Volume 6 (2016): Issue 2 (October 2016)

Rising concerns about the spread of cross-border criminal networks and transnational terrorism have transformed the international security arena into a more diverse, fragmented, diffused, less visible and hardly predictable one. Thus, (in)security is more mobile and remote than some decades ago. The establishment of an integrated European security area requires efforts to develop common standards and joint practices in terms of harmonisation of legal systems, advanced integration of security measures and tools, coherence of procedures and shared operational methods of law enforcement. The article discusses the main integration trends, challenges and options of internal security reforms in the European Union (EU) from legal, technological and operational advancement perspectives. It is argued that some harmonisation of criminal law as sharing and pooling of sovereignty has been achieved on the supranational level. The approach of supra-territoriality development is proposed in terms of shared security space management, where enhanced functional needs towards discursive coherence by copulative regulations and technological measures can be innovated to overcome some obstacles in the EU’s security integration and achieve further operational success.

The article intends to analyze the closely correlated concepts of trademark exhaustion and parallel imports. The growing importance of these concepts in the current world, especially in the European Union, makes it an interesting research topic, even though the concepts are complicated due to their nature and different actors involved. The authors use comparative approach, concentrating on two world leaders in the field, in order to discover what is the approach of the EU as well as the approach of the USA to the concepts of trademark exhaustion and parallel imports, what are the benefits and weaknesses of these approaches, and analyze why these markets have arrived at certain conclusions.

This paper seeks to analyse the directive on the application of patients’ rights in cross-border healthcare. Two years after the transposition, it is time for first evaluations of its application, performance and perception. The analysis consists of three major elements: reconstruction of the legal scope and subject matter of the new legislation, conclusions of the evaluative reports monitoring its implementation and performance as well as the public opinion polls revealing the EU citizens’ perception of its details. These three components combined together deliver a picture of the state of play about the pan-European cross-border patients’ mobility. The bottomline conclusions negatively verify the supposition present in some earlier literature on patients’ cross-border mobility that the directive has a transformative potential leading towards the creation of truly competitive pan-European medical market. After two years of its operation, there is still no increased patients’ mobility across EU internal borders observed. As regards the speculations for the future, there are only some weak symptoms identified and they may result in intensified cross-border mobility for healthcare.

The authors propose a novel quantitative method to analyse the structure of legal texts. The method enables to determine grammatical similarity between legal texts. The authors use the external theory of fundamental rights to separate the text of fundamental rights of the Estonian Constitution into two categories of norms: constitutional rights and restrictions. Grammatical similarity between constitutional rights, restrictions and selected legal acts and case law is measured. The layer of special norms renders the best grammatical similarity with the text of fundamental rights. The same grammatical similarity tests can be replicated to cover other jurisdictions in the future. The research is experimental, but the authors believe that the method can be utilised in fields of computational linguistics and legal text mining, but also in research where legal text structures are analysed for various purposes.

On 11 June 2013, the Commission issued the Recommendation on common principles for injunctive and compensatory collective redress mechanisms in the Member States concerning the violations of rights granted under Union law. The main areas where private enforcement of rights granted under Union law in the form of collective redress is of value are consumer protection, competition, environment protection, protection of personal data, financial services legislation and protection of investments. Point 13 of the Recommendation concurrently emphasises that the principles it puts forward relate both to judicial and out-of-court collective redress. The Member States should ensure that judicial collective redress mechanisms are accompanied by appropriate means of collective alternative dispute resolution available to the parties before and throughout the litigation. Point 25 et seq. of the Recommendation then contains special regulations concerning collective alternative dispute resolution and settlements. The purpose of this article is to evaluate if the current legislation on alternative dispute resolution in the Czech Republic meets the principles encompassed in the Recommendation or if radical legal changes need to be adopted.

The article deals with the role of cultural diplomacy in Slavic EU Member States. Its basic idea is to present the main characteristics of cultural diplomacy as a field of possible cooperation between the Slavic EU member countries. The conclusions of the research are three: firstly, the cultural diplomacy of the Slavic EU Member States is fragmented and diversified. Secondly, each country promotes its own cultural diplomacy and there is almost no cooperation between countries in the cultural field. Finally, cultural diplomacy is still an omitted instrument of Slavic EU Member States and a fertile ground for future collaboration within the EU and in the region of Central Europe.

The goal of this paper is to stress the importance of changing the present growth strategy of Central and Eastern European (CEE) economies. The economic model of resource and debt intensive growth they have enjoyed in the past two decades have proved to be ineffective and unsustainable. Given that the CEE growth model cannot be identified separately from the EU as a whole, we try to propose possible policy measures that would stimulate growth in the CEE in context of the policies at the EU level.

In recent years, Poland has become one of the most attractive locations for foreign investment and has strengthened its position in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and throughout Europe. The aim of this paper is to analyse what makes Poland an attractive market for foreign investors, to offer a better understanding of reasons why Poland is a more attractive location compared to its neighbours in the CEE. After surveying Portuguese investors in Poland, our results indicate that the most significant factor determining locating a business in Poland is its large domestic market. Poland’s location is also appreciated by Portuguese investors while deciding on FDI. As indicated by Portuguese investors, the most important obstacles to investment in Poland are language barriers, cultural differences and bureaucracy. These results are relevant for companies who wish to invest in Poland and can also assist policymakers in designing policies to attract FDI.