Riccardo Vecellio Segate

In criminal proceedings, offenders are sentenced based on doctrines of culpability and punishment that theorize why they are guilty and why they should be punished. Throughout human history, these doctrines have largely been grounded in legal-policy constructions around retribution, safety, deterrence, and closure, mostly derived from folk psychology, natural philosophy, sociocultural expectations, public-order narratives, and common sense. On these premises, justice systems have long been designed to account for crimes and their underlying intent, with experience and probabilistic assumptions shaping theoretical discourses on the nature of crimes and offenders’ punishability. As scientific discoveries, inventions, and methodologies progressively developed to refine such doctrines and displace long-held assumptions, criminal courtrooms have increasingly witnessed counsels and judges relying on scientific evidence to submit, dispute, or validate claims. For instance, over the last century, criminal courtrooms have selectively admitted neuroscientific models, exams, and insights claiming to revolutionize our understanding of who is culpable and deserving of punishment. Most recently, advancements in epigenetics have promised even more profound challenges to long-standing criminal law doctrines. This article examines the reasons reversibility and inheritability of epigenetic markers might warrant revising culpability and punishment and concludes that epigenetic findings are not yet robust enough to justify such revisions.

All throughout the so-called "Global South", hundreds of millions of individuals from entire communities in the rural, poorer, or most peripheral areas are not officially recorded by the States they are citizens of or they habitually reside in. This is why several of such States are resorting to extensive and purportedly "universal" digital remote onboarding programs, pioneered by India's Aadhaar, whereby individuals are centrally recorded onto a public database with their identity (and possibly citizenship) confirmed. Whenever paper documents are obsolete, inaccurate, deteriorated, or inexistent, individuals may have their identity confirmed through an "introducer", who mediates between marginalised communities and central authorities and is entrusted by both with this delicate task. Introducers, however, cannot by themselves grant someone the status as "citizen": they may at best confirm his or her existence and identity. These onboarding programs are enabled by wide-covering sets of technical standards, ranging from data protection and cybersecurity to interoperability, safety, disaster recovery, and business continuity. Meanwhile, similar technologies, relying on analogous standards, and fundamentally aimed at a similar purpose (that is, registering all those who fall within the prescriptive jurisdiction of a State), are deployed by border officials in the context of migration managementespecially in "developed" countries. The "unofficial" and "outside-the-scope-of-the-law" components of said migratory patterns are growing exponentially due to combined effects of climate, insecurity, and geopolitical factors, increasingly originating "borderline" situations whereby identity and citizenship are challenged and contested: statelessness, refuge, nomadism (both traditional and "digital"), and internal displacement. Strikingly enough, discussions around what technical standards to adopt, and who should select them, as well as on what the role of “introducers” could be, towards the digital onboarding of individuals experiencing “borderline” configurations of citizenship are entirely neglected in socio-legal and security scholarship alike. Complemented with concrete policy proposals, the present work accepts the ambition to start bridging this gap.

The United States is the most influential actor in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; its intelligence agencies cooperate with Israel on most “counterterrorism” dossiers impacting Palestinians’ life, with a significant number thereof pertaining to Internet policing in Gaza and the West Bank. Meanwhile, Israel controls some of the key Internet service providers (ISPs) that serve Palestinians, and it is thus endowed with the capability to compel those ISPs to filter information so as to perform as American propaganda reinforcers. Moreover, the United States may unaccountably assert jurisdiction over data from and to Palestine because American cables are where most of the Internet transits through, exercising surveillance without judicial oversight. Verified instances of censorship directed by government-tied U.S. corporations, especially during confrontational seasons, are indeed numerous. Palestinian authorities themselves contribute to creating information clusters and identity bubbles, with infrastructural deficiencies as well as executive and court orders undermining freedom of expression online under arbitrary “public morals” or “security” concerns. The combined effect of technical advantage and regulatory capture supports the convergence of interests between Palestinian and Israeli authorities in restricting Palestinians’ digital rights, and assists the United States in reiterating its “security” hegemony in the region. This warrants a debunking of the limits of the law in constraining private actors and readjusting states’ jurisdiction over Internet infrastructure and data packets transiting through it.

Pursuant to Article 63 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), a state may require other treaty parties to disclose their intellectual property case law 'of general application'. While most domestic judgments in common law are indeed of general application, civil law systems theoretically employ judgments as reference only. Nevertheless, to value consistency and predictability, the hybridisation of civil law jurisdictions is increasingly leading them to devise special lists of judgments that acquire formal or factual binding status on lower-ranked courts. This trend is particularly evident in China, whose Supreme People's Court's 'Guiding Cases' join other specific categories of holdings within 'Judicial Interpretations' and further guideline documents that are factually binding domestically. When the United States and the European Union requested, through the World Trade Organization, that China disclose the full range of its case law of general application, China responded that civil law jurisdictions do not issue judgments that are binding beyond the parties. This article examines the limitations and merits of the Chinese stance.

Patent offices worldwide deny patentability to innovations which stand against the ordre public: does enhancement represent a value-laden societal threat? Patent offices also reject applications for therapeutical methods: when is enhancement also a therapeutical method? One specific class of enhancers, i.e. pharmaceutical neuroenhancers, is particularly complex in this respect: certain molecules can potentially function both as treatment for neuropsychiatric disorders and as recreational enhancers for non-patients’ brain. Hence, the present work advances the debate on enhancement patentability in two directions: ratione loci, by scrutinising China’s stances on enhancement’s safety and morality, compared to the most frequently explored Western jurisdictions, namely the EU and the US; and ratione materiae, by illuminating the porous bioethical boundaries between treatment and enhancement in the domain of neuropsychiatry. It challenges patent offices’ de facto regulatory role in defining and policing citizens’ access to neuroenhancing substances through misplaced or pseudo-scientific intellectual-property narratives of innovativeness and morale.

