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In England and Wales, the Mental Health Act (MHA) 1983 provides the legal framework for the detention of individuals suffering from a mental disorder if they are judged to present a risk of harm to self or others. The MHA removes from certain psychiatric patients civil liberties otherwise inherent in our legal system. Through both statute and common law, it balances a patient’s right to autonomy with psychiatrists' duty of care by reference to the health and safety of the patient. It also balances the civil rights of individual patients against the right of society to protection.1 The 2018 Independent Review of the Mental Health Act (1983) set out recommendations for the government on how the MHA and associated practice needed to change in its final report ‘Modernising the Mental Health Act’.2 This led to the development of the government’s plans to reform the Act, together with the associated policy and practice, as set out in the white paper.3 The proposals take forward the recommendations made by the Independent Review and the full government response. The government is now consulting on its proposals before bringing forward a bill to amend the act. This commentary highlights the white paper’s marginalisation of patients detained under part III of the MHA. As a member of the Independent Review’s Department of Health and Social Care Topic Groups tasked with formulating recommendations for revision of the detention criteria and part III of the MHA, I am delighted that so many of our recommendations have been approved or are being given serious consideration by the government. However, I have substantial concerns about the white paper’s differential approach to civil (part II) and forensic (part III) patients, specifically the exclusion of forensic patients from the proposed changes to the detention criteria in the MHA. …

The 2016 Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) policy paper on case selection and prioritization is a significant development in that it highlights the possible role of the ICC in prosecuting environmental damage, illegal natural resource exploitation and land grabbing. For obvious reasons, however, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor policy paper could not expand the court’s current jurisdiction over ecocide which is dependent on a formal amendment to the ICC Statute and the policy paper is only an internal policy document. But more fundamentally it has been predicted that the 2016 ICC Office of the Prosecutor may signify the revitalization of the debate on how an international crime of ecocide could be conceptualised under international law and ultimately whether the ICC should have a broader jurisdiction over ecocide. This article aims to critically evaluate how a crime of ecocide could be conceptualised under international law, as well as to assess the limitations of conceptualising ecocide based on the narrow definition of the existing crimes under the ICC Statute. Moreover, this article aims to critically evaluate developments in past three and half years following the adoption 2016 OTP Policy Paper, and notes that the practice of the OTP in dealing with recent national communications and the ICC case law itself to date have not signified a considerable shift in interpreting the law in cases involving environmental damage, illegal natural resources exploitation and land grabbing. Therefore, they have done little so far to clarify the scope of the court’s existing jurisdiction over “ecocide”.

The dispute concerned anti-dumping duties imposed by Australia on two exporters of A4 copy paper from Indonesia which Indonesia claimed were inconsistent with several provisions of the Anti-Dumping Agreement. Australia imposed these duties, ranging between 30% and 40%, on the basis of a comparison of constructed normal values with export prices. Those constructed values were based, for certain input items, on substitute values – prices of pulp exported by Brazilian and South American producers to China and Korea – rather than on the actual costs recorded in those exporters' financial records. These kinds of ‘cost adjustments’ currently rank among the most controversial topics in contemporary WTO anti-dumping case law.

This article sets out to explore the potential of the right to an effective remedy in Article 47 of the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights (‘CFR’) in equipping the Union’s social acquis with credible remedies. Article 47 CFR is one of the most-litigated and important articles in the Charter. At the same time, however, it has received surprisingly little attention in the context of EU employment law. Discussion is structured as follows: section one explores the rise of the principle of effectiveness, from the early case law of the Court of Justice to the Charter’s entry into force in 2009. Section two sketches the powerful potential of Article 47 CFR, highlighting its utility both in tackling domestic obstacles to effective enforcement, and expanding the horizontal applicability of EU employment law. Section three briefly highlights some of the limitations litigants might encounter, including a general emphasis on broad regulatory discretion for Member States, and the difficult of crafting (positive) duties out of (negative) restraints. A concluding section turns to EU law more broadly, as well as the European Convention of Human Rights, for inspirations guiding the potential future development of Article 47 CFR. A Thematic Working Paper for the Annual Conference of the European Centre of Expertise (ECE) in the field of labour law, employment and labour market policies: The Charter of Fundamental Rights from an EU Labour Law Perspective