Intergovernmental Level Research Articles

The Roots of Legal Problems Arising in the Course of Automatic Exchange of Information in Tax Matters Between the EU and Russia

This article is devoted to the roots of material and procedural legal problems arising in the course of the automatic exchange of information between the European Union (EU) and Russia. This matter is topical since automatic exchange of information is a method of cooperation between tax authorities from different countries that is new and rapidly developing. From our point of view, it is high time to discuss some of the legal problems that are inherent in automatic exchange of information. As far as we can see, the fundamental problems are: (1) th problem of choosing an appropriate legal basis for automatic exchange of information and (2) the problem of the international standards for automatic exchange of information developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) being implemented to differing extents in the national legislation of different countries. In this article we suggest ways of solving the aforementioned problems in order to make automatic exchange of information between the EU and Russia more comfortable at the intergovernmental level. The solution of these problems will help to concentrate on another issue – the problem of protecting taxpayers’ rights, primarily the right to confidentiality, which is beyond the scope of this article but still very important in the light of the enhancement of global tax transparency.

The importance of animal welfare and Veterinary Services in a changing world.

Animal welfare is an essential component of the future of sustainable agriculture and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. There is growing global recognition of the importance of animal welfare, which must always be considered as part of the decision-making around food and nutrition security. Veterinary Services, encompassing public and private veterinarians and para-veterinarians, are custodians of animal welfare and key players in future actions to improve it. The welfare of animals is everyone's responsibility, from the individual farmer and practitioner to policymakers at the national and intergovernmental level. In this paper, after providing background information about current animal welfare issues and identifying animal welfare risks, the authors make a number of recommendations for action at the institutional and individual level. They do so because while the former is essential to generate change at scale and effective resourcing, the latter can create immediate action at a local level and drive change from the ground up. Without coordinated action from Veterinary Services, opportunities to improve animal welfare, alongside human and environmental health and well-being, may very well be lost, and animal welfare may fail to improve or even be at risk of decline.

Matching institutionalized expertise with global needs: Boundary organizations and hybrid management at the science-policy interfaces of soil and land governance

In environmental governance, the role of expertise is regarded as a crucial support to decision-making. Yet, in intergovernmental settings, studies aimed at understanding the relation between science and policy have predominantly focused on the fields of climate change and biodiversity. Through a fieldwork-based study of the Science-Policy Interface (SPI) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils (ITPS) of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), this paper investigates the role of scientific expertise in the global governance of soil and land degradation. Drawing upon the concepts of boundary organization and hybrid management, the study shows that analytical tools deriving from the Science and Technology Studies (STS) tradition provide valuable understandings of science-policy dynamics at the intergovernmental level. The results of the analysis reveal that science-policy organizations match the definition of boundary organization to different degrees and that hybrid management strategies occur with different magnitudes, with significant implications for each organization's capacity to bridge science and policy. This implies that such STS concepts should not be regarded as purely descriptive labels, but as resources that can serve broad analytical purposes in the study of global environmental governance. In this respect, the study contributes to an on-going theoretical dialogue between STS and International Relations (IR), claiming that IR scholars should consider the adoption of relevant STS theoretical tools for the analysis of global environmental institutions.

Digital art and the belt and road initiative: opportunities, challenges and perspectives

Digital art, following the technology used to produce, store, display and trade it, is highly dynamic and offers digital artists seemingly limitless creative possibilities. China is today the biggest importer and exporter of creative goods and services and has established as one of its policy principles the internationalization of its cultural industry and international cooperation. This article explores the transformative potential of digital art in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative and the potential challenges that emerge from the legal perspective. Its main findings are that digital art can play a significant role in helping to develop the Belt and Road Initiative, especially in fostering cultural interaction and exchanges between the people of the participating countries, thus expanding the reach of the initiative beyond the inter-governmental level. However, a significant challenge is presented by the different approaches different governments may have towards (digital) art and related technologies. The article also reiterates the existence of legal challenges, for example, in intellectual property protection, data protection and anti-money laundering, which must be addressed, preferentially in a coordinated fashion not only between the countries within the BRI but globally.