Until robots and humans mostly worked in fast-paced and yet separate environments, occupational health and safety (OHS) rules could address workers' safety largely independently from robotic conduct. This is no longer the case: collaborative robots (cobots) working alongside humans warrant the design of policies ensuring the safety of both humans and robots at once, within shared spaces and upon delivery of cooperative workflows. Within the European Union (EU), the applicable regulatory framework stands at the intersection between international industry standards and legislation at the EU as well as Member State level. Not only do current standards and laws fail to satisfactorily attend to the physical and mental health challenges prompted by human-robot interaction (HRI), but they exhibit important gaps in relation to smart cobots ("SmaCobs") more specifically. In fact, SmaCobs combine the black-box unforeseeability afforded by machine learning with more general HRI-associated risks, towards increasingly complex, mobile and interconnected operational interfaces and production chains. Against this backdrop, based on productivity and health motivations, we urge the encoding of the enforcement of OHS policies directly into SmaCobs. First, SmaCobs could harness the sophistication of quantum computing to adapt a tangled normative architecture in a responsive manner to the contingent needs of each situation. Second, entrusting them with OHS enforcement vis-à-vis both themselves and humans may paradoxically prove safer as well as more cost-effective than for humans to do so. This scenario raises profound legal, ethical and somewhat philosophical concerns around SmaCobs' legal personality, the apportionment of liability and algorithmic explainability. The first systematic proposal to tackle such questions is henceforth formulated. For the EU, we propose that this is achieved through a new binding OHS Regulation aimed at the SmaCobs age.

Despite local instances of single arbitrators' corruption not having proven completely absent from arbitration chronicles over the last decades, one may safely argue that until very recently, no scandal had ever been severe enough to shake the foundations of arbitration communities on a regional, let alone global, level. However, this eventually occurred in 2019 in Peru as the outcome of one of the countless parallel investigations stemming from the 2016 Odebrecht corruption saga, propagated from Brazil to the whole of Latin America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and beyond, and labelled by many as the largest scandal of its kind in recent history. Peru's vicissitudes revolved around a number of corrupted arbitrators who systematically accepted bribes and political favours from Odebrecht in return for favourable awards upholding the repricing of public-procurement contracts. This story can teach us about more than the simple evidence that arbitrators, too, might fall for corruption; criminologically, it suggests that arbitration as a dispute-resolution mechanism can find itself embedded within regionalised networked systems of corruption-prone regulatory capture, and even play an active role in their normalised perpetuation. To prevent this, while having regard for safeguarding the independence and confidentiality of arbitral proceedings to the highest possible extent, the enactment of context-sensitive binding regulation is advised.

The prosecution of international crimes by specialised non-domestic courts and tribunals raises several concerns, not least in evidentiary assessments; thus, the future of international criminal justice shall be relocated to domestic trials by reliance on universal jurisdiction (“UJ”). While a few “Western” jurisdictions have recently started to employ this legal device, “Eastern” jurisdictions have consistently voiced suspicion at this trend, while other Western jurisdictions seem not yet ready to embrace it, either. Among those jurisdictions which declare themselves unwilling or unready to face this relatively new challenge, the PRC and Italy stand out, owing to their regional appeal, their involvement in (alternative?) discourses on global justice, and their millenary intertwined roots as legal civilisations. Hence, the present study investigates these two jurisdictions comparatively, as far as their stances regarding UJ’s applicability over international crimes (and practice thereto) are concerned. As for China, the overarching reason why it refrains from exercising UJ over international crimes rests with geopolitical self-restraint, expressed through the respect for third jurisdictions’ sovereignty (and, where applicable, related officials’ immunities), the principle of non-interference, as well as the principle of state consent in IR. To exemplify, China objected to the inclusion of war crimes in NIACs within the scope of mentioned Statute’s rules, arguing that UJ should be grounded in codification rather than progressive development of international customs. Mirroring its stance vis-à-vis the ICC, China is wary of deferring to UJ even at the domestic level. China’s reluctance to exercise UJ can also be inspected on a crime-by-crime basis; for instance, with regards to genocide, political arguments from the Chinese standpoint can be posited both against to and in favour of a deeper engagement with UJ. Contrary to China, Italy’s lack of UJ practice can be explained through the lenses of its overenthusiastic support for the ICC as the most appropriate forum for prosecuting international crimes. In fact, the exercise of UJ by Italian domestic courts is hindered by a series of obstacles, and Italian legislation does not yet satisfactorily cater for international crimes. Although the immediate reasons why China and Italy resist UJ in theory and practice differ, these two countries’ approaches to international justice in fact converge at a deeper foundational level around core historical conservative preferences.

Algorithms may seriously impair the right to privacy held by groups of individuals (and thus, more subtly, individuals themselves, but relationally). Indeed, a functional equivalence exists between the way personal data is gathered and aggregated, and the patterns of data analysis about groups of individuals, with the difference that whilst the first is (unevenly) regulated domestically, EU-wide, as well as internationally, the second is almost consistently disregarded. Consequently, one needs to determine whether a full-standing “right to group privacy” should be recognised also as a legal (alternatively to only moral) obligation. In the positive, policymakers shall establish the (expectedly sophisticated) criteria for deciding what groups would not be simply considered as “aggregated bundles of individual privacy rights” (defined here as “collective rights”, like in a standard “class action”) by algorithms’ owners, programmers, and end-users. The main contribution of the present study is to further the theoretical understanding of the relevance of mentioned distinction (collective vs group rights) by drawing normative inferences from the modern-day psychology theory of Gestalt, eventually encoding a wider range of legal shades, and possible implications thereof for privacy entitlements in everyday life.

