In this piece, the five-part RENFORCE blog series on the new Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) is introduced by Urszula Jaremba.

The FSR – adopted in December 2022, and due to enter into force next week – is an extraordinary piece of EU legislation. Whereas its primary goal is to address distortions on the internal market brought on by subsidies granted by non-EU governments to undertakings active in the EU, the new rules interact and intersect with various EU regulatory regimes in the areas of antitrust, public procurement, and Common Commercial Policy. At the same time, under this novel regulatory regime, the European Commission is designated new, extensive and exclusive enforcement powers which, in turn, give rise to various questions of institutional and constitutional nature pertaining to the democratic foundations of the European Union.

Whereas this blog post offers a general introduction to this new and fascinating regulatory regime and its main features, other authors (details below) will shed light on the FSR from the perspective of their own academic disciplines.

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The functioning of technologies largely relies on standards – technical specifications that ensure that devices, systems and networks “talk” to each other. Due to the rapid pace of digital development, standards are increasingly assuming regulatory, economic and societal roles. How do these standards come to being? How, if at all, can their increasing regulatory function be legitimized? And what is their role in the current legal order? In her new book, Olia Kanevskaia attempts to provide answers to these and many other legal questions arising around ICT standardization.

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For Cedric Ryngaert, there are limits to the duty to freeze assets of persons listed under the EU sanctions regime against Russia. In particular, he approves of a recent decision of the District Court of Amsterdam, which held that a listed shareholder in a Dutch corporation should not be barred from voting regarding matters of corporate governance. He argues that such voting need not result in funds being transferred to Russia, which could be used to fund the war in Ukraine. Still, he believes that the Court of Justice of the EU may want to give more guidance on the matter on the basis of a preliminary ruling.

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For Ruairí Harrison and Anne Koopmans, as the intrigue into the final contours of the Digital Services Act (DSA) is displaced by an anticipation as to the Act’s impact on both the user experience and platform transparency, the emphasis on social media platforms is hard to avoid. Yet as the dust similarly settles on the Joe Rogan-Neil Young controversy for Spotify, how will the DSA impact Europe’s leading streaming service? Further, is the DSA appropriately ‘future proof’ to address Spotify’s increasingly diversified business model or is there a necessity for focused regulatory action on digital streaming services?

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In November 2020, the European Commission published its LGBTIQ Equality Strategy 2020-2025, committing to improving the recognition of trans and non-binary identities, and intersex people. For Leens van Kessel, LLB student at Utrecht University, the European protection of the human rights of transgender persons would benefit from a clearer application of what she dubs the ‘comparator approach’ in CJEU cases regarding discrimination on grounds of gender recognition.

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What if law enforcement had the power to take down an entire phone network? How comfortable would you feel if your messages were exposed and viewed at length? When the EncroChat network was compromised by French law enforcement in 2020, questions were raised not only about the capability to access highly secure information, but also how the presumption of innocence is afforded to criminal suspects pre-trial. For current Utrecht LLM student Suzanne Flynn, as trends in law enforcement progress towards detection rather than reaction, the takedown of the EncroChat network encapsulates a sea change in the area of encryption and the law enforcement response thereto.

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When the European Commission announced its upcoming Media Freedom Act (MFA) last year, many were taken aback by what seemed a bold step into the Fourth Pillar of Democracy. Yet within months of its announcement, the indispensable nature of a pluralistic media would be brought to bear beyond the former Eastern Bloc as Russian citizens fail to recognise the atrocities their armed forces are committing in Ukraine due to the non-existence of independent Russian media. As media freedom is also contracting in Europe, Ruairí Harrison assesses the Commission’s proposed approach to both reimagine and reinforce media freedom in the EU-27.

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In its recent judgments in bpost and Nordzucker, the CJEU held – in essence – that to prevent a violation of the ne bis in idem guarantee in Article 50 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, public authorities need to cooperate and coordinate their punitive enforcement actions, also when they are active in different policy areas or in other jurisdictions. According to Michiel Luchtman, the paradoxical result seems to be that to prevent one fundamental right from being violated, it is necessary to accept (sometimes intrusive) interferences with other rights. Has the Court now entered a slippery slope, eliminating fundamental rights barriers, to promote the effective enforcement of EU law? And if so, at the expense of what?

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Ukraine is ‘one of us and we want them in’, said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on 27 February 2022, in response to Ukraine’s bid for membership. In this post, Machiko Kanetake argues that the EU’s response regarding Ukraine’s accession should not reproduce a fundamental ambivalence underlying the EU’s relations with its eastern neighbourhood.

This post is the fifth and last in a series drawing on a RENFORCE expert seminar on the EU’s response to the war in Ukraine, held online on 8^th March 2022. It follows analysis of the EU’s response to the migratory flow, the EU’s decision to provide weapons to Ukraine, the EU’s economic sanctions, and the role of social media in times of war.

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Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, European media and social networks have been flooded with information and videos from both sides. The info-media war between Russia and Ukraine plays a key role in this conflict. For guest contributor Noemi Mena Montes, Ukraine is winning the narrative – read her blogpost to understand how.

The post is the fourth in a series drawing on a RENFORCE expert seminar on the EU’s response to the war in Ukraine, held online on 8^th March 2022, and follows analysis of the EU’s response to the migratory flow from Ukraine, the EU’s decision to provide weapons to Ukraine, and the EU’s economic sanctions against Russia. Stay tuned to RENFORCE Blog for further commentary on the EU’s neighbourhood policies and Ukraine.

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