the functions of failing public service providers. In the UK, at present, there is a demand for the nationalisation of Thames Water, which supplies water to 16 million users but is struggling financially and operationally. Proponents of nationalisation often overlook the complexity of the process, which involves the expropriation of shares and can be an expensive option. The expense arises in part due to the globalised investment context, where bilateral investment treaties (BITs) between various countries require compensation from foreign investors who suffer expropriation. There is wide foreign ownership of Thames Water, as well as many other UK public service suppliers. The practical and legal obstacles to nationalisation may mean that compensation must be paid at full market value, or not far short of it, even where the nationalised company is insolvent or failing. This paper examines the compensation frameworks applicable to the nationalisation of distressed public service providers with foreign ownership, analysing both bilateral investment treaties and the European Convention on Human Rights. Using Thames Water as a detailed case study, we demonstrate that current international investment law standards, which were developed for the expropriation of profitable enterprises, prove ill-suited when applied to the nationalisation of insolvent companies. Requiring “prompt, adequate and effective” compensation at fair market value for failing public service providers, such as utilities, creates perverse outcomes, as the taxpayers are asked to fund both the rescue of failed private ownership and the infrastructure investments that private owners neglected, while the shareholders who presided over the decline receive windfalls from state intervention. We propose an alternative framework based on four graduated responses: (1) enhanced regulatory intervention before failure occurs; (2) the use of upstream insolvency procedures, including restructuring plans; (3) the use of ordinary insolvency procedures of liquidation and administration; and (4) nationalisation as a last resort when market-based solutions are exhausted. Crucially, in this last case, we advocate for compensation to be calculated on a basis that reflects the insolvency of the nationalised entity. This entails valuing expropriated interests at what shareholders and creditors would have received through the insolvency proceedings that nationalisation displaces, which will typically be well below market value, even zero.

Laws doi: 10.3390/laws15020024

Authors: Thomas Cook Boleslaw Z. Kabala

A Jeffersonian model of civic education supports robust civic engagement while differing in important respects from prevailing paradigms of community-embedded learning that prioritize activism. Rather than emphasizing participation alone, Jefferson’s approach to the development of civic awareness foregrounds reasoned speech, civil discourse, and the cultivation of practical judgment informed by theoretical understanding. Central to this model is Jefferson’s insistence that civic education is primarily a local and state responsibility, grounded in a broader commitment to self-government. Jefferson’s account reflects an appreciation for human reason as a universal capacity that makes consent and civic deliberation possible. Reason, so understood, provides the foundation for political equality and for an account of human flourishing articulated most clearly in the Declaration of Independence and consistent with core claims of the natural law tradition. This framework supports a conception grounded in metaphysical equality and civic friendship, best expressed within a federal political order, and capable of sustaining what classic sources and contemporary initiatives describe as a “pervasive commitment to diversity—as well as unity”. Further contributing to the novelty of our argument, we show that Jeffersonian natural-law-inflected civic engagement resonates well into the 20th century. Important judicial decisions, educational initiatives, and policy recommendations—including Cook v. McKee, Education for American Democracy (EAD), and the Truman Commission Report—draw upon related concepts of civic formation, consent, and reasoned participation. Jefferson’s emphasis on “reasons in speech,” understood as an essential element of self-government, thus remains a necessary and underappreciated contribution to contemporary debates over civic education and engagement.

Laws doi: 10.3390/laws15020023

Authors: Sebastian R. Graham Matthew K. Reising

This article contributes to ongoing debates between political scientists and the burgeoning civic education reform movement over the nature and goals of political inquiry and the need for a careful analysis of political methodology. To do so, this article draws on and explicates Aristotle’s criticisms of Hippodamus to show the dangers of privileging legibility and quantifiability over the common experiences of civic life, which includes normative considerations of good and bad and right and wrong. Ultimately, we argue that Aristotle provides a model for inquiring into the nature of political life that is conscious of civic responsibility and which offers a strong justification for continued civic education reform. Along the way, we contribute to ongoing discussions about the potentially positive relationship between liberal and civic education by connecting the civic education movement to modern theorizing about virtue politics.

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Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit der Notwendigkeit, die Anstiftung restriktiv auszulegen. Der Beitrag hebt die Bedeutung des deliktischen Kontexts hervor, in welchem der Anstifter Einfluss auf den unmittelbaren Täter ausübt. Vor dem Hintergrund zweier jüngster Urteile des Bundesgerichts zur Anstiftung wird die Bedeutung dieses Kontextes der Anstiftung untersucht. Mit anderen Worten: Der Kontext bietet dem Anstifter einen Hebel, um andere zur Begehung einer Straftat zu bewegen. Der vorliegende Beitrag erläutert diesen Begriff des Einflusses und plädiert für eine restriktive Auffassung der Anstiftung, die sich von allzu schematischen Modellen distanzieren soll. Dabei dient die Verletzung des Amtsgeheimnisses als konkretes Beispiel zur Veranschaulichung der Problematik.

Laws doi: 10.3390/laws15020022

Authors: Adeline Auffret O’Neil Indira Boutier Emmanuel Maganaris

The recognition of a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right has reshaped global human rights discourse, yet its operationalisation remains uneven. This article examines how the African human rights system which is uniquely grounded in collective rights, has reframed environmental protection as a constitutive element of development, sovereignty, and justice. Through doctrinal and case-law analysis, it traces the evolution from the African Commission’s foundational jurisprudence in SERAC, which extended state duties to the regulation of private and transnational corporate actors, to the African Court’s landmark judgment in LIDHO v. Côte d’Ivoire. The study demonstrates how the Court transforms the aspirational ‘greening’ of human rights into binding obligations by articulating a robust duty of vigilance and linking environmental harm to violations of the rights to life, health, and development. It further shows that LIDHO inaugurates a post-sovereign model of shared and polycentric responsibility, in which state accountability encompasses corporate conduct within their jurisdiction and, potentially, beyond it. The article concludes that the African Charter’s collective framework offers an implicit regional model of ecological justice, one capable of addressing extractive asymmetries and informing emerging climate-related obligations across the continent.