<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

India was the first country in South Asia to establish diplomatic relations with the European Economic Community (EEC). Once, the country was one of the top beneficiaries of the EEC development assistance. However, this article traces the evolution of development policy with India and how the relationship has evolved between the two partners over time. Particularly, the discussion focuses on the development cooperation between the European Union (EU) and India from 1957 to 2020. A major shift took place in 2004 when the EU and India became strategic partners, and India is the only country from South Asia that has established a strategic partnership with the EU. The study also explores the founding principles of the relationship between both partners. The qualitative research method is applied here in the empirical setting to explain the crux of diplomatic relations and development cooperation. Likewise, we found here, through the latest results, that EU–India relations were established and strengthened in the past decade. The EU also concluded some trade negotiations, but the complete free-trade agreements (FTAs) are still in the dialogue phase.
</abstract>

Evolution of the European Union Development Policy towards India

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The article investigates whether there is a need for legislative action in social networks—which are similar to broadcasting—to ensure that diversity of opinion can be sufficiently expressed to protect freedom of opinion-forming. The investigation focuses on Facebook because it has the largest number of registered users worldwide and is thus the network with the greatest reach. First and foremost, it will be debated whether social networks have a power of opinion comparable to broadcasting. Based on this foundation, it is possible to assess the extent to which diversity of opinion is expressed in social networks and the extent to which freedom to form opinions is actually under threat.
</abstract>

Threats to Diversity of Opinion and Freedom of Expression via Social Media

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COVID-19 has had a major influence on the educational system. Since March 2020, the majority of teaching and learning has taken place online, including in the adult education sector. At the same time, the speedy transformation to the online mode has raised various legal issues, particularly regarding data protection, intellectual property rights, and compliance with the national legal framework. This article aims to analyse the compliance of online learning and teaching in adult education programmes with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and, on the basis of that, make recommendations to adult education entities that offer online teaching and learning process. To achieve the aim, the author uses the following research methods: a doctrinal research method, a scientific literature review, and a survey. As a result, the author identifies various legal issues regarding personal data protection during recording online teaching and learning, such as compliance with the GDPR requirements during online lecturing, compliance of e-platform providers with the GDPR, unauthorised access, data loss, and cyberattacks.
</abstract>

Selected Legal Issues in Online Adult Education: Compliance of Online Learning and Teaching Process with GDPR

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The following desk research was conducted in the framework of the Horizon 2020 project Mediatized EU to study how media discourses have been constructed to foster or hamper the European project and how they resonated among the public, by focusing on the elite–media–public triangle. This is an in-depth longitudinal review of the existing academic literature, policy developments, and available data on the transformation of media discourses, elite views, and public opinion on the EU and Europeanization in Estonia, Estonia’s path towards European integration, and the ways in which the media has influenced public opinion throughout the last twenty years since Estonia joined the European Union.
</abstract>

Elite Agenda, Media Framing, and Public Perception of European Integration in Estonia

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In order to continue to grow and prosper, modern society is increasingly adopting the products of companies, institutions, and organizations providing credit services. However, as a result, dissolution of a marriage tends to pose problems and raises unavoidable questions concerning the determination of the nature of the obligations of the spouses and the division of these obligations, which is why it is quite common in divorce cases for a third party, a creditor whose interests also need to be protected, to be involved. In cases concerning family relations, protection of the public interest predominates because protection of the legal interests of the spouses as well as the creditors must be guaranteed, also the proportionality of the protection of the legal interests between the parties must be achieved, because everyone has the right to defend their violated rights, and the state must ensure the protection of those legal interests. However, this protection is often compromised due to the lack of information available to notaries, which could be alleviated by more extensive use of technology. The article’s aim is to analyze the amendments to the Civil Code of the Republic of Lithuania as of 1 January 2023 concerning extrajudicial divorce at a notary, its advantages and drawbacks, as well as to discuss the existing and the possibility of adaptation of new technological solutions with an aim of improving the protection of creditors in the divorce process.
</abstract>

Department of Law, Faculty of Business Management

Divorce at the Notary: Protection of Creditors’ Interests

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The spread of online databases and the increasingly sophisticated search solutions in the past 10–15 years have opened up many new opportunities for lawyers to find relevant documents. However, it is still a common problem that the various legal databases and legal search engines face an information crisis. Legal database providers use various information extraction solutions, especially named entity recognition (NER), to mitigate this problem. These solutions can improve the relevance of the lists of results. Their limitation, however, is that they can only extract and create searchable metadata entities if the latter have a well-defined location or regularity in the text. Therefore, the next era of search support for legal databases is semantic processing. Semantic processing solutions are fundamentally different from information extraction and NER because they do not only extract and make visible and/or searchable the specific information element contained in the text but allow for the analytical analysis of the text as a whole. In addition, in many cases, legal database developments using machine learning can be a significant burden on a company, as it is not always known what kind of an AI solution is needed, and how the providers could compare the different solutions. Legal database providers need to customize processing their documents and texts in the most optimal way possible, considering all their legal, linguistic, statistical, or other characteristics. This is where text processing pipelines can help. So, the article reviews the two main natural language processing (NLP) solutions which can help legal database providers to increase the value of legal data within legal databases. The article then shows the importance of text-processing pipelines and frameworks in the era of digitized documents and presents the digital-twin-distiller.
</abstract>

How Could Semantic Processing and Other NLP Tools Improve Online Legal Databases?