Policy debates on the rights and international status of climate refugees, environmental migrants, or environmentally displaced persons have unleashed detailed scholarly commentaries over the last decade, and virtually all standpoints have been scrutinized in literature already. Nevertheless, one aspect of this debate has gone somewhat off the radar in recent years: the (co-)responsibilities of incorporated subsidiaries of transnational corporations in triggering or exacerbating pseudo-environmentally motivated mass-movements of workers and related strata of the populations domiciled where these corporations operate. Despite such neglect, mentioned exploitative occurrences only increased in recent years, and the trend speaks for their further expansion as globalization complexifies, world population increases, and climate disruption worsens. Against this backdrop of urgency, it seems essential to rediscover this angle of the debate; that is, to revitalize ethical and legal discourses on private actors and what intervention should be required of the international community in order for transnational corporations to take action and observe minimal standards of environmental good practice, especially in corporate policy areas bearing a direct impact on labor conditions, social development, and ultimately on the pulling or restraining factors of migration. The first international binding Treaty on business and human rights, currently being negotiated in Geneva within the United Nations Human Rights Council and apparently close to finalization, builds exactly on these concerns. In each of its 2018 Zero Draft, 2019 Revised Draft, 2020 Second Revised Draft, and 2021 Third Revised Draft, the Treaty provides protection to those workers and their families who are factually deprived of their lands due to corporate soil exploitation. In this sense, the problem will manifest itself under the new (yet not so new) terms of distinguishing between migrations fully caused or simply catalyzed or facilitated by localized environmental pollution and/or largescale climate-change-related phenomena. Pursuant to this new covenant, States would be compelled to ensure that companies operating within their prescriptive jurisdiction respect all human rights. Eventually, while this Treaty should generally be welcomed as it sheds new light on business-caused environmental migrations and it decompartmentalizes related human rights, its current formulation might not significantly contribute to the clarification of certain definitions. Most perplexingly, it does not establish a straightforward legal distinction between environmental migrations induced or 'simply' precipitated by corporate misconduct.

The global cybersecurity discourse has never proved more fragmented than in the aftermath of the failure of the last United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security. This discourse stands trapped in long-lasting and seemingly crystallized normative stances between “the West” and “the East,” yet it also calls upon the international community to regulate a wide spectrum of phenomena, ranging from thefts of digitally-stored trade secrets to large-scale pervasive attacks, which may soon reach the threshold of armed attacks. If one situates the major cybersecurity players on a sliding scale between freedom and control over cyber content and infrastructure, the mainstream stance would place the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, China, and Russia in that order. Nonetheless, this scale is in practice more complex, in part due to the influence of the Sh...

The tricoloured flag India adopted in 1947 to mark its independence from Britain, the Tiraṅgā, results in fact from the combination of four elements whose official and popular semiotics has traversed several waves of negotiations during the decades preceding the foundation of contemporary India. Three of these elements are its equally sized, horizontal colours: saffron, white, and green; theirs is a chronicle of embeddedness in both confessional and secularist narratives which had shaped ancient and modern India, whereby the colour at the top—the saffron—best testifies to the intensity of and controversies surrounding mentioned narratives. Related struggles are subsumed under the choice to replace the 1921/1931 spinning wheel (charkha) with the blue-stained Ashok/Dharma Chakra, the “Wheel of Law”. Significant legal accounts coalesce indeed into the Tiraṅgā, from both spiritual-philosophical and positivistic standpoints. Despite conveying a supposedly ethnicity-neutral identity, the Chakra is often replaced with sectarian symbols by “minority” movements when they protest against the Hindu majority’s legislative radicalism.

Tensions between the EU’s legal order and the international investment law regime are not exclusive to the Brexit era, but they certainly gained momentum in the aftermath of this referendum. By incautiously declaring that the UK will remain a party to the Unified Patent System regardless of Brexit, the British government arguably shaped (il)legitimate expectations on the part of investors who aimed at exploiting their intellectual property rights in the UK while benefitting from the judicial protection of the forthcoming Unified Patent Court as much as of the European institutions (and market) as a whole. Indeed, not only the System itself will undergo a process of major rebalancing after London’s departure from the EU, but more importantly, the UK will most probably be unable to retain its membership in the System after the actual delivery of Brexit. These complications trigger a wide spectrum of fundamental dilemmas investing the definition and scope of concepts such as unilateral...

This paper discusses the effect of the constitutionalisation of the EU’s legal framework on European integration. The first section deals with the evolution of the Treaties as a pathway towards increasing legal integration. The second section discusses the EU’s evolving constitutional doctrine. The remaining sections provide supportive evidence to back up the previously introduced arguments, drawing on a number of important issues such as division of competences and human rights, leaving an input for further research on the impact of Brexit on the matter.

International criminal tribunals (ict s) have found, almost consistently, that unlawfully and/or secretly obtained evidence is admissible. De facto, defendants in international criminal law (icl) enjoy no privacy-related procedural safeguards under either the applicable domestic law or international human rights law (ihrl). Privacy violations are not confined to those impairing defendants’ rights; they might result in premature acquittals or in misconducts vis-à-vis the victims, too. While this is practically unescapable a compromise due to the ‘high profile’ of the accused and the complexity, length, momentousness, and ‘political charge’ of these trials, over-relaxed admissibility rules become unsustainable as far as digital evidence is concerned, in that they add to the latter’s inherently low reliability and heavy cognitive impact. Facing this issue, it is legit to wonder whether artificial intelligence (ai) might mitigate privacy violations or render them no longer necessary, th...

