Institutional actors as international law-makers in Business and Human Rights: The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and beyond

Business and human rights is an interdisciplinary field, which advocates that both state and businesses are duty-holders of human rights obligations. The area of business and human rights aims to regulate and prevent negative impact of business operations at all levels of global supply chains. The approach of international law in this regard has so far been piecemeal. States have been traditionally a principal participant in the international community. Nonetheless, this article aims to test arguments submitted by Jovanović in his 2019 book "The Nature of International Law" that institutional non-state actors are capable of creating international legal rules. Equipped with this knowledge, this article argues that the UN Human Rights Council has through adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights restated human rights obligations of states and indirectly of corporations in international law in order to protect the dignity of rights-holders in local and global environments

Anonymous birth versus child's right to identity

The right to identity of the child, internationally recognized by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, is one of the most important in the corpus of child rights. Its structure is complex since it includes several narrower rights. Nevertheless, the situations where it comes to restriction of the right to identity are not negligible. One of them is the right to anonymous birth, the possibility acknowledged by legislators in a certain number of European countries. Conflicting interests between a mother and a child are inevitable consequence of the anonymous birth. The aim of this article is to compare the right to identity of a child and the mother's right to anonymous birth as insurmountable barrier in determining biological origin. Special attention is paid to the possibility of establishing an adequate balance between their interests, by comparing the importance that national legal system offers to each of them, with appropriate arguments, several different models of motherhood regulations are presented and can be found in European legislations. The analysis also includes the stances of international bodies, especially the European Court of Human Rights.

What makes the securities criminal law system of the United States work: 'All-embracing' 'blanket' securities crimes and the linked enforcement framework

The article explores the key factors that make the securities criminal law of the United States (US), as one of the integral building blocks of the capital markets and securities regulatory system, efficient. This includes the role and characteristics of sectoral (blanket) all-embracing securities crimes enshrined into the federal securities statutes, their nexus with general crimes, the close cooperation of the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and prosecutorial offices, the applicable evidentiary standards, and the fundamental policies undergirding these laws. The rich repository of US experiences should be instructive not only to the Member States of the European Union (EU) striving to forge deeper capital markets but also to those endeavoring to accede the EU (e.g., Serbia), or to create deep capital markets for which efficient prosecution of securities crimes is inevitable.

"Business as unusual": Pandemic concentration of executive powers in Croatia

Faced with the Covid-19 pandemic, countries around the globe responded with a wide range of special measures. Whereas some of them resorted to their constitutional emergency rules, others opted to act through legislation. The author argues that the effects of the legislative approach to the epidemic in Croatia actually resemble the state of an emergency in the proper sense of the word, although the authorities try to present the whole case as a situation of "legal normalcy". More precisely, the author claims that in practice the adopted model produces concentration of power in the executive branch far beyond what one could expect in ordinary times. To prove that, the author analyses the Croatian legal anti-epidemic framework through several elements (declaration of emergency, law-making powers, overview of executive emergency actions, parliamentary sittings). Finally, the author argues that the constitutional state of natural disaster in Croatia should have been proclaimed.

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) in Hungary: A Western model, an Eastern illiberal regime, and a case of deferred institutional adaptation

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) is a mode of research, development and innovation (RDI) governance which has proliferated primarily in European states with a tradition and/or culture of participatory and deliberative technology governance. It assumes the existence of open, transparent and accessible policy-making processes, and a culture of responsibility and accountability in government and in the private domain. In Hungary, where RDI is supposed to be the key to economic competitiveness, RRI has never taken root. Examining the regulation of the Hungarian RDI system, it becomes clear that there is a significant degree of institutional incompatibility with the solutions promoted by RRI. More significantly, the contemporary system of government and administration and the prevailing model of policy-making and governance prevent or exclude deliberately the implementation of RRI.

