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This is a translation of the text written by Czech theologian Josef Zvěřina, originally published in 1969, republished: Zvěřina, Josef. 1995. “Můj přítel nevěrec.” In Pět cest k radosti [The five ways to joy], edited by Jolana Poláková, 79–80. Prague: Zvon.

The Common commercial policy of the European Union has been changing its nature after the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty as the protection of human rights is today its important dimension. There are several reasons for this development and the expanding role of the European Parliament is undoubtedly one of them. This article aims to assess and demonstrate the European Parliament’s role on the basis of several specific case-studies in the area of negotiations of free trade agreements, the Generalised System of Preferences, and the debate on responsible business conduct of multinational enterprises. It comes to the conclusion that the European Parliament has become an influential actor in the Common commercial policy advocating for the use of trade instruments to promote human rights abroad.

After its gradual establishment, the investment policy of the European Union experienced turbulent times when the EU and the United States commenced negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Trade and Investment Partnership. While the public and political focus concentrated on the transatlantic relations with the United States (TTIP) and Canada (CETA), the EU has steadily progressed at different paces with third countries in Asia where it commenced trade and investment negotiations with Singapore, Vietnam, Myanmar, China, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia among others. This paper seeks to evaluate how the Union has been successful in its “Asia strategy” in the field of investment negotiation and promotion of its reform approach to the investment protection regime. It offers an overview of the EU investment negotiations with the individual partners in the Far East and explores these relationships and their potential implications. It concludes that it is not surprising that the EU already persuaded the first countries in this region about its novel approach because of their strong motivation to conclude agreements with the EU that will ‘modernise’ and ‘harmonise’ the existing investment protection. On the other hand, challenges persist as it remains to be seen in which direction Asian actors will push for in the development of global investment governance.

The Common commercial policy of the European Union expanded in its scope after the Lