Testing limited environmental liability against human rights requirements. IES WORKING PAPER 3/2009

Questions regarding oil spills remain high on the political agenda. Legal scholars, legislators as well as the international, European and national Courts struggle to determine key issues, such as who is to be held liable for oil spills, under which conditions and for which damage. The international regime on oil spills was meant to establish an “equilibrium” between the needs of the victims (being compensated for their harm) and the needs of the economic actors (being able to continue their activities). There is, however, a constantly increasing array of legal scholars’ work that criticizes the regime. Indeed, the victims of a recent oil spill, the Erika, have tried to escape the international regime on oil spills and to rely instead on the provisions of national criminal law or EC waste legislation. In parallel, the EC legislator has questioned the sufficiency of the international regime, as it has started preparing legislative acts of its own. One can in fact wonder whether challenging the international liability regime with the European Convention on Human Rights could prove to be a way forward, both for the EC regulators as well as the victims of oil spills. This paper claims that the right to property, as enshrined in Article P1-1 of the Human Rights Convention, could be used to challenge the limited environmental liability provisions of the international frameworks.

ICT for growth: a targeted approach. Bruegel Policy Contribution 2012/10, June 2012

This Policy Contribution assesses the broad obstacles hampering ICT-led growth in Europe and identifies the main areas in which policy could unlock the greatest value. We review estimates of the value that could be generated through take-up of various technologies and carry out a broad matching with policy areas. According to the literature survey and the collected estimates, the areas in which the right policies could unlock the greatest ICT-led growth are product and labour market regulations and the European Single Market. These areas should be reformed to make European markets more flexible and competitive. This would promote wider adoption of modern data-driven organisational and management practices thereby helping to close the productivity gap between the United States and the European Union. Gains could also be made in the areas of privacy, data security, intellectual property and liability pertaining to the digital economy, especially cloud computing, and next generation network infrastructure investment. Standardisation and spectrum allocation issues are found to be important, though to a lesser degree. Strong complementarities between the analysed technologies suggest, however, that policymakers need to deal with all of the identified obstacles in order to fully realise the potential of ICT to spur long-term growth beyond the partial gains that we report.