The EU’s Economic Governance: Development in the Context of Modern Challenges

The article explores the key milestones in the evolution of the economic governance system in the EU in the context of the current challenges facing the European economy. The European single currency is one of the most significant and tangible achievements of a United Europe, and is therefore not just a monetary project. It provides a basis for economies of the Member States to become more integrated with a view to supporting greater stability and prosperity. The architecture of the Economic and Monetary Union, established by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, is unique whereas it combines a single monetary policy that pursues the objective of price stability with decentralized fiscal and economic policies under the responsibility of Member States. In light of those considerations, the Treaty requires Member States to regard their economic policies as a matter of common concern and to coordinate them within the Council that is, at the intergovernmental level. Since the early 1990s, when the Maastricht Treaty laid the foundations of the single currency area, the EU has developed a very comprehensive and detailed framework for economic and fiscal surveillance. The framework is laid down in a range of secondary legislation, as well as in other documents that provide more details and transparency on how surveillance is carried out in practice. The framework has evolved in waves over time, with changes introduced in response to the emergence of new economic challenges, as well as based on the lessons gained in the implementation of the surveillance framework. In 1997, the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) was established so as to strengthen the monitoring and coordination of national fiscal and economic policies to permanently enforce the deficit and debt limits established by the Maastricht Treaty for all Member States. In the early 2000s, adherence to the nominal deficit targets of the SGP proved difficult for some Member States in a recessionary environment. That is why the SGP was reformed to allow for greater consideration of economic conditions. In response to the vulnerabilities exposed by the economic and financial crisis that hit the EU and the euro area after 2007, the EU took a series of measures to strengthen its economic governance and surveillance framework. They are relevant for all Member States, but have a number of specific features for those that use the euro. The revamped macroeconomic and budgetary surveillance were integrated into the European Semester, a common timeline for the coordination of economic and employment policies at EU level, and which was established in the same context. Thus, the EU’s economic governance has strengthened and improved over time, evolving in the context of historical events. Its future will depend, in particular, on which scenario for further development the EU ultimately chooses.

The EMU and Its Multi-Level Constitutional Structure: The Need for More Imaginative ‘Dialogue’ Among and Across EU and National Institutions

‘Finance’ has become the most salient part of the European project. For better or worse, it has been the EU’s major field of experimentation for institutional innovations, and also the protagonist of its major tensions. Such tensions pervade the Monetary Union, the Banking Union, and the framework for fiscal stability and budgetary coordination, and, in important occasions or respects, have ignited inter-court conflicts, exposed some accountability gaps, and made more difficult than desirable cooperation towards a common policy and mutual understanding, albeit in the diversity, at the inter-governmental level. It need not be like this. All those shortcomings can be overcome without major statutory reform, with a more imaginative use of the tools already in place, and (crucially) a change in the practice of dialogue between institutions and bodies, both from a vertical perspective (notably, courts, but also parliaments and governments) and a horizontal one (between political, administrative and judicial levels of accountability). European Monetary Union, EMU, banking union, fiscal coordination, judicial review, accountability, dialogue

Transborder Cooperation in the Carpathian and Barents Regions: Optimization of Management through Comparative Sociological Analysis

The article is devoted to analysis of the peculiarities of transborder cooperation in the Carpathian and Barents regions and optimization of its management through comparative sociological analysis. The institutional capacity of managing transborder cooperation, in the Barents region of northern Europe, its focus on increasing human capital and reorienting to cluster development can serve as an example for the development of cross-border cooperation in the Carpathian region. This is evidenced by the multifaceted activities of the Barents Euro-Arctic and Barents Regional Councils for the development of cooperation between the border regions and territorial communities, coordination of priorities and implementation of Barents Co-operation programs at the international, intergovernmental and interregional levels, synchronization of their activities in the Arctic region with EU institutions, cooperation leading international structures in Northern Europe, the Arctic and the Baltic. Such institutional experience in the Barents region indicates the feasibility and high potential impact of establishing a new multilateral international instrument for supporting cross-border cooperation in the Carpathian region. This experience should not be copied, but should be implemented taking into account the specifics of the Carpathian region. The author`s position on the methodological foundations of the sociological study of crossborder interactions as a differentiating and solidarizing factor is formulated. Perspective directions of research of cross-border interactions are seen first of all in: creation of international research collectives; elaboration and improvement of sociological tools for monitoring the state and dynamics of cross-border interactions; constructing a system of indicators that characterize the factors of micro, meso, macro and global levels that determine the content of cross-border interactions. The Ukrainian-Slovak, Ukrainian-Hungarian and Ukrainian-Romanian borders as a special space of social differentiation and integration remain extremely unexplored.

