Currently, the field of business and human rights is at a crossroads in terms of normative development, as two major legislative instruments are being negotiated at the regional and international levels. The first instrument is a proposal for a directive aimed at ensuring business responsibility for the respect of human rights and the environment within the European Union, or in other words a proposal for a Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence. The second one is a proposal of a legally binding instrument on transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights, commonly referred to as the Third Revised Draft Treaty on Business and Human Rights, which is being developed by the open-ended intergovernmental working group established by the Human Rights Council in 2014. Given such parallel developments, it would seem prudent for the ongoing efforts to be interlinked so as to contribute to creating consistent legal solutions governing corporate accountability for human rights violations at international and supranational fora. This is particularly relevant in the context of rapid globalization, where transnational corporations can exploit legal and regulatory loopholes at the cost of human rights and the environment. This paper analyses the two legislative drafts with the aim of determining to what extent those two draft hard law instruments reflect the applicable international soft law standards and contribute to the creation of a complementary and mutually reinforcing regulatory framework. The analysis shows the differences in the scope and approaches utilized in the two instruments and identifies gaps and shortcomings in the proposed solutions from the standpoint of effective protection of the victims’ rights. The analysis shows that the two proposed legislative texts are for the most part mutually complementary and it points to the ways in which their norms can be read together so as to enable a coherent and consistent legal framework and ensure legal certainty. The authors also argue that the two legislators should utilize the drafting process to address the identified discrepancies in the existing normative framework in order to achieve the best results.

The aim of the paper is to present international standards and their implementation in the national legislations in European countries regarding judges’ right to association with special regard to judges’ right to unionise. 
 Authors hypothesise that although not strictly envisaged in any of the hard law sources, there is a plethora of soft-law instruments to assert this right. Consequently, the authors conclude that there is nothing in the relevant international standards that a priori prevents judges from unionising. Additionally, they posit that judges benefit from collective workers’ rights generally linked to the trade unions through activities of judges’ association, even in cases where judges are explicitly prohibited from joining and forming trade unions. The latter assertion is supported by a comparative overview of practices in selected European countries.

The number of persons forcibly displaced from their homes, the long duration of their plight, and the manifold negative consequences of internal displacement have intensified the United Nations efforts to come to grips with, what is now called, “the global internal displacement crisis”. At the heart of the new United Nations strategies is a quest for solutions to internal displacement, with the Framework on Durable Solutions for Internally Displaced Persons serving as their blueprint. Endorsed in 2009 by the major international stakeholders in the field, the Framework provided the conceptual foundations for the policies and programmes for internally displaced persons which would go beyond the provision of humanitarian assistance. To understand whether the Framework has had an important role in the development of the scholarship on forced displacement as it has had in practice, the study examines the references to the Framework in scholarly discussions evolving since its endorsement. To this aim, the authors undertake qualitative and quantitative analysis of a sample of scholarly articles in the field of social sciences. The study’s findings confirm that the Framework on Durable Solutions for Internally Displaced Persons represents a standard reference for the concept of durable solutions in academic research on internal displacement. However, the study also shows that a more critical engagement with the text of the Framework is missing.

The accession of the European Union to the European Convention on Human Rights is currently being renegotiated, but this remains a rocky and time-consuming process. Mostly relying on doctrinal method, the authors examine various methods advocated in legal theory as a means to ensure a coherent protection of human rights in Europe in the absence of an institutional agreement. The authors focus their attention on the further development of autonomous concepts in the case law of two the European supranational courts as a prerequisite for successful application of the status quo method. The principle of ne bis in idem is selected as a case in point. Finally, authors formulate proposals for approaches regarding autonomous concepts to be utilized by the Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights.