This report contains three separate papers, each addressing selected issues concerning natural gas policy and security of gas supply in Europe. The over-arching themes are vulnerability (to supply disruptions, to supplier pricing power) and fragmentation; and measures designed to overcome them,...

This book, through various differently oriented chapters, tries to give an insight on how the European Union and its multilevel model of governance must try to strike a balance between diverging interests and priorities. In particular, the EU and the European states (including the CoE's Members)...

The state of implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the European Union (EU) in the context of the EU framework governing business and human rights (B&HR) is worthy of consideration. This chapter follows the top-down approach: it explores the relevant EU legal and policy...

This chapter discusses the basic obligations for national product safety regulations imposed by the TBT Agreement, and gives a general picture of the rules on technical standards that are applicable in the relations between China and its trading partners. The first section defines the scope of...

In the course of the crisis in the Ukraine, most leading politicians in Eastern European countries, such as Poland, the Baltic States and Ukraine itself, identified the high dependency on natural gas imports from Russia as a threat to energy security. Hopes of independence through extraction of...

Past episodes of energy insecurity have been fleeting and the fears have been assuaged by market forces or technical change. This paper analyses the nature of the EU's current energy security problems, emphasising the increased importance of natural gas and high level of dependence on Russian...

Due to the increasing European import dependency, significant additional natural gas volumes will be required. In addition to the Nord Stream pipeline, the Nabucco and South Stream pipeline are projects planned for the next decade to provide further gas supplies to the European market. As one of...