Global Intergovernmental Initiatives to Minimise Alcohol Problems: Some Good Intentions, but Little Action

While, historically, alcohol production and sale were local matters, commercialised and industrialised alcohol has supervened, globalised initially through European empires, transforming alcohol’s place in everyday life. But alcohol was not included in the current international drug control system, initiated in 1912. In the current “UN system” of 35 intergovernmental agencies, alcohol has been a recurrent concern in the work only of the World Health Organization (WHO). Examples are given of the sporadic involvement in alcohol issues of other agencies, and the history of WHO’s involvement between 1950 and early 2020 is briefly described. At WHO, the place of alcohol programming in its structure and which other topics it is linked with have been recurrent issues. Civil society support for alcohol initiatives has been comparatively weak, and alcohol industry counter-pressure has been strong. Alcohol issues have thus received less attention at the intergovernmental level than the harm would justify. Constraining factors have included not only lobbying by industry interests, but also the multi-sectoral nature of alcohol problems and the international cultural position of alcohol as a luxury good served at gatherings of political and media elites.

The Political Economy of Australian Regulatory Reform

The problem of regulatory accumulation has increasingly been recognized as a policy problem in its own right. Governments have then devised and implemented regulatory reform policies that directly seek to ameliorate the burdens of regulatory accumulation (e.g. red tape reduction targets). In this paper we examine regulatory reform approaches in Australia through the lens of policy innovation. Our contributions are twofold. We first examine the evolutionary discovery process of regulatory reform policies in Australia (at the federal, intergovernmental and state levels). This demonstrates a process of policy innovation in regulatory mechanisms and measurements. We then analyse a new measurement of regulatory burden based on text analytics, RegData: Australia (see Al-Ubaydli and McLaughlin 2017; McLaughlin et al 2019). RegData: Australia uses textual analysis to count “restrictiveness clauses” in regulation — such as “must”, “cannot” and “shall” — thereby developing a new database (RDAU1.0). We place this “restrictiveness clauses” measurement within the context of regulatory policy innovation, and examine the potential for further innovation in regulatory reform mechanisms.

Particularities of the international cooperation in the Black-Caspian Seas region

The paper considers the tendencies of the international cooperation in the Black-Caspian Seas region. Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, there has been formed the conditions for expanding the cooperation and strengthening the economic relations between the states of the Caspian and Black Seas Region. The paper analyses the international positioning and priorities of the cooperation applied by the regional states, on the basis of which key areas and formats of their interaction are implemented. The results of the cooperation are being studied. They include the creation of intergovernmental organizations and new transit routes for the supply of goods. The influence of the issue of the the legal status of the Caspian sea on cooperation in the Black-Caspian Seas region is also considered. In the context of the conflict of the foreign policy interests, the concept of the regional cooperation has not been formed both on state the intergovernmental level. However, due to the high transit potential of the region, international economic ties are being formed, which is in the interest of all regional states. Regional cooperation is pragmatic and has a limited scale. Expansion of the cooperation is so far possible between the parties that do not have opposing positions on ethnopolitical conflicts.

Die Causa Soleimani: Zur Legalität von „targeted killings“ im Völkerrecht

With the killing of Qasem Soleimani by the USA in January 2020, the issue of targeted killings was once again brought to the attention of the press, politics, and the global community. Although targeted killings have been a common means of combating terrorism for decades, and a growing number of states is participating in the creation, updating and execution of so-called ‚hit lists’, the question of the legality of this practice remains highly controversial. This contribution first sets out the international legal framework for targeted killings to then address specific features of the international legal assessment at the intergovernmental level vis-a-vis possible third countries and at the individual level vis-a-vis the targeted person. In particular, the right of self-defence and the rights of the targeted person will be examined. Finally, the article addresses the (il-)legality of the killing of Qasem Soleimani.

Невідомий досі архів професора Івана Огієнка за польський період еміграції: обсяг, персоналії, проблематика кореспонденції (на матеріалах архіву Інституту національної пам’яті Польщі у Варшаві)

The article was written on the basis of the so-called Warsaw-Kholm archives of Ivan Ohiienko – a well-known Ukrainian statesman, religious figure, and scientist, professor at the University of Warsaw in 1925–1932 – which were found in the archive of Polish Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw and studied by the author. The documents were still considered lost during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The reasons for dispersing and the ways of moving this archive collection are clarified, the facts about the preservation of a part of the documents and the way they got after the war to the archive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Poland, and later to the archive of Polish Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, are presented here for the first time. The characteristics of the archive are presented in terms of the volumes, personalities, and public institutions with which the creator of the archive corresponded. The multifaceted issues of the correspondence are considered against the background of the philosophy of being an individual in the context of emigration. The activities of Ohiienko in the complex reality of emigration are analysed in several aspects: the struggle for physical survival, civil and professional assertion, and the thirst for fulfilment of his duties before he was forced to abandon the Motherland because of political reasons. The conclusions emphasise the need to resolve the issue regarding the copying of the discovered archival documents at the intergovernmental level, scientific study of them, and their first publication in Ukraine.

