Comparing and contrasting the definitions of genetic data in Chinese and EU law

An old Chinese saying says: “Nature and man joined into one whole” (Tian Ren He Yi). One could think that Chinese political thought, extensively bound to religion, philosophy, and tradition, laid perfect foundations for the implementation of public international law sustainable development principles. However, Chinese totalitarianism irreversibly changed the perception of the relation between humans and nature that used to be deeply rooted in traditional culture. The purpose of this work was to analyze the evolution of Chinese attitude towards sustainable development that serves environmental protection. The key issue concerning the Chinese willingness to fulfill their international obligations concerning sustainable development had to be addressed. Equally important was the question about the integration principle in Chinese law which would imply balancing environmental needs with economic development in all state politics as it does in the EU law under article 11 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The research shows that Chinese environmental law has been notablyshaped by public international law in correlation to its standards and has developed significantly forthe last 35 years. A good example may be the amendment of 2014 of Chinese Environmental Law that implemented expressis verbis sustainable development as a priority before economic development. However, it seems to be a landmark change, opening new research fields considering its future execution. Considering the above, this work concludes with some moderate but ironic optimism linked to the current plan of the People’s Republic of China to build „ecological civilization.”

Legal translation plays a significant role for Chinese law to form self-expression under the global legal pluralism. The launch of the “Belt and Road Initiative” and other comparable strategies necessitates an efficient dissemination of Chinese legal discourse. Chinese law translation is more than just a linguistic exchange; it is an interchange with common law, civil law, or Islamic law; so, Chinese law should communicate new notions freely and considerately. This article finds that EU institutions have been attempting to create a new discourse of EU law, with legal translation playing an essential role. It employs both “familiarization” and “exteriorization” translation strategies to strengthen the formulation and regional recognition of EU law. Comparatively, the translation of Chinese law can benefit from this in order to express legal discourse with Chinese characteristics when combined with a context-oriented translation technique.

The article is devoted to the study of the nature of the digital environment as a social phenomenon and legal category, as well as the peculiarities of legal regulation of private relations in this environment. Based on an analysis of Ukrainian doctrine and legislation, in particular the Law of Ukraine “On Digital Content and Digital Services,” the evolution of the concept of “digital environment” from a doctrinal idea to its legal consolidation is examined. The legal categories of “digital environment,” “cyberspace,” and “metaverse” are compared in national law and legal doctrine, EU law, US law, Chinese law, and international legal discourse. It is shown that international law and EU law are dominated by the category of “cyberspace,” which is focused primarily on public law (security) aspects, while in Ukrainian law, the digital environment is gradually becoming the basic framework for regulating private law relations regarding digital things: digital content, digital services, and virtual assets. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenon of the metaverse as a special segment of the digital environment with a high level of immersion and permanence of virtual spaces. The approaches of the EU, the US, and China to regulating digital platforms, cybersecurity, data, and the metaverse, as well as their impact on models for regulating private relations, have been analyzed. It is noted that the most promising model for Ukraine is one that combines the European approach to protecting human and consumer rights in the digital environment with the doctrinal development of digital objects, digital rights, and digital jurisdiction. It is pointed out that the existing legal definition of the “digital environment” does not fully reflect the entirety and characteristics of this socio-legal phenomenon. A list of characteristics inherent in the digital environment as a socio-legal phenomenon and reflecting the peculiarities of its nature is proposed, in particular: socio-technological nature, transborder (transjurisdictional) nature, subject-oriented dimension, high dynamism and technological determinism of changes, and others. The need to harmonize regulatory and scientific approaches, further systematic modernization of civil legislation, and implementation of the concept of digital constitutionalism and digital rights into the national legal order is emphasized.

The article entitled “Patients’ genetic data protection in Polish law and EU law – selected issues” presents issues related to the protection of patients' rights and focuses on the legal basis for genetic testing and genetic data protection. Based on a comparison of regulations of international law and regulations on genetic tests introduced in foreign legal systems, the text analyzes the assumptions for the draft of the Polish act on genetic tests performed for health purposes. It presents the patient's consent to testing, the scope of information provided to the patient, the right to disclose research results to related persons and the protection of genetic data. In reference to the regulations set out in other acts, it was noted that they do not guarantee the protection of information obtained as a result of research. Due to the particular nature of genetic data, they require increased protection, which can be guaranteed through implementation of the Act on Genetic Research. In the final part, authors presented the most important achievements of the judicature of European Court of Human Rights in the field of genetic data protection.