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Contemporary technology and artificial intelligence increasingly facilitate the delivery of justice by automating, accelerating, and supporting judicial procedures with digitisation and automation tools. This article analyses options for the automatisation of the European Small Claims Procedure. The authors propose the digitisation of the procedure to a greater extent by additional features, such as AI-powered translation and text-to-speech tools, as well as creation of a trustworthy system for submission and storing of procedural documents based on the Estonian e-File example within the framework of the ongoing EU-funded SCAN II-project.
</abstract>

Automation Within a Novel Platform for the European Small Claims Procedure

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The rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) in recent years has brought about significant changes in many social sectors such as communication, economy, entertainment, and others. To define the key role that ICT plays in its development course, the European Union (EU) has developed a composite indicator, the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), to assess the digital policy performance of its Member States. In the current work, an attempt is made to evaluate the performance of the EU countries on the digital economy and society with respect to implemented EU digital policies by studying the five dimensions of the DESI for the years 2014–2019, using the corresponding DESI reports (DESI 2015 – DESI 2020). Moreover, the digital convergence among EU Member States, in terms of similarity of their performance in the five dimensions of the DESI by grouping them according to the optimal number of clusters, is also examined. Since the optimal number of clusters is two, EU Member States are classified in two groups, one of high and one of low performance in the five dimensions of the DESI. The evolution of each member country and the possible transitions from one group to another during the years 2014–2019 is also a point of interest. The grouping of EU Member States into the two clusters showed that socioeconomic factors may affect the overall DESI. Linear mixed effect models confirm the positive effect of Gross Domestic Product per capita, the public expenditure for education and research and development (R&amp;D) on the DESI and the negative effect of the average number of weekly working hours. The results could be used to reform the existing EU digital policies and identify areas where further improvement is needed.
</abstract>

Evolution of the Digital Economy and Society Index in the European Union: Α Socioeconomic Perspective

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 13 (2023): Issue 2 (December 2023)

Volume 13 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Volume 12 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 12 (2022): Issue 1 (May 2022)

Volume 11 (2021): Issue 2 (September 2021)

Volume 11 (2021): Issue 1 (May 2021)

Volume 10 (2020): Issue 3 (December 2020)

Volume 10 (2020): Issue 2 (September 2020)

Volume 10 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

Volume 9 (2019): Issue 4 (December 2019)

Volume 9 (2019): Issue 3 (September 2019)

Volume 9 (2019): Issue 2 (September 2019)

Volume 9 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

Volume 8 (2018): Issue 2 (September 2018)

Volume 8 (2018): Issue 1 (June 2018)

Volume 7 (2017): Issue 2 (October 2017)

Volume 7 (2017): Issue 1 (June 2017)

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

Volume 6 (2016): Issue 1 (February 2016)

Volume 5 (2015): Issue 2 (October 2015)

Volume 5 (2015): Issue 1 (February 2015)

Volume 4 (2014): Issue 2 (October 2014)

Volume 4 (2014): Issue 1 (June 2014)

Volume 3 (2013): Issue 3 (December 2013)

Volume 3 (2013): Issue 2 (October 2013)

Volume 3 (2013): Issue 1 (June 2013)

TalTech Journal of European Studies

 TalTech Journal of European Studies (abbreviation TJES) is a semiannual international peer-reviewed research journal (formerly known as the Baltic Journal of European Studies and Proceedings of the Institue for European Studies) with an international editorial office and extensive international editorial board. The journal is abstracted in SCOPUS, Web of Science (Emerging Sources Citation Index) and other relevant databases. Since 2020, the scope of the journal is related to digitalisation and technology implementation and their impact in the social, legal, political, economic and cultural domains in the European Union and its Member States. We kindly encourage members of the academic community to contribute to our journal. Papers submitted to the forthcoming issues will be reviewed by eminent scholars in the particular field under strict supervision of the international editorial board. Special issues   BJES 2013 Vol. 3 Issue 3 was guest co-edited by Natalia Chaban and Martin Holland (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)  BJES 2014 Vol. 4 Issue 2 was prepared in cooperation with Latvian European Community Studies Association (LECSA)  BJES 2017 Vol. 7 Issue 2 has been supported by the European Commission’s Jean Monnet Module “Digital Single Market as a New Core of European Union Studies”, project reference number 587255-EPP-1-2017-1-EE-EPPJMO-MODULE.   BJES 2018 Vol. 8 Issues 1 and 2 have been supported by the project ‘Digital Single Market as a Key Element in EU-oriented Georgian Higher Education’ (no. 155-2016-A), funded by the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the framework of Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid. TJES 2023 Vol. 13 Issue 1 was guest edited by Viktorija Skvarciany (Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania).      Why submit  TJES is an effective channel of academic dissemination as it is widely read and distributed through Baltic and European research networks and libraries and read by policy makers as well.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 