COMMERCIALIZATION OF PRODUCTS OF SCIENCE PRODUCTS OF UKRAINE IN INTERNATIONAL MARKETS

The problems of commercialization of science-intensive products in international markets are identified. The aim is to study the current state of the high-tech sector of Ukraine's economy and to analyze innovative technologies and scientific and technological progress in the period of globalization. The expediency of taking into account and ensuring the competitiveness of the state economy in the conditions of Industry 4.0 is revealed. It is noted about the expediency of effectively realizing the export potential for high-tech products. A critical analysis of a number of agreements at the intergovernmental level on cooperation in science and technology is presented. Innovative activity in the period of globalization is analyzed. The problems that have become a threat to the further development of Ukraine's economy are outlined. The need to attract foreign direct investment in order to overcome economic problems is substantiated.

Resolving Business and Human Rights Disputes – Is Arbitration the Way to Go?

The insufficient level of protection afforded to human rights violations caused by business-related activities of multinational enterprises has recently begun to garner increased attention. On an intergovernmental level, the elaboration of an internationally binding treaty regulating the activities of transnational corporations is underway. States have also taken initiatives on a national level to reflect their commitment in implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. In both respects, much work remains ahead. Against this background, a group of prominent lawyers have suggested the use of arbitration as an alternative venue for resolving business and human rights disputes. After a span over five years of concept elaboration, public consultation and drafting, the idea has materialised in the creation of the Hague Rules on Business and Human Rights Arbitration (the Hague Rules or Rules), which were officially launched on 12 December 2019. This paper aims to take stock of the proposed Rules and the context of their appearance and examine if arbitration is a suitable medium for resolving business-related human rights infringements. In doing so, it discusses the legal framework governing the confluence of business and human rights as well as the features which speak both in favor and against arbitration as a means of settling business-related human rights disputes. The provisions of the Hague Rules are addressed in detail, particularly where default rules where tailored to better respond to the needs of human rights disputes. The paper concludes with an assessment of arbitration’s potential to ensure protection and enforcement of human rights in international business and reflects whether the Rules are robust enough to empower victims in this endeavor.

Network Diplomacy: Theory

Network diplomacy is a relatively new phenomenon in the world of international relations which refers to an increased role of non-state actors on the world stage engaging with state actors to arrive to more comprehensive solutions and more effective decisions. Unfortunately, there are not enough studies and research composed this concept, however a few authors and political scientists take on the task to analyze what network diplomacy is, what it does and what it can do. However, if network diplomacy as such is a wide practice, the integral part of which are both states and non-states actors, and if considering that social network has become the world’s new, convenient and quick form of communication, then it will soon have to be applied also on the higher, intergovernmental level. This paper primarily focuses on ideas and definitions of network diplomacy and provides a brief overview of the works, papers and articles that have already been published on the topic, that address both the theoretical and practical implications of network diplomacy.

Cooperation between the Russian Animation Industry and Asian Partners

One of the main trends in the development of the Russian animation industry is the intensification of international cooperation and promotion on international media markets. Russian animators are developing different forms of international cooperation and co-production in the context of the economic crisis, financing problems, lack of second-tier personnel and production capacities, as well as national distribution problems. In the situation of a weakening relationship with European partners, there is an increase in cooperation with Asian companies.
 The leading role is given to cooperation with China, due to the policies pursued by the two countries and close cultural interaction supported at the intergovernmental level. Russian companies are moving from outsourcing in film production to other forms of interaction, such as co-financing of projects and co-production. The essay analyzes the co-production experience of such leaders of the Russian animation industry as Riki, KinoAtis and Wizart Animation.
 Co-production with foreign companies involves a number of problems caused by cultural, mental, legal and organizational differences. Still, it combines financial efforts and consolidates technical capabilities, raising the quality of films to the world level. Co-production also stimulates international distribution and reduces financial risks, opens up opportunities to conquer new markets and overcome the systems of quotes that exist in some countries. In the Russian animation industry, the number of co-produced films demonstrates a tendency to increase. The development of various forms of interaction between the Russian animation business and foreign partners and the presentation of coproduced films on international media markets contributes to the formation of Russias positive image and promotes its national interests, lifestyle and culture, affirming animations long-standing status of a soft power asset.