Systematic construction of lawfulness of processing employees’ personal information under China's personal information protection law

In law and economics, the theory of efficient breach arises from a situation where non-performance of a contract, compared to its performance, might produce higher payoffs to the parties after the contract has been concluded. Under this situation, it is assumed that non-performance of the contract is economically more desirable than performance. Breach is one of the approaches to realizing non-performance. In order to achieve non-performance, the party who has to perform (promisor, obligor or seller) could either breach the contract or negotiate with the other party for a release from the contract. If the party contemplating breach is able to take the benefit and the cost of breach into account, he will breach only when the profit of doing so is higher than other choices. His choice of breach is considered to be efficient as long as he could still make profits after paying damages and the damages he pays could put the non-breaching party in as good a position as he could enjoy had the contract been performed. The central question in this thesis is to what extent the sales law in different legal systems can promote efficient breach and efficiency. Efficiency is the central concept for evaluating remedy rules in different legal systems. In the real world, it is costly for contracting parties to draft perfect contracts ex-ante, which have considered all possible risks, as well as the other party's opportunistic behaviour that might occur after the conclusion of the contract. By the same token, achieving settlements ex-post might also be discouraged by the high negotiation costs. By providing various default rules as well as mandatory rules in relation to different risks, contract law may thus facilitate transactions for instance by filling the contract gap, disambiguating contract terms, motivating efficient behaviour as well as preventing opportunistic behaviour. According to the efficient breach theory, efficient contract rules should enable contracting parties to behave efficiently, for example to only breach a contract when it is efficient to do so but otherwise to take proper measures of performing their contract. This thesis focuses on how different contract law rules shape a seller's incentives to breach efficiently, or more broadly, to take efficient solutions in the situation when strictly performing a sales contract is less efficient than not performing it.

How is globalisation governed? The following article tries to answer this question. Focusing on economic globalisation, it presents the case of the international commodity chain in toys, identifies its various segments or boxes, and then gives examples to illustrate how the chain is governed. The article argues that economic globalisation is governed by the totality of strategically determined, situationally specific, and often episodic conjunctions of a multiplicity of sites throughout the world. These sites include, for example, EU law, United States law, Chinese law, multinational corporation and trade association codes of conduct, international customs conventions, and WTO law. Each of these sites has institutional, normative, and processual characteristics. Though the sites are not isolated from each other, each has its own history, internal dynamics, and distinctive features. Taken together, they represent a new form of global legal pluralism.

EU investment in China has increased dramatically since the early 1990s and is poised to increase further in light of Chinas recent accession to the World Trade Organisation. This book explores and critically appraises the existing legal framework governing EU-China investment relations,particularly EU investment in China. The current legal framework is composed of Chinese law, EU law and applicable international law, but the Chinese law is unsystematic and hard to discover and the EU has acquired only shared external investment competence which is vaguely defined. The applicable international treaties are incomplete, incoherent, or either too general or too specialised. Besides this, the international fora to settle investment disputes are still not readily available. Furthermore while law has played a very important role in decision-making by EU investors, the Chinese legal system is generally perceived as ineffective and lacking in effective enforcement of court and arbitration decisions. What the book demonstrates is that the time is ripe for a new international legal framework for foreign investment in China, and that as EU-China economic and political relations continue to improve, construction of such a framework is not only necessary, but also possible.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform healthcare, but this requires access to health data. Synthetic data generated through training machine learning models on real data offers a way to balance innovation and privacy protection. However, uncertainties in the practical classification of synthetic health data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) currently limits the possible benefits of synthetic data. Through a systematic analysis of relevant legal sources and an empirical study, this article explores whether synthetic data should be classified as personal data under the GDPR. The study investigates the residual identification risk through generating synthetic data and simulating inference attacks, challenging common perceptions of technical identification risk. The risk of identification depends on several factors. The findings suggest synthetic data are often likely anonymous since results of an attack cannot easily be verified. The legal analysis highlights uncertainties about what constitutes a ‘reasonably likely’ risk and a need to further investigate a threshold for accepted risk. To promote innovation, the study calls for clearer regulations to balance privacy protection with the advancement of AI in healthcare.