The tricoloured flag India adopted in 1947 to mark its independence from Britain, the Tiraṅgā, results in fact from the combination of four elements whose official and popular semiotics has traversed several waves of negotiations during the decades preceding the foundation of contemporary India. Three of these elements are its equally sized, horizontal colours: saffron, white, and green; theirs is a chronicle of embeddedness in both confessional and secularist narratives which had shaped ancient and modern India, whereby the colour at the top—the saffron—best testifies to the intensity of and controversies surrounding mentioned narratives. Related struggles are subsumed under the choice to replace the 1921/1931 spinning wheel (charkha) with the blue-stained Ashok/Dharma Chakra, the “Wheel of Law”. Significant legal accounts coalesce indeed into the Tiraṅgā, from both spiritual-philosophical and positivistic standpoints. Despite conveying a supposedly ethnicity-neutral identity, the Chakra is often replaced with sectarian symbols by “minority” movements when they protest against the Hindu majority’s legislative radicalism.

International criminal tribunals (ICTs) have found, almost consistently, that unlawfully and/or secretly obtained evidence is admissible. De facto, defendants in international criminal law (ICL) enjoy no privacy-related procedural safeguards under either the applicable domestic law or international human rights law (IHRL). Privacy violations are not confined to those impairing defendants' rights; they might result in premature acquittals or in misconducts vis-à-vis the victims, too. While this is practically unescapable a compromise due to the "high profile" of the accused and the complexity, length, momentousness, and "political charge" of these trials, over-relaxed admissibility rules become unsustainable as far as digital evidence is concerned, in that they add to the latter's inherently low reliability and heavy cognitive impact. Facing this issue, it is legit to wonder whether artificial intelligence (AI) might mitigate privacy violations or render them no longer necessary, thus improving the fairness record of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other ICTs.

When the UN Human Rights Council initiated negotiations towards the first international legally binding instrument for the accountability of transnational business activities, EU Member States opposed it, and EU institutions themselves endeavoured to obstruct it by making it conditional upon the widening of its scope, as to cover all domestic companies, too. This move, phrased in human-rights terms, might rather account for the EU's reluctance to have its subsidiaries in developing countries compete with domestic businesses subject to less rigorous due-diligence standards (and thus, lower labour costs). Developing countries replicated that human dignity resides in countries not being imposed harmful developmental trajectories for market-competition purposes, and in indigent workers not being prevented from seeking survival means in domestic employment. Mentioned stalemate exposed frictions between different EU institutions, and evoked issues of both EU law and public international law, including: competence demarcation between Brussels and Member States; "extraterritoriality" of EU obligations in (negotiating) foreign policy; responsibility of non-state actors. Furthermore, these negotiations unearthed the problematic "identity" of human-rights policymaking, in its intersection with the concrete needs of its addressees. The EU has risked to either disrupt the initiative, or lose sight of the stances of this project's actual stakeholders: the poorer.

The framework known as “Responsibility to Protect” (“R2P”) has afforded legal endorsement and codification to the doctrine that States hold responsibility under public international law for the protection of their own citizens and of those who reside within their prescriptive jurisdiction. This holds true in peacetime and wartime alike, and it is shaped by an understanding of “security” which increasingly calls for comprehensive and multifaceted assessments (human security) to replace the traditional ones centred on military protection. Within the human-security paradigm, the right to food stands at the forefront of a reconceptualization which proceeds beyond the quantity of available (or accessible) food, up to scrutinise its nutritional value more pertinently, and human capabilities in context. “Hidden hunger”—the chronic insufficiency of nutrients intake that victimises hundreds of millions of children worldwide—is currently dismayingly unaddressed in legal scholarship, despite representing a proven trigger of violent spirals which turn countries to conflict and frustrate their Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”). It is therefore essential to analyse the chances to successfully invoke the R2P framework as to intervene in countries whose ruling classes can be identified as the major cause of protracted hidden hunger (either because those regimes keep their population in a condition of civil conflict, or due to those rulers’ individual greed and unconstrained authoritarianism). The case-studies of Burundi and North Korea respectively are enlightening to this end, and surprisingly illustrate that whereas, strictly legally, the R2P provides (modest) enhanced room for perpetrators accountability, its political impact restricts the options available for the international community to argue that the wilful production (or passive acceptance) of hidden hunger violates the internationally recognised “right to food”, and intervene accordingly whenever necessary.

