In Milieudefensie et al. v Royal Dutch Shell, the District Court in the Hague ordered the respondent company to cut its global carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030, as compared with 2019 levels. The landmark judgement represents the first imposition of a specific mitigation obligation on a private company over and above reduction targets set by existing ‘cap‐and‐trade’ regulations and/or other governmental mitigation policies. In interpreting Royal Dutch Shell's duty of care under Dutch tort law, the Court referred extensively to international soft law, including the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. This note considers the implications of this case for corporate responsibility for environmental and human rights.

The Green Deal (GD) and the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) are both central to the EU's environmental, economic and social sustainability, even as many questions persist regarding their processes and outcomes. This article considers both processes as essential catalysts for, and tools of, a more polycentric Europe. It specifically wants to harness the problem‐definition and problem‐solving abilities of such a polycentric system through greater participation, solidarity and trust. By ensuring citizen empowerment through citizen assemblies such as the CoFoE, the success and legitimacy of the GD, as a central part of the EU's sustainability agenda, could be strongly amplified. This article highlights several procedural and substantive overlaps and synergies that present low‐cost, high‐gain opportunities to make these processes mutually reinforcing. More generally, the CoFoE, and possible future iterations, should be central to the EU's democratic integration and its longevity.

Climate litigation has become a permanent fixture in the climate law and policy landscape. Across jurisdictions, climate litigation takes different shapes, with actions based on administrative, civil, or criminal law. An increasing number of cases incorporate human rights, leading to courts inter alia imposing more onerous mitigation obligations on governments and private actors in light of human rights provisions. Several landmark cases in this domain have come from European jurisdictions and have been argued with reference to both the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. An analysis of case law from the European Member States shows that the emerging picture is one of the Charter playing a secondary role to the ECHR. Based on this jurisprudential analysis, this article reflects on the future role of the Charter in climate litigation, and by extension, in shaping environmental human rights.

The European Union’s (EU) approach to safeguarding seed quality and ensuring agricultural productivity includes a range of regulatory measures related to seed marketing, including the restriction of market access to seed varieties that are properly certified. In order for varieties to be properly certified, they have to be registered in a Plant Variety Catalogue. EU seed laws, and their Member State implementation, have traditionally favoured uniform crop production of commercialised breeds over conservation varieties, which has been a contributing factor to crop genetic erosion. The United States’ (U.S.) approach to seed marketing regulation is often presented as an alternative model to the EU’s approach. In the United States, any seed can be indistinctly marketed if properly labelled. In this regulatory framework, certification and registration of seed is voluntary. In light of the continued issues regarding crop genetic erosion and the recent developments in EU seed law reform, this article examines the key elements of both regimes and considers their different approaches to market access for conservation varieties. The most important differences relate to in truth-in-labelling (U.S.) and ex ante quality control mechanisms (EU). These differences highlight that EU and U.S. seed laws must be placed in their respective broader regulatory context and that their relative comparability hinges on policy aims related to seed quality. This raises the broader question as to what the key policy aims of seed laws are and whether these oft-compared regimes are in fact analogous in terms of goals and structure.

The sustainability of complex contractual governance in “hotbeds” depends on steering principles. Ostrom’s design principles provide an analytical framework for robust institutions that enable collective action and cooperative behaviour. The success of Ostrom’s design principles depends on the capacity of social entities to self-govern. This article explores the potential of Ostrom’s design principles as such steering principles for contractual governance in “hotbeds”. We find that the preconditions for successful contractual networks in “hotbeds” and the empirical situations underlying Ostrom’s design principles are comparable. Building on this comparability, we apply Ostrom’s design principles to contractual networks in “hotbeds” area theoretically, and then go on to demonstrate its applied value to three situations in West Papua, Indonesia.