Markets in Financial Instruments Directive I är ett direktiv framtaget av Europakommissionen som reglerar den finansiella marknaden i Europa, som ett resultat av finanskrisen som uppkom 2007. Direktivet har implementerats i hela Europa Unionen och infördes i Sverige 2007. Finanskrisen har lagt grunden för ytterligare skärpta regleringar för en effektivare tillsyn, eftersom det tidigare fanns reguljära brister på den finansiella marknaden. Från januari 2017 implementerades Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II och träder i lag i Sverige januari 2018. MiFiD II syftar till att täppa till de brister som funnits i det första direktivet. Syftet med studien är att undersöka om direktivet kan bidra till förändrade förutsättningar gällande konkurrens mellan aktörer som verkar på den finansiella marknaden samt vilka fördelar och nackdelar direktivet medför. En kvalitativ forskningsstrategi har tillämpats och semistrukturerade intervjuer har genomförts. Utvalda aktörer som verkar på den finansiella marknaden har intervjuats både personligt men också online. Ytterligare information om direktivet har samlats in från vetenskapliga artiklar, litteratur samt dokument från myndigheters hemsidor. Resultatet av studien visar att samtliga aktörer är positivt inställda till direktivet men att det fortfarande finns oklarheter gällande dess implementering, hur direktivet ska tolkas samt hur ett enhetligt utförande ska ske inom alla EU-länder. MiFID II syftar till att främja konkurrensen ytterligare, men baserat på respondenterna tenderar åtstramningarna att leda till ökade inträdesbarriärer, risk för stordriftsfördelar samt att mindre aktörer kan missgynnas. / Markets in Financial Instruments Directive I is a directive established by the European Commission that regulate the financial market in Europe as a result of the financial crisis that occurred in 2007. The Directive has been implemented in the European Union and introduced in Sweden in 2007. The financial crisis has laid the foundation of harder regulations and for supervision to be more effective, because of the previous shortcomings on the financial market. Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II were implemented in January 2017, and will be established as a law in Sweden in January 2018. The purpose of MiFID II is to overcome the shortcomings that have been identified in the first directive. The purpose of the study is to examine whether the directive can contribute to changing conditions for competition between players on the financial market and the advantages and disadvantages of the directive. The study has a qualitative research strategy, with a focus on semi-structured interviews. A number of players on the financial market have been interviewed both personally and online. Further, information on the directive has been collected from scientific articles, literature and documents from government websites. The result of the study shows that all respondents are positive to the directive but that there still are uncertainties about its implementation, how the directive should be interpreted and how all the EU countries should implement the directive in a uniform way. MiFID II aims to continue to improve the competition, but based on the respondents, harder requirements tends to increase barriers to entry, risk of economies of scale, and smaller players to be exposed.

Managing a wild population effectively requires knowledge of the abundance and behaviour of the species. Harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) are usually counted when they come ashore at haul-out sites, and so it is important to understand how the number of seals counted at this time relates to total population size. Satellite telemetry studies confirmed that harbour seals on the west coast of Scotland showed a degree of site fidelity and coastal foraging. Most trips taken by tagged animals involved travelling only 10-30 km from haul-outs and lasted less than a day (mean 21.07 hours, SE = 0.54), although some seals travelled over 100 km. Eighteen percent of the time these tagged seals spent hauled out was in the Special Area of Conservation where they were caught. Individual seals can be recognised from their unique pelage patterns using computer-assisted photo-identification. Capture histories for adult harbour seals at a site in north-west Scotland indicated that the number of seals using the study area between April and October was 3.4 times higher than the number counted during an aerial survey made during the August moult. In the UK, aerial surveys of harbour seals are usually conducted during the first three weeks of August, when seals are moulting. These counts have a coefficient of variation of around 15%. Land-based counts made at study sites on the north-west coast of Scotland indicated that the number of seals hauled out was most consistent during the moult, but highest counts were from the pupping period. Analysis of moult counts indicated that starting surveys one week earlier (on 7th August) and surveying 1½ hours earlier in the tidal cycle would reduce the count variation. There was spatial, seasonal, diurnal and sex-related variation in the proportion of time harbour seals hauled out. Thus the relationship between counts and total population size is likely to vary spatially and temporally. This variation should be included in the estimates of the CV of correction factors. A 5% annual change in harbour seal population size was predicted to take around 14 years to detect based on annual surveys and a CV = 0.15. This detection period increases when monitoring methods with lower precision are used, or surveys are made less frequently. Trends in seal abundance at pairs of haul-out sites were not synchronous and so it is unlikely that counts from small land-based protected areas, such as Special Areas of Conservation, can be used to monitor overall population status.

