The perception of being treated fairly during decision-making processes is an important topic in the research literature on law and society. Many studies have indeed found that perceived procedural justice affects people’s reactions, for instance, by increasing their trust in legal authorities and lowering their intentions to protest against these authorities’ decisions. Here, we reveal support for this fair process effect and point to some of its potential boundary conditions. In our experimental study, 239 participants imagined being the defendant during a single-judge criminal court hearing that used either a fair or an unfair procedure. Following the experience of a fair as opposed to an unfair procedure, participants showed more trust in judges and were less inclined to protest against the judicial ruling. Interestingly, the effect of the procedure manipulation on trust in judges was moderated by the extent to which participants attributed their case outcomes to external causes. We found a fair process effect among participants with relatively low external attribution ratings, while this effect attenuated and was not statistically significant among participants whose external attribution ratings were relatively high. These findings point to the possibility that attributional processes can moderate people’s responses to procedural justice in legally relevant contexts.

While habitat destruction threatens other-than-human life across the planet, overexploitation and illegal trade are the second leading source of threats to wildlife. ‘Wildlife’ though predominantly is taken to mean other-than-human animals, and plants are largely overlooked or ignored even though they are critical to human societies and the health of the planet. Adopting a green criminological analysis, this article provides evidence that legislation governing wildlife use and protection is speciesist and ‘plant blind’. Through a content analysis of 185 countries’ wildlife trade legislation, we find that not all legislation includes plants and that in some legislation different species of plants are regarded differently. This means that there are gaps in the framework of legal protection for some plants, which can have real-world consequences. For instance, lack of protection can lead to reduced conservation for exploited plants, which in turn can increase the loss of biodiversity and further threaten ecosystem health and planetary well-being. Legislative and societal plant blindness needs to be challenged and overturned to help stop the biodiversity crisis.

There is a heated debate on shareholder versus stakeholder governance. The debate has expanded from traditional stakeholders who are directly involved with the company, such as employees and customers, to stakeholders who are indirectly affected by the company’s conduct, for example through ecological damage and climate change, including future stakeholders. But the lack of an integrated measure makes it difficult to hold the board accountable against multiple goals. This article develops an integrated model of corporate governance including current and future stakeholders, building on an integrated measure for corporate value. The board can use this integrated value measure to balance the interests of the various stakeholders in a structured way. The integrated value measure can also be used by stakeholders (including shareholders) to hold the board accountable for its decisions. Finally, the article examines mechanisms, such as stakeholder councils and sustainability-related performance pay, to include the interests of the various stakeholders on the board.

As a response to the pandemic, sea-rescue operations in the Mediterranean have either come to a halt or have been perilously delayed. Since then, policies of port closure and semi-closure have been undertaken under different forms. Nevertheless, States have an obligation to assist ships’ masters in delivering any shipwreck to a place of safety, even in times of COVID-19 or any other public emergency. This article explores whether State responsibility under international human rights law might be engaged whenever rescuing boats are compelled to lengthy standoffs with no coastal State allowing disembarkation. Therefore, in discussing the interim measures issued by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in cases of prolonged confinement at sea – following port closures and refusals of a place of safety – it suggests that the ECtHR should have ordered disembarkation of all shipwrecked onboard. Indeed, the actual conditions of migrants and asylum-seekers compelled to exhausting and unlawful standoffs at sea, in addition to their precarious physical and mental health, may amount to inhuman and degrading treatment and to a de facto deprivation of personal liberty under Articles 3 and 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). While contesting the increasing use of a language of ‘crisis’ and the recent ‘practical and effective’ approach of the Court of Strasbourg, aimed at preventing ‘foreigners [including asylum seekers] circumventing restrictions on immigration’, this article concludes highlighting the risks of such an approach, thereby exhorting the Court to challenge what may become a perpetual (rather than exceptional) emphasis on a migration crisis.

Cartels have been a persistent problem in the European internal market and despite strong enforcement, cartels continue to exist and be discovered by the Commission. This article proposes that the optimal way to deal with cartels requires the imposition of criminal sanctions against corporates and responsible executives. This is not a novel proposal in itself: the US has had criminal sanctions against cartels for over a century and the UK for a decade. But the EU’s unique regulatory and governance structure requires that such a proposal must have a stronger evidentiary basis and must take into account its governance structure. This article does so by analysing statistics on cartel enforcement in the EU and the US to show that fines have not been able to sufficiently deter cartels. Second, normative reasoning based on harm theory, morality of criminalisation and public choice theory is employed to indicate that cartel activities are criminal in nature and that penalising them as such would not amount to overcriminalisation. Third, objective analysis is used to dissect the limitations of fines: when used in isolation they do not target the wrongdoers, are suboptimal and impose social costs. Fourth, it is shown that combining fines with criminal sanctions can help us redress these issues and improve the deterrence levels significantly. Lastly, principles are proposed to ensure that such a proposal considers the varying gravity of cartel activities, and is in sync with the EU’s rule of law and governance structure and the Commission’s leniency programme.

The involvement of business actors in gross human rights abuses and international crimes is not a new phenomenon, as exemplified by the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide. Nowadays, many European and US-based companies doing business in China, specifically in the Xinjiang province where Uyghurs are persecuted, may be connected to severe human rights abuses. The current business and human rights legal framework, which has developed to include human rights due diligence laws and civil litigation, may not be robust enough for preventing companies from doing business in the region, and punishing them when they do and become connected to abuse. We contend that this framework could be strengthened so as to enhance corporate accountability in the face of gross, state-orchestrated human rights abuses in the region. We consider specific laws that the United States and the European Union have adopted to address this situation, namely the 2022 US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and the EU Proposal for a regulation on prohibiting products made with forced labour on the Union market.