This article argues that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) seems to have recently acknowledged that there is a right to access to emergency health care in the member states of the Council of Europe. The Chamber of the ECtHR found that a state's failure to design a regulatory framework that guarantees access to health care in emergency situations violates the substantial limb of Article 2 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) that protects the right to life. It is argued that the newly established requirements seem to be reasonable but that there seem to be no sufficient safeguards to ensure that the ECtHR does not substitute its own assessment for that of medical professionals.

am the recipient of the 2016 PhD scholarship of Cardiff University's Department of Law (UK). My utmost thanks to Cedric Ryngaert and the reviewers for their generous comments on previous versions of this essay, as well as to all those involved in the production of this issue. This essay benefited greatly from exchanges with Ken Peattie, Frank Goedertier and Theo Raedschelders. Johannes Nissen, Titia Kloos, Peter Morris and Nick Cleary are thanked for proofreading. All mistakes remain my own.

Emerging and developing states are home to powerful corporations capable of deploying economic activities on a global scale through the rapid pace of technological change and globalisation. But such corporations have to date been largely overlooked in the field of business and human rights. Treatment of such corporations has typically been in the context of supply chain studies, as subsidiaries of corporations from economically developed Western states. This book takes a radically different approach. It aims to investigate the conditions under which the European Union and its Member States regulate and remedy human rights violations by corporations from emerging and developing states. Stemming from the hypothesis that the EU intends to play a central role, Aleydis Nissen explores how the EU and its Member States attempt to ensure that EU-based businesses are not undercut by emerging competition, drawing on global examples to illustrate this developing phenomenon.

The European Union’s 2013 Country-by-Country Reporting (CBCR) rules bring within the public domain information on corporate payments made to governments all over the world for the purpose of exploiting natural resources in the oil, gas, mining and logging sectors. In so doing, the CBCR rules enhance transparency in these sectors and aim to reduce tax avoidance and corruption in resource-rich countries. Arguably, they also contribute to the European Commission’s long-term strategy to secure sustained access to raw materials in the European Economic Area. The CBCR rules represent one of the only three binding regulatory frameworks that have been adopted at the EU level to implement the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Just as with the two other initiatives that came into existence (the Non-Financial Reporting Directive and the Conflict Minerals Regulation), the immediate impact on the competitiveness of corporations based in the EU was a key concern during the legislative process. This article uncovers the two strategies that were employed to overcome such concern and give the CBCR rules a ‘global’ character.

The Economic Partnership Agreement between the East African Community (EAC) and the European Union (EU) is of particular importance for the Kenyan floriculture sector. While the other EAC Partner States remain reluctant to ratify this agreement, they allowed the Republic of Kenya to start its implementation under the principle of variable geometry in June 2021. Kenya and the EU then started a strategic dialogue in which they pledged to strengthen their cooperation on human rights issues. This article identifies two priorities for floriculture workers: Kenya’s ratification of the core labour rights Convention No. 87 on the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise and the broadening of an enabling space for an active, organised and transparent civil society.