The thesis addresses the introduction of a supra-national instrument; a European directive on Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) into national contexts of land-use planning in three countries; Sweden, Iceland and England. The directive ”On the assessment of the effects of certain plans and programmes on the environment” was agreed upon by the European Commission on the 21st of June 2001 and was to be transposed to national legislation by 21st of June 2004. The introduction of these requirements meant that the countries needed to make legal adjustments and implement it at the different levels of planning. Many EU member countries, including those studied in the thesis, had some experience of environmental assessment of plans and programmes prior to the introduction of the SEA directive. SEA has as a concept and a tool in planning in national and international debate on Environmental Assessment and planning for the last two decades. Hence, the SEA directive was introduced to an existing context of environmental assessment in planning and the preparation of the directive has drawn on substantial conceptual development and practical experience of strategic environmental assessment in various forms. The aim of this research is to shed a light on the transposition of the SEA directive into a national legal framework and how the introduction relates to the countries’ planning contexts and previous application of SEA-like instruments. In the thesis an overview is given of the way the directive is transposed to the national legal system of the three countries and the existing planning framework is described. The results from the national reviews are analysed in relation to the contents of the directive and the international and Nordic academic debate regarding the purpose and role of SEA, related to the characteristics of the planning system. The research shows differences in the legal and planning contexts to which the SEA requirements have been introduced in the three countries. Despite of those, the legal requirements follow closely the contents of the directive. However, the expectations towards the directive expressed by national officials and politicians, the recommendations in the way the legal SEA requirements shall be implemented, differ between the countries as well as references to other processes; land-use planning and the practices of Environmental Impact Assessment and Sustainability Appraisal. The thesis is the result of a project within the interdisciplinary research programme MiSt, “Tools for environmental assessment in strategic decision making” at BTH funded by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. The project has been carried out at Nordregio, the Nordic Centre for Spatial Development, Stockholm. / MiSt Report 6

Water management is undergoing a transformation towards integration, source control and ecological thinking. In the EU, the Water Framework Directive can be considered as a driver towards this new approach to water management. Innovations are deemed necessary to deliver this ideal of water management. In this thesis efforts by water sewerage companies in England & Wales to rectify agricultural pollution at source are viewed as an organisational innovation towards more sustainable water management. These source control interventions can help achieving the goals of the Water Framework Directive by reducing diffuse pollution from agriculture, fostering participation in water management and by reducing overall cost of implementation. This thesis contributes to understanding the process of change in water management by developing a model of the innovation-decision process. Insights about how innovation and therefore change can be influenced is generated by applying this model to the process of source control intervention adoption by water and sewerage companies. This research employed a flexible research design using comparative case studies. Each of the 10 water and sewerage companies in England and Wales represented an individual case. Data were collected in two phases using semi-structured interviews with selected water and sewerage company representatives. Thematic analysis, recurrence counts and content analysis were applied to analyse interviews. It was found that water companies are likely to contribute towards integrated approaches to water management, since there is a trend to adopt source control intervention. Change in water management is influenced by the interaction of factors from the domains: ‗Natural-Physical‘, ‗Organisational Characteristics‘, ‗Regulatory- Institutional‘ and ‗Innovation Attributes‘. The rate of change by water and sewerage companies is governed by a combination of asset characteristics, environmental state changes and the funding cycle. Furthermore, innovation is triggered by direct regulation and regulation that requires the gathering of information. Contrary to this flexible or framework regulation performs better in guiding the direction of change.