Several international policy documents define the environment as made of “natural heritage” and “cultural heritage” together, along the lines of concepts such as “biosphere” or “ecosystem” which have been introduced relatively recently to define the complexity of human-environment interactions. Nevertheless, distinguishing natural heritage from the cultural one helps analyse situations where damage inflicted to the former negatively impacts the latter. In fact, cultural heritage sits under siege worldwide due to polluting activities and environmental degradation, which are causing irreparable damage to—or even the disappearance of— valuable expressions of civilisations’ legacy. Most damages are transboundary, thereby calling into question bilateral forms of States’ liability; others involve a globalised dimension of climate change, addressed through “trusteeships” whereby the international community establishes centralised compliance schemes which are built on incentives and sanctions while do not necessarily provide for clear-cut liabilities. Yet, this uncertainty on the liability schemes to be applied to different sources of environmental damage to cultural heritage in peacetime remains under-explored in legal scholarship, which rather tends to focus on the protection of cultural heritage in armed conflicts, on environmental damages exclusively considering the environment’s natural elements, on state liability within domestic jurisdictions only, or on liability as a corollary of state responsibility. Two categories of events are to be assessed: those where a home damage to the environment results in damage to cultural heritage abroad, and those where the damage to both occurs directly extraterritorially; these both may occur due to state initiatives, or through malpractices of corporations which are neither owned nor controlled by the State. Strict, absolute, or “soft” liabilities are invoked by private parties when their property is violated, or by States when their heritage as a collective good is damaged, but might also involve the international community as a whole when such cultural expressions are deemed of public interest and conceptualised as “global commons.” When it comes to damages of this sort, it is unlikely that States purposively caused them or even deliberately refrained from preventing them; what is more, these damages often occur as a result of concurrent actions by multiple countries over extensive periods of time. Consequently, the legal analysis on liabilities warrants to be framed under a broader cosmopolitan solidarity and burden-sharing perspective, whereby States voluntarily uphold the convenience of selected forms of international liability, in order to protect cultural heritage and contain one of the most perilous side-effects of deregulated anthropisation. To this end, China’s metamorphosis from law-recipient to law-maker status on the international plane is worth focusing on. By scrutinising Beijing’s approach to (international) environmental law during the “Western humiliation” period, the WW2 aftermath, the “Cultural Revolution”, and the transition to world power status under the label of “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics,” it is possible to draw inferences on what liability schemes for cultural heritage protection are deemed desirable in Chinese politics and discourses. An investigation of the values underpinning China’s policies over the last decades facilitates the tracing of the normative spillovers from environmental law to cultural heritage law (and vice versa), as well as the debunking of implementation asymmetries between domestic and international preferences.

The first target of today’s global commercial and military espionage, trade secrets, are the only form of intellectual property protection to be based on the necessity of nondisclosure and secrecy rather than on the paradigm of publicity and exploitability, with the obvious consequence that where confidentiality ends, no trade secret factually exists anymore. As such, current judicial remedies to trade secret thefts simply miss the point, treating trade secrets as rights which can be restored, rather than as assets that once stolen, are lost forever. Moreover, trade secrets often represent the “backbone” of a country’s development: an invaluable strategic advantage for entire industrial systems, innovation environments, and national economies. Whereas a trade secret theft occurring within domestic borders transfers exploitability rather than causing damage to the economic ecosystem of the country concerned, international trade secret thefts may jeopardize states’ economy and public security alike. For these reasons, the only way to protect trade secrets by law is through ensuring that their secrecy is reasonably safe by means of compulsory cybersecurity and cyber-hygiene standards to be complied with by their owners. When it comes to this specific form of IP, the only protection is afforded with prevention: injunctions and compensations can work as remedies for other IP rights’ misappropriations and misexploitations, but do nothing to restore the peculiarity of a trade secret which is, indeed, its secrecy. Not only should companies be compelled to adopt and implement reasonable sector-specific IT security measures and procedures, but licensing agreements including know-how should feature a specific cybersecurity clause to be carefully negotiated. The new cybersecurity regimes of world powers like China seem to capture this problem, and to (involuntarily?) provide useful tools for addressing it beyond the schemes of intellectual property or tort (confidentiality) laws. Regrettably, other countries in the Pacific region appear to keep the belief that trade secret thefts are a private affair of the breached companies, which should seek redress via traditional judicial channels. This is to be deemed an outdated, misleading, shortsighted and ineffective approach.

Tensions between the EU’s legal order and the international investment law regime are not exclusive to the Brexit era, but they certainly gained momentum in the aftermath of this referendum. By incautiously declaring that the UK will remain a party to the Unified Patent System regardless of Brexit, the British government arguably shaped (il)legitimate expectations on the part of investors who aimed at exploiting their intellectual property rights in the UK while benefitting from the judicial protection of the forthcoming Unified Patent Court as much as of the European institutions (and market) as a whole. Indeed, not only the System itself will undergo a process of major rebalancing after London’s departure from the EU, but more importantly, the UK will most probably be unable to retain its membership in the System after the actual delivery of Brexit. These complications trigger a wide spectrum of fundamental dilemmas investing the definition and scope of concepts such as unilateral declaration, indirect expropriation, reasonable expectation, estoppel, and public policy exception, under both EU law and international investment law. It is therefore essential to explore these intersections as to anticipate possible scenarios in the event of both domestic court and international arbitral claims lodged by patent investors pre- and post-Brexit, having due regard for competition concerns on the side of the EU, yet referring to recent Canadian case law which opened the gate to investor-State claims in the field of intellectual property.

Musical instruments occupy a unique place in the cultural heritage constellation, and yet, neither scholarly literature nor legislative texts take account of this unique status. In particular, movable instruments are considered as a- stand-alone category for export purposes, whereas a fairer approach would call into consideration their performative potential and artistic history. A violin which is not played is worth only part of its artistic potential, and along analogous lines, a violin which is played in an out-of-context manner does not fulfill the promises it was crafted for. An instrument’s links to its reference community of composers, interpreters, listeners, artisans and intellectuals should be factored in when it comes to deciding whether a musical treasure is worth more leaving a country or remaining therein. On top of this, the law should refrain from perpetuating a dichotomy — that between tangible and intangible heritage — which is at best simplistic and, regarding music, decidedly unhelpful. The more the link of a musical treasure to a country is genuine and time-proof, and the more precious and playable that instrument is, the more such a treasure should be allowed to circulate, by reason of joint cultural and economic arguments. The true specificity of this cultural heritage category should be met with policy special care in all relevant scenarios, including appropriation by former colonies and regime conflicts with, for example, environmental or private property law.