This chapter aims to address one of the most fundamental legal issues related to Facebook, which is its business model. Most of Facebook’s economy is based on the exploitation of its users’ personal data. It is true that data privacy legislation has a direct and fundamental impact on the organization of the social media platform. However, the EU’s data privacy legislation, principle-driven and horizontal in its approach, is not as simple and homogeneous as expected (Sect. 2.1). Furthermore, the practical range of this legislation is often underestimated. The combination of, on the one hand, an overreaching piece of legislation (guided by a dynamic definition of personal data, an extensive interpretation of user’s rights, etc.), and, on the other hand, an omniscient profiling activity (the huge “mountain” of data that belongs to Facebook) leads to a direct confrontation between EU law and this specific business model (Sect. 2.2). Characteristically, even the most fundamental matter of choosing the appropriate lawful basis for the processing of personal data becomes confused in the context of Facebook (Sect. 2.3). Not only do the data privacy legislation’s core principles affect Facebook and are affected by the social media’s management, but also specific issues, such as the protection of minors, acquire new dimensions in this context (Sect. 2.4). Finally, the chapter focuses on Facebook’s accountability, mainly as regards the thorny question of the transfer of users’ data outside the EU, specifically to Facebook’s US servers (Sect. 2.5).

The rapidly advancing digitalisation of the global economy, particularly the emergence of quasi-monopolists with the ability to define the rules of the game, poses numerous challenges to competition law as it is now practised worldwide. The European Union and China, in particular, have recently taken up these challenges with far-reaching reforms of their respective competition law regimes. This paper analyses these reforms and trends from a critical perspective informed by ordoliberalism, one of the arguably most influential schools of competition thought. First, the core ideas of the early Freiburg School on competition are distilled. The subsequent sections compare this ideal type with current developments in EU and Chinese competition law. The discussion of similarities and differences shows that both reform agendas suffer from similar problems connected to the rule of law and suggests that a modernised ordoliberal competition law approach must be guided not only by substantive but also by procedural aspects.

Regulatory Issues Related to AI Development and Use: A Comparative Analysis of Chinese and EU Laws

This thesis analyzes the theory of efficient breach in three different legal systems, including English sales law, European Union contract law and Chinese contract law. The existing legal systems provide contract parties with more solutions, other than “efficient breach” to avoid inefficient performance. Generally, all the three systems allow parties to stipulate liquidated damages for breach of contract and expectation damages are chosen as the basic damages measures by English law and EU law. In this sense, paying monetary equivalence to performance is one option to contract promisors for avoiding inefficient contracts. Besides shaping contract parties’ incentives to perform or breach a contract via remedy rules, all the three legal systems have set out specific rules dealing with the circumstances where performance of a contract is inefficient.

Regulations on the Online Finance in China

Arbitration and jurisdiction agreements are frequently used in transnational commercial contracts to reduce risk, gain efficacy and acquire certainty and predictability. Because of the similarities between these two types of procedural autonomy agreements, they are often treated in a similar way by courts and practitioners. This book offers a comprehensive study of the prerequisites, effectiveness, and enforcement of exclusive jurisdiction and arbitration agreements in international dispute resolution. It examines whether jurisdiction and arbitration clauses have identical effects in private international law and whether they have been or should be given the same treatment by most countries in the world. By comparing the treatment of these clauses in the US, China, UK and EU, Zheng Sophia Tang demonstrates how, in practice, exclusive jurisdiction and arbitration agreements are enforced. The book considers whether the Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements could be treated as a litigating counterpart to the New York Convention, and whether it could work successfully to facilitate judicial cooperation and party autonomy in international commerce. This book breaks new ground in combining updated materials in EU, US and UK law with unique resources on Chinese law and practice. It will be valuable for academics and practitioners working in the field of private international law and international arbitration.