This dissertation examines how eco-knowledge intersects with the changes to EU legal cultures and practices known as eurolegalism. This conjunction has created a mechanism for the extension of EU law in the Member States even in the face of a weakened EU. Through a portfolio of six articles, controversies over the protection of wolves in Sweden are used to illustrate and explicate the changing roles and responsibilities of various actors in protecting species, and the centralization of competence for environmental protection in Europe at the EU level. In doing so, some substantive requirements of the Habitats Directive are also analyzed. The first article maps the movement of competence to determine conservation policy towards the EU level and away from international and Member State actors. The second article examines what the EU requires of its Member States by analyzing the Habitats Directive’s key concept, favourable conservation status. It also makes normative arguments for how contested aspects of this concept should be interpreted to best achieve the Directive’s conservation goals. The third article deepens this analysis by applying these arguments to the Swedish wolf population. The fourth article is a case commentary illustrating the enforcement of the Habitats Directive through public interest litigation to stop the hunting of Swedish wolves. The fifth argues that the greater availability of public interest standing in the US than in the EU has led to the greater implementation of federal law. The sixth argues that greater availability of public interest litigation in Sweden than previously is also leading to the greater enforcement of “federal” EU law. Each of these articles demonstrates or explains factors that lead to the hollowing out of state power in favor of the EU and interest groups. / <p>Cover photo by Guillaume Chapron</p>

Aeshna viridis, a dragonfly generally considered to be a specialist as it in most cases choosesStratiotes aloides as its habitat, have suffered badly from habitat loss and fragmentationsthroughout Europe under the last century as the human demand of land use have grown. It´sthereby considered near threatened on EU red list and is included in the Habitat Directive.This means that it is protected by EU law as all EU Member States is committed to protect,monitor and report back to EU the status of the species. Several European countries havedesigned protection plans for S. aloides to improve the preservation of A. viridis. My study inSouth and Central Sweden shows that the strong connection between A. viridis and S. aloidesmay not be consistent all over the distribution range of A. viridis, as my survey showed thatlarvae occur among other water plants when S. aloides is not present. Another aim in thisstudy was to evaluate the possibility to use occurrence data on A. viridis and S. aloides fromthe Species Observations System to monitor A. viridis distribution and dispersal. My studyimplies uncertainties of how well the datasets reflects reality and more research is necessarybefore clarifying if datasets could be a possible tool in conservation management of A. viridis.

International cybersecurity is arguably one of the most serious, complex and recent security-issues of our time. The connectivity between EU member states regarding cybersecurity due to the borderless nature of cyber, together with increasing threat-levels, has made the need for a common response widely acknowledged in the EU for several years. Even so, a common EU cybersecurity response involves problems such as reluctance of member states to share information, that cybersecurity management is linked to national security and therefore touches upon sovereignty, and different levels of cybersecurity development between member states. Despite this, the Network and Information Security Directive was adopted by the European Council in May 2016, involving EU-wide binding rules on cybersecurity. This thesis examines and explains, through a neo-functionalistic approach, how and why this development towards supranational management of cybersecurity in the EU has happened. The author finds that cybersecurity management seems to have institutionalized from a nascent phase during 2013, moving towards an ascendant phase during the end of 2013 and 2014, to end up between an ascendant and a mature phase during 2015 and 2016 – which makes the adoption of the NIS-directive logical. The neo-functionalistic explanation to the development of supranational cybersecurity management in the EU highlights the role of the Commission as a ‘policy entrepreneur’ and the publication of the EU cybersecurity strategy, accompanied by the proposal for the NISdirective in 2013. These regulatory outputs sparked further institutionalization by providing many opportunities and venues for member states to interact and build networks on cybersecurity issues, by initiatives with normative impact to foster an EU ‘cybersecurity community’, by the continuous strengthening of supranational cybersecurity actors such as ENISA, and by supranational cybersecurity cooperation platforms, such as the NIS-platform and the European Private Public Partnership on cybersecurity. Between 2013 and 2016, 21 EU Member States published national cybersecurity strategies, almost all referring clearly to their commitment to EU cybersecurity initiatives. This provides an indicator of a high level of legitimacy of supranational cybersecurity management. However, the thesis also finds that the strongest supporters of EU cybersecurity management are not the most powerful member states but rather the smaller ones. While not expressing a strong commitment to EU initiatives in cyber policy documents, the most powerful member states still agreed to the NIS-directive. This supports the neo-functionalist notion about the “stickiness” of an institutionalization-process, and the possibility that powerful states might have double paths, committing to EU regulation and institutionalization while still continuing their own way.