The global cybersecurity discourse has never proven more fragmented than in the aftermath of the failure of the last United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security. This discourse stands trapped in long-lasting and seemingly crystallized normative stances between “the West” and “the East,” yet it also calls upon the international community to regulate a wide spectrum of phenomena, ranging from thefts of digitally-stored trade secrets to large-scale pervasive attacks, which may soon reach the threshold of armed attacks. If one situates the major cybersecurity players on a sliding scale between freedom and control over cyber content and infrastructure, the mainstream stance would place the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, China, and Russia in that order. Nonetheless, this scale is in practice more complex, in part due to the influence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a regional security forum which has witnessed major rebalancing after the membership expansion in June 2017. This paper scrutinizes India’s contribution towards a possible fragmentation of the “Eastern” cybersecurity discourse based on hard laws and state assertiveness, and the consequent disruption of the constructivist East-West binary dialectic about cyberwarfare, cyberterrorism, cyber espionage, and online data protection. By simultaneously negotiating its sub-alterity and rejecting its subalternity, India holds the potential to reshape an otherwise almost-coherent “cyber East.”

This paper discusses the effect of the constitutionalisation of the EU’s legal framework on European integration. The first section deals with the evolution of the Treaties as a pathway towards increasing legal integration. The second section discusses the EU’s evolving constitutional doctrine. The remaining sections provide supportive evidence to back up the previously introduced arguments, drawing on a number of important issues such as division of competences and human rights, leaving an input for further research on the impact of Brexit on the matter.

This paper is aimed at providing a concise historically-informed as well as theoretically-updated account of the “state of the art” regarding the European Court of Human Rights’ understanding of torture, drawing on both the preventive measures adopted by the Council of Europe and the judgemental criteria established via the massive jurisprudence of the aforementioned Court. A number of key-cases are scrutinized through comparative lenses, with particular emphasis on the long-lasting, uneven relationship with the UK rulers, not to mention the controversial membership of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Turkey. Several issues and conceptual frameworks are examined, building on an extensive academic and non-academic literature. Among them: the disputed threshold between “torture” and “inhuman/degrading treatment”; the "priority policy" of the Court; the so-called “ticking bomb”-justification; the practice of incommunicado detention; and the duty to introduce evidences before the Court.

Le dispute territoriali eritree (II): Sudan ed Etiopia L'Eritrea, un Paese autarchico, dittatoriale, di recente costituzione, i cui rapporti con i vicini sono attraversati da tensioni sempre pronte a (ri)trasformarsi in conflitto. I pessimi rapporti con la comunità internazionale e lo scarso interesse nella diplomazia delle Nazioni Unite hanno condotto Asmara all'incapacità di estinguere i contenziosi aperti lungo tutti e quattro i confini: con Yemen, Gibuti, Sudan ed Etiopia. Un caso pressoché unico al mondo Seconda parte (Qui la prima parte dell'analisi) ERITREA VS. ETIOPIA: SI CONFLIGGE LONTANI DALLE CORTI TRADIZIONALI – Anche nel caso della controversia territoriale fra Eritrea ed Etiopia, così come già sottolineato essere avvenuto per i contenziosi con Yemen e Gibuti, la strada scelta per tentare una risoluzione pacifica della questione è stata quella dell'arbitrato internazionale: arbitrato che peraltro, unitamente agli altri che coinvolgono il territorio eritreo, sta già facendo scuola, per quanto nessuno strumento giuridico sovranazionale sia al momento capace di garantire l'efficacia in sede esecutiva di qualsivoglia decisione assunta e teoricamente accettata su base consensuale. Il dilemma in esame era sorto nel 1993, all'indomani della proclamazione d'indipendenza da parte dell'Eritrea, i cui confini con l'Etiopia non erano stati regolati e non potevano essere automaticamente considerati congruenti a quelli dell'ex colonia italiana − anche questi ultimi, a ogni modo, erano rimasti piuttosto labili nell'ottica della speranza fascista di espandersi ulteriormente quanto prima nel Corno d'Africa. Suona strano oggi pensare a Eritrea ed Etiopia come a due comunità in conflitto, se si ricorda la cooperazione posta in atto un quarto di secolo fa per il rovesciamento della dittatura di Mènghistu Hailè Mariàm, che portò allo sdoppiamento di potere tra le due attuali capitali. Una cooperazione che, come spesso accade, venuta meno la convenienza della contingenza, non ha sostenuto il peso di una differenza etnica troppo accentuata. Anche in questo rapporto di Chatham House si sottolinea l'incredibile numero di accordi e ritrattazione degli stessi tra Paesi del Corno d'Africa: fenomeno che certo si registra un po' ovunque, ma che tra Etiopia, Eritrea, Sudan e Somalia si fa carico di una rapidità impressionante, rendendo difficoltoso per i Governi occidentali (ma anche per altre potenze quali quella cinese) intervenire con tempismo rispettando una strategia coerente. Si reputa degno di nota chiarire che la fragilità dei confini, riferibile all'intero continente africano, ha in verità radici ben più profonde, andando a incunearsi nell'estraneità del concetto di " confine " rigidamente demarcato nell'Africa pre-coloniale. Inoltre, più la conquista coloniale è stata fulminea e/o brutale, più l'accettazione di confini definitivi ne ha risentito, con effetti long-term che si protraggono ancora oggi. A ogni modo, dopo l'intervento ONU con la missione UNMEE scaturita dall'Accordo di Algeri (12 dicembre 2000) e terminata nel 2008 per le scarse

