The contribution offers a critical appraisal of the individual’s (in)access to justice when his or her fundamental rights have been violated during direct enforcement action by EU law enforcement authorities. Based on three case studies – ESMA, DG COMPETITION, OLAF – we argue that direct enforcement, and the shared activities and joint decisions of EU and national authorities it entails, have been ‘squeezed’ into the existing system of separated controls between the EU and the Member State legal orders. This brings with it challenges regarding the control over public power which may affect ‘access to’ and ‘justice’. The main argument of our contribution then is that in the current EU-constellation, courts are – contrary to what is generally assumed – not always, or in any case not necessarily, best-suited for remedying fundamental rights violations and providing the protection the individual needs. Therefore, the co-existing judicial and non-judicial remedies can address each other’s gaps and ultimately ensure a fully-fledged protection of fundamental rights if designed properly and aligned with each other and with national law.

This chapter provides an introduction to Intellectual Property, Innovation and Economic Inequality. It begins by discussing the problem of economic inequality, including the scale of that problem, types of economic inequality, and extant research on such inequality. The chapter then outlines the structure of this volume, which is divided into three parts: (1) theoretical, empirical, and policy issues; (2) intellectual property and national inequality; and (3) intellectual property and global inequality.

This chapter introduces the main research themes of this book, which explores two current global developments. The first concerns the increased use of algorithmic systems by public authorities in a way that raises significant ethical and legal challenges. The second concerns the erosion of the rule of law and the rise of authoritarian and illiberal tendencies in liberal democracies, including in Europe. While each of these developments is worrying as such, in this book, I argue that the combination of their harms is currently underexamined. By analysing how the former development might reinforce the latter, this book seeks to provide a better understanding of how algorithmic regulation can erode the rule of law and lead to algorithmic rule by law instead. It also evaluates the current EU legal framework which is inadequate to counter this threat, and identifies new pathways forward.

In Chapter 3, I developed this book’s normative analytical framework by concretising the six principles that can be said to constitute the rule of law in the EU legal order. Drawing on this framework, in this chapter I now revisit each of these principles and carry out a systematic assessment of how public authorities’ reliance on algorithmic regulation can adversely affect them (Section 4.1). I then propose a theory of harm that conceptualises this threat, by juxtaposing the rule of law to algorithmic rule by law (Section 4.2). Finally, I summarise my findings and outline the main elements that should be considered when evaluating the aptness of the current legal framework to address this threat (Section 4.3).

This chapter illustrates how soft law can have very real implications for the fundamental rights position of individuals. While the existence of an interference is often treated implicitly in the case law of the ECtHR and the CJEU, the chapter argues that interferences can result from soft law acts. For the EU this means that recourse to soft law does not in itself preclude the application of the Charter. How soft law may concretely interfere with fundamental rights is illustrated with a couple of examples from different policy areas. Having shown the possible fundamental rights implications of soft law, the chapter turns to remedies. Here the limitations of the EU’s system of judicial remedies is highlighted and the potential of non-judicial remedies is explored.

Chapter 1 explores the contours of the religious practices of the Muisca in the early decades after the European invasion. To do so it unravels a series of overlapping assumptions and stereotypes about the functioning of their religious practices, social organisation, and political economy. While much of the historiography continues to take for granted that these people constituted a pagan laity led in the worship of a transcendental religion by a hierarchy of priests who performed sacrifices in temples, this chapter shows that these long-held narratives are fictions originating in the earliest descriptions of the region, later embellished and developed by seventeenth-century chroniclers. Instead, drawing a large corpus of colonial observations, it reveals a highly localised series of immanentist religous practices, centred on the maintenance of lineage deities that Spaniards called santuarios and a sophisticated ritual economy of reciprocal exchange, that were intimately connected to the workings of political power and economic production.

In contemporary European law, it has become increasingly evident that EU law is not implemented according to the traditional distinction between direct and indirect administration, but through various forms of cooperation between national and EU authorities, as well as between national authorities themselves. These cooperative mechanisms generate so-called ‘composite procedures’, that is, administrative decision-making processes which involve administrative authorities belonging to more than one legal system for the implementation of EU law. This phenomenon has generated increasing scholar attention with attempts at offering taxonomies, labels, analyses of composite procedures in different EU policy fields, or insights regarding the question of access to justice. This chapter studies a less explored angle in this debate: the question of the remedies available to redress possible fundamental rights violations occurring in the context of the composite procedures. It first provides a categorisation of composite procedures, together with an examination of possible fundamental rights violations. The chapter then outlines the available remedies in selected scenarios, identifying possible gaps. The chapter will show that, while composite procedures are capable of violating both substantive and procedural EU fundamental rights, the current system of remedies seems to be ill-suited to provide effective remedies in multi-jurisdictional decision-making processes.

This chapter criticizes the oversimplification of the binary North–South debate on intellectual property, innovation, and global inequality and highlights the wide geographic, sectoral, and income inequalities within middle-income countries. It begins by explaining why the arrival of these countries has called into question the North–South debate. The chapter then moves from the widely studied subject of global inequality to the underexplored topic of national inequality. Focusing on the intellectual property context, the discussion highlights the considerable subnational variations in the economic and technological conditions of middle-income countries. To combat national inequality, this chapter concludes by recommending interventions in three areas: (1) international norm-setting, (2) national policymaking, and (3) academic and policy research.