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Politicization of the 5G rollout: Litigation way for Huawei?

The Chinese government’s ambition to become the global leader in new technologies, manifested in state-led industrial policies such as Made in China 2025, has prompted a strong response. For example, the United States significantly tightened its export control regulations and expanded grounds for foreign direct investment screening. In turn, the European Union (EU) has been pursuing the policy of technological sovereignty, an integral part of Ursula von der Leyen’s political guidelines for 2019-2024. This growing antagonism between the countries racing for technological superiority, labelled as a “technological de-coupling”, coincided in time with the rollout of the 5G infrastructure, surrounded by controversy over the involvement of Chinese tech companies in the process. In this blog, we capture the politicization of the 5G rollout reflected in the ongoing resistance to the participation of the Chinese technology giant Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (Huawei) in the 5G projects. To tackle this issue, we will shed some light on the 5G…

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Tilting the Playing Field

“Levelling the playing field” has been one of the buzzwords of the European Union (EU)’s external economic policy over the last few years. In essence, through various instruments including free trade agreements, the EU has been trying to ensure that foreign entities, goods and services are subject to similar regulatory burdens as their EU counterparts when engaging in…

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Could Russia again invoke its “essential security interests” in relation to the war in Ukraine?

I. Introduction Most recently, it seems that Russia will not initiate its withdrawal from the WTO, and has many investment treaties that are still in force. At present, there is still a possibility that investors may seek to bring claims under these investment treaties in relation to the measures taken by Russia arising out of its…

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The First Working Draft of the WHO’s ‘Pandemic Treaty’: attempting to cover normative gaps indicated by the COVID-19 pandemic?

Given its cross-border nature and the threat to global health, the COVID-19 crisis has shown the world the importance of strengthening global pandemic governance. In particular, the pandemic has prominently indicated significant flaws in the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR, 2005) as the current instrument governing pandemics. In addition to recognizing that revisions are urgently needed to…

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Does It Matter Who Writes Legal Rulings? It Depends.

Does it matter whether rulings delivered by international tribunals are truly written by the adjudicators appointed to the case, as opposed to the permanent staff of a legal bureaucracy working in the background? In his Reply to our EJIL article, ‘WTO Rulings and the Veil of Anonymity’, Armin Steinbach claims there is nothing untoward about unnamed…

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