Constitution without a state: The formation of The Kingdom of SCS and "The Vidovdan" Constitution in The constitutional law curriculum in Yugoslavia's successor states

"The Vidovdan" Constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, rendered on 28 June 1921, one hundred years after its adoption, remains an unavoidable topic and an occasion for discussions about the reasons for the failure of the Yugoslav state. The unitarian-centralist system unanimously criticized today as an inadequate constitutional form for the functioning of a complex community such as Yugoslavia was once legitimized by the concept of national unity of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The national conception, the type of state system, and the related disagreements are part of both the political and constitutional history of the states that emerged from the disintegration of Yugoslavia. This paper analyses the content of textbooks of Constitutional Law that are in use at law schools in the successor states, which have existed continuously since the breakup of Yugoslavia until today and are used to educate the vast majority of lawyers in these states. The way in which the shared constitutional history from the first decade of Yugoslavia is presented after the collapse of the socialist paradigm (that mainly was unison) largely follows the national borders of the successor states in terms of its content and interpretation.

Canaries in a coal mine: Rule of law deficiencies and mutual trust

The value decline in the EU has manyfold consequences. It jeopardizes the very essence of Europe as a community of values. At the same time it endangers legal principles, such as mutual recognition, which is based on mutual trust presuming that all Member States are based on the rule of law and protect fundamental rights. Once trust is rebutted, Member States' judicial authorities will refuse to cooperate and recognise each other's judgments in order not to become complicit in individual rights violations and not to contradict the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. This paper argues that EU law must allow for such considerations and suspend mutual recognition-based laws not only on a case-by-case basis, as it happens today in practice, but in general with regard to Member States undergoing rule of law decline, in order to uphold the EU's fundamental rights culture, and EU law's equivalency with the Convention's human rights regime.

Institutional framework of collective consumer protection in the Republic of Serbia: Condition and perspectives

The paper presents the system for protection of consumers' collective interests in the Republic of Serbia and its development perspectives. The paper relies on certain results of the research conducted at the Union University School of Law, as well as on specific comparative legal approaches. The Law on Consumer Protection introduced an administrative procedure for collective consumer protection. Contended arguments in favour of that change were efficiency and low costs of administrative procedure. In practice, administrative protection has proven to be more effective than judicial protection, but the effect of deterring traders from actions that violate consumer rights has not been fully achieved. In that sense, the existing system of protection of consumers' collective interests in Serbia can be improved by modifying certain administrative measures and by introducing specific forms of alternative dispute resolution in Serbian consumer legislation. The novelties brought by the Directive on Representative actions, whose adoption can be expected very soon, have also been presented in the paper.

Nature of Customary international law: All we need is practice

The main objective of this paper is to critically assess the dominant additive theory of the formation of Customary International Law by using the concept of discursive normative practice and the work of Gerald Postema. My central conclusion is that the use of this concept provides an explanation of the process of formation of Customary International Law that is superior to the additive theory which consists of two elements - practice and opinio juris. On the other hand, Postema's theory also has its own weaknesses, and this paper explores ways to improve it.

Constitutional design and destiny of the states: The Weimar Constitution and the St Vitus Day Constitution in comparative perspective

The Weimar Constitution of 1919 and the St Vitus Day Constitution of 1921 were quite different in many aspects. Their comparison is nevertheless of interest not only because it shows some influences of the older one to the younger, but also for the fact that it displays the line of developments of the two countries - Germany and Yugoslavia. If considered from the standpoint of parliamentary government, territorial organization of the two states and some other features the analysis of the respective constitutional developments leads to several conclusions. The two constitutions had their initial shortcomings, but those did not belong to the same area of constitutional law. In Germany they concerned the horizontal separation of powers, whereas in Yugoslavia they belonged to the vertical division of power. Both constitutions under survey ended up in dictatorships. In both countries, attempts were made in the course of history to remedy the initial shortcomings or constructive errors of the two constitutions. In Germany such attempts were successful, which on the contrary was not the case in Yugoslavia. Germany therefore became a well-functioning liberal democracy, while Yugoslavia failed and disappeared.