The G20 is dead as a crisis or steering committee: Long live the G20 as hybrid focal point

ABSTRACT The G20 as experienced via the 2008 global financial crisis is dead. That is to say, examining the G20 as a tightly controlling concert of powers is no longer relevant. Yet, this ending does not mean that the G20 is irrelevant. The G20's increased fragmentation has cut into its substantive performance. Tensions in national policy coordination have constrained institutional effectiveness, creating a high degree of fragility in terms of delivery. This line of argument highlighting the limits and constraints of the G20, however, overlooks the success of the G20 in embedding itself as a hybrid focal point for global politics. Teasing out this dynamic, this article profiles the changes with respect to the G20's shift from both a crisis and steering committee at the apex of power to a platform that exhibits some hub characteristics but facilitates networking at both the intergovernmental and state or societal transnational levels.

The European Union and the Racialization of Immigration, 1985-2006

Over the past two decades, the European Union (EU) has played an increasingly influential role in the construction of a de facto common immigration and asylum policy, providing a forum for policy-formulation beyond the scrutiny of national parliaments. The guiding principles of this policy include linking the immigration portfolio to security rather than justice; reaffirming the importance of political, conceptual and organizational borders; and attempting to transfer policing and processing functions to non-EU countries. The most important element, I argue, is the structural racialization of immigration that occurs across the various processes and which escapes the focus of much academic scrutiny. Exploring this phenomenon through the concept of the “racial state,” I examine ways to understand the operations of immigration policy-making at the inter-governmental level, giving particular attention to the ways in which asylum-seekers emerge as a newly racialized group who are both stripped of their rights in the global context and deployed as Others in the construction of national narratives.

The essence and structure of economic factors of global innovation networks development

In today's world economy, the innovative aspect is becoming an important factor in improving the country's competitiveness, developing competitive high-tech industries and production volumes. Generalizations have been made that include factors that contribute to a country's economic success in the global environment: a strong national innovation system, the availability of effective internal and institutional mechanisms, as well as external tools to engage countries in a new era of innovative economy. It has been analyzed that in the conditions of existence of the modern economic market - postindustrialization and globalization processes, classical templates of relations in the innovative sphere began to be replaced by global network structures based on international scientific cooperation and the concept of open innovation. This phenomenon of networking has been observed both within companies and at the intergovernmental level, and the main components of innovative interconnections are cluster associations and network structures. Network associations have been proven to be open structures capable of unlimited expansion by including new nodes, provided these nodes are capable of communicating within the network, meaning that they have similar values or production objectives. The emergence of new forms of global regulation that can replace the forms and methods of national and public administration in the economy are closely linked to the tendency to internationalize economic innovation processes. The components of the global innovation network have been analyzed, such as subsystems - innovation, supply, investment and commercial. The typology of innovative networks has been considered and it has been proved that the two-component environment is a special factor for the effective functioning of innovative networks. The classification of elements of global innovation networks is analyzed and the key components of global innovation networks are analyzed. The innovative network was considered as a set of interconnected institutions and it was found that in this case the center of the network is the institutions that produce, enhance and adapt new technologies and new knowledge.

Inkorporacja acquis Schengen do prawa Unii Europejskiej i prawa krajowego państw członkowskich

This article takes up in the form of an interdisciplinary legal and political analysis the issue of the incorporation of the Schengen acquis into European Union law and the national legal systems of the EU member states in the light of the concept of a hybrid system of territorial governance. Accordingly, the Schengen acquis stimulated the process of intersecting the interests of internal security and the protection of Member States’ borders with the supranational ideological imperative with regard to the principle of free movement of persons. The argument developed in this article is that the incorporation of the Schengen acquis into EU law consolidated hybridity of the legal and institutional construction of the EU after the Amsterdam Treaty as a result of the contradiction between the logic of political bargain at the intergovernmental level and the vertical spillover generated at the supranational level in the institutional and decision-making dimensions. The conclusions point to the emergence, as a result of “schengenisation”, of the area of freedom, security and justice in the EU, in which the principle of free movement of people brought about diversification of the states’ adaptation mechanisms in relation to the ideologically determined project of transformation of the system of management of the territory and borders within the European Union.