L'esperienza quotidiana ci porta a prendere atto di un incremento dell'emigrazione dall'Africa che è vero, esiste, ma rappresenta solo la punta di un fenomeno molto più profondo. Quelli africani sono popoli che si spostano continuamente da una regione all'altra del continente, in proporzioni enormi, alla ricerca di momentaneo conforto a carestie, conflitti, persecuzioni etniche o " semplicemente " estrema povertà. Esodi e controesodi in continua crescita, anche in ragione dei trend demografici. Leggi qui la prima parte dell'articolo I FLUSSI INTERCONTINENTALI DELLE MIGRAZIONI AFRICANE − Nella prima parte di questa analisi abbiamo affermato che i migranti africani che scelgono il " ricco Occidente " sono solo la punta di un iceberg di colossali dimensioni, e forse proprio le statistiche − comunque impressionanti − delle traversate nel Mediterraneo ci restituiscono una buona immagine di quali siano i numeri complessivi dei fenomeni migratori che interessano il continente nero. Un aspetto " nuovo " da evidenziare è che in conseguenza dei recenti accadimenti mediorientali (in primo luogo ovviamente l'ascesa dello Stato Islamico e il collasso della Siria), l'Africa è divenuta a livello intercontinentale non solo emissaria di migranti, ma anche destinataria, con centinaia di migliaia di profughi siriani che invece di dirigersi verso Giordania, Libano e Turchia, cercano di attraversare l'Egitto, un po' per tentare l'imbarco ad Alessandria, la maggior parte per proseguire verso la Libia e la Tunisia. Vita dura quella dei migranti siriani in suolo egiziano, considerati come sono dal Governo di al-Sisi una sorta di «manovalanza dei Fratelli Musulmani» (citando un'espressione del Corriere della Sera), perciò torturati e incarcerati a tempo indeterminato. D'altro canto, il caso dei siriani è un'eccezione alla norma che vede ogni anno decine di migliaia di giovani africani partire per altri continenti: i più fortunati, brillanti ghanesi o nigeriani o sudafricani che hanno avuto l'opportunità di studiare sognano le migliori università inglesi, belghe e statunitensi per poi tornare rarissimamente (4%) in patria; gli altri, si affidano a conoscenze di fortuna e alla buona sorte con il miraggio di un Occidente capace di offrire opportunità migliori. Molte donne scarsamente istruite, allettate dall'idea di guadagni facili, finiscono nelle maglie del racket della prostituzione in mano alla criminalità organizzata. Le politiche UE di contrasto all'immigrazione sono risultate particolarmente efficaci verso il Marocco, riducendo drasticamente gli sbarchi nella penisola iberica: si potrebbe comunque argomentare che gran parte di chi non è riuscito a imbarcarsi per la Spagna ha virato verso

Il Montenegro e l'Occidente: scenari futuri Dal referendum per l'indipendenza nel 2006, il Montenegro si è avvicinato in modo rapidissimo al sistema atlantico, con negoziati avviati con UE e NATO: un orientamento strategico che sottrae ulteriore terreno d'influenza alla Russia di Putin. E come spesso accade, porre l'accento sulle dinamiche culturali ci aiuta ad approfondire la complessità delle relazioni diplomatiche condotte da questo piccolo Stato affacciato sull'Adriatico meridionale. UN PAESE GIOVANE NEL FRAGILE CONTESTO POSTBELLICO DEI BALCANI – Vita breve, quella dello Stato di Serbia e Montenegro: sorto nel 2003 sulle ceneri del processo disgregativo dell' ex Jugoslavia, si è infranto nel 2006 contro lo scoglio di un referendum che ha statuito l'indipendenza del Montenegro. Già dal 2002, però, grazie alla mediazione di Bruxelles, le due realtà si erano andate a comporre in una confederazione de facto (disponendo ambedue di piena sovranità in molte aree di competenza). Tutto fuorché un plebiscito, quello del 2006, con una percentuale di favorevoli di poco superiore al limite del 55%: certo, Belgrado non aveva sufficiente capacità di traino economico in quanto ancora sofferente a causa delle sanzioni post conflitto bosniaco, ma la composizione etnica della popolazione era (ed è) troppo eterogenea per sviluppare un pieno sentimento identitario. Un Paese giovane, fatto di giovani (relativamente al contesto europeo): la media si attesta sui 37 anni; conseguenza immediata, la mancanza di un vero e proprio establishment politico e industriale, nonché la mancata espressione di un sentimento nazionale dalle radici consolidate. Embed from Getty Images Fig. 1 – Il 1° marzo 2012 il Consiglio europeo ha concesso lo status ufficiale di Paese candidato alla Serbia, mentre aveva già concesso il medesimo status al Montenegro il 17 dicembre 2010 LA PROIEZIONE DI PODGORICA NELLA COMUNITÀ INTERNAZIONALE – Benché irrilevante per estensione territoriale, e forse ancor più per entità demografica, quella montenegrina è una realtà tutt'altro che avulsa di significato per gli attuali movimenti dello scacchiere geopolitico: il suo orientamento a Occidente – ormai prossimo a siglare i passi decisivi – frena con risolutezza qualsivoglia eventuale mira russa di espandere la propria influenza nella regione, in seguito al ritrovato ruolo di peso conquistato da Putin con il braccio di ferro in Ucraina, ma più segnatamente con la presenza militare e politica nell'intricato groviglio siriano. Quello che poteva essere il principale teatro di scontro tra una rinvigorita Russia e un sempreverde cappello