This thesis deals with the legal aspects of the fight against tax evasion with a particular focus on current legal instruments within the Czech legal order. The thesis is divided into five parts. The first part of the thesis defines the concept of tax evasion, compares the concepts of tax avoidance and tax evasion in the foreign literature. The term tax evasion does not have a legal definition in the Czech legal order and different views of the meaning of this term can be found. This thesis works with tax evasion as an illegal arrangement aiming at minimizing one's tax liability, as well as acting towards circumventing tax legislation. The second part also summarizes the knowledge about BEPS and its influence on the state budget, competition and society. The third part is devoted to selected specific legal instruments in the fight against BEPS, namely the institute of abuse of law, transfer pricing rules, low capitalization, international cooperation and double tax treaties. These tools are described in detail and their current form is analyzed. The work also expresses the author's personal opinion on these tools, which he considers to be very conservative. Similarly, the instruments introduced into the Czech legal system with the implementation of the ATAD Directive are analyzed. The last part of...

The 26th of March the European Parliament voted for the directive Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (COM/2016/0593).The directive was then voted through by the Council of Ministers on April 25th and should be implemented into each union states legislation within 24 months. The Directive came to be very controversial and heavily debated in the media, where it has been depicted as either a threat to freedom of speech or as the salvation of copyright owners. Citizens of the Union usually have poor insight in the work of EU and media are the citizens single largest link between them and the Union. What the media reports is interesting to study by the three fundamental democratic values transparency, influence, and accountability. This paper uses a qualitative content analysis with an inductive approach to examine the debate around the Copyright Directive and to highlight the most distinctive arguments and people in the debate in order to examine the results from a democratic perspective. The most striking arguments in the debate is that the basic principles of copyright must be strengthened, that opponents / advocates lacks knowledge, that the Directive contributes to censorship of the internet and a link tax, and that the big internet corporations must take responsibility. Advocates are primarily copyright owners who strive for their rights to receive an income from their work, while opponents are primarily specialists in the field or internet companies who are concerned about the implications of the directive.

The major advances in the identification of the human genome that took place from the early 1990s onwards triggered a significant increase in the number of patent applications concerning newly discovered human gene sequences that nevertheless failed to disclose the function of the isolated material, and thus did not meet the patent law requirement of industrial application. In order to address this issue the 1998 Directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions (Biotech Directive) 1 required patent applicants to disclose the industrial applicability of inventions covering human gene sequences and related proteins at the time of the patent application. Furthermore, the Biotech Directive established functionality-related protection for all types of genetic inventions, thus restricting the scope of protection granted to human genetic inventions to their ability to perform the industrial application disclosed by the applicant. This thesis analyses the implications of the Biotech Directive's approach towards the industrial application of human genes and fragments thereof in respect of three issues: the assessment of the industrial applicability of inventions concerning sequences or partial sequences of human genes; the distinction between discoveries and patentable inventions when the claimed subject matter is human genetic material; and the determination of the scope of protection awarded to patents over genetic information. The thesis argues that the requirement of industrial application can act as an efficient checkpoint for preventing the grant of patents over human genetic discoveries of no practical benefit to society, but also for impeding the issuance of overly broad patents in this field. At the same time, a strict interpretation of this requirement does not imply that patent authorities will systematically overlook the interests of private firms, but it is intended to set a realistic standard that serves to avoid the rise of undue barriers in the pursuit of research and innovation in this industry.