Il Mali: un territorio sospeso Sospeso tra un Nordafrica in ricerca di rinnovati assetti politici e una dimensione subsahariana che sta tentando di rendere sostenibile la crescita delle proprie economie, tra conflitti interni e terrorismo, tra il disinteresse dei media occidentali e l'azione sotterranea delle diplomazie. Tutto questo è il Mali. LE INGENUITÀ DI IERI – La conformazione territoriale del Mali contemporaneo, con quelle due fasce di terra poste al di sotto del Maghreb che si allargano a Nord-Est e Sud-Ovest a partire da uno stretto corridoio centrale, e quel confine con la Mauritania quasi ad angolo retto che pare un esercizio di geometria analitica, sembra incarnare efficacemente quel paradigma in ordine al quale per ridisegnare le estremità dei Paesi, nella storia del continente africano, si è fin troppo spesso utilizzato il righello degli interessi piuttosto che la complessità della sapienza socio-antropologica, la matita della frettolosa ambizione personale in luogo dell'approfondimento delle complessità etniche, delle appartenenze, dei legami di sangue, delle culture ufficiali e delle subculture informali. Nonostante il semplicismo delle scelte passate, impossibile sperare che un Paese confezionato a tavolino senza riguardo per la geografia umana che lo percorre possa conservare a lungo pace e stabilità, nonché assenza di rivendicazioni territoriali, focolai indipendentisti e rivitalizzazioni di estremismi del più ampio respiro. Questo infatti è ciò che sta accadendo oggi in Mali, e che in verità accade fin dai primi passi successivi alla decolonizzazione; ma prima di procedere con qualche considerazione sui movimenti endogeni ed esogeni che impattano sul Mali in questi ultimi anni, è utile riprendere brevemente le questioni fondamentali – e ormai quasi secolari – che ne costituiscono il fulcro originario. View image | gettyimages.com Fig. 1 – Ribelli tuareg in Mali UNA CONTESA DI LUNGO CORSO – Il continente africano è percorso a ogni latitudine da conflitti cosiddetti " etnici " di media e larga scala, e accade spesso che a negoziare tra lo Stato e i gruppi separatisti siano non solo i rappresentanti delle reciproche parti, ma anche – e soprattutto – alcuni Paesi confinanti, o nazioni europee che dal punto di vista geostrategico e commerciale si sentano parti in causa particolarmente coinvolte. Accade poi quasi sempre che tali condizioni vengano a coincidere, e cioè che a negoziare tra le istituzioni dello Stato e le fazioni di ribelli sia la potenza regionale limitrofa maggiormente vicina all'UE, solitamente come retaggio del trascorso coloniale. E quando la questione arriva ai tavoli del Servizio Europeo per l'Azione Esterna – SEAE (la cosiddetta " diplomazia europea ")-, ecco che un gioco di diplomazie multilivello si manifesta in tutte le

Burundi e Ruanda: due Paesi, un destino Burundi e Ruanda non condividono solo una trascorsa unità territoriale, ma anche una tragedia che si potrebbe specularmente trasporre da un confine all'altro senza alcuna differenza. Da decenni i due Paesi sono insanguinati da conflitti etnici il cui culmine nel 1994 ha sconvolto l'opinione pubblica di tutto il mondo. Ora è forte il rischio di una ripresa degli scontri, dovuta ai recenti accadimenti politici burundesi. POCO TERRITORIO, TROPPO SANGUE − Se considerassimo il territorio di Piemonte e Valle d'Aosta e lo trasferissimo al centro dell'Africa sub-sahariana, nell'area dei Grandi Laghi, otterremmo una rappresentazione piuttosto fedele del Burundi sia a livello di estensione che di geomorfologia. La modestia del territorio burundese fa da contrappasso all'enormità della tragedia umanitaria di cui tale Paese è testimone da almeno quattro decenni, insieme al confinante Ruanda. Neanche 21 milioni gli abitanti censiti nei due Paesi, ma i flussi di disperati che a ogni rivitalizzazione del conflitto si spostano tra Kigali e Bujumbura assumono sempre dimensioni di svariate centinaia di migliaia di individui, con inevitabili conseguenze non solo sullo sviluppo economico, ma anche sull'efficacia dei timidi interventi che la comunità internazionale prova a porre in campo ogni volta che il problema si ripresenta. Uno dei tanti casi in cui il cosiddetto " Occidente " (nel duplice registro di sistema di valori e macro-regione geopolitica) ha originato una frattura ritenendo di poterla utilizzare a proprio arbitrio, per poi accorgersi di non possedere strumenti atti a governarla, risultandone infine sconfitto. Ciò che oggi definiamo " conflitto di matrice etnica " altro non è che la sommatoria di semplificazioni definitorie e categorizzazioni forzate adottate dal colonizzatore europeo, che hanno alimentato, nel secolo scorso, una patologica attenzione e reciproca repressione delle differenze (prima sconosciuta). View image | gettyimages.com Fig. 1 – Foto all'indomani del genocidio in Ruanda (1994) IL RUANDA-URUNDI, POSSEDIMENTO MANDATARIO BELGA − Una piccola e organizzata minoranza, si sa, è ben più facile da controllare rispetto a una disomogenea e dispersiva maggioranza: questo devono aver pensato anche i belgi al momento di stabilire un assetto amministrativo per i territori controllati. Caso emblematico quello del Ruanda-Urundi, passato da mano tedesca (Protettorato dell'Africa Orientale) a controllo belga con il beneplacito della Società delle Nazioni dopo la disfatta di Berlino nel primo conflitto mondiale: si decise allora di affidare il potere a pochi Batutsi (Abanyaruguru e Abahima), escludendo pressoché totalmente i Bahutu e i Batwa. Sebbene ormai quasi tutte le fonti concordino nel ritenere non sostanziali le differenze culturali e

Dopo la Conferenza di Nairobi, Tokyo è pronta. Mentre l’Occidente guarda a Est, l’Est guarda a Sud, preparandosi a esportare in Africa una competizione che nell’acque dell’Oceano Pacifico si fa sempre più tesa. Cina e Giappone non devono scontare pregressi errori coloniali, né preoccuparsi di accordi di compromesso su migrazioni e terrorismo: hanno mano libera nel proporsi ai leaders africani come esempi rampanti di progressi possibili, e diversissimi. Una diversità concorrenziale, che si spera apporti un contributo positivo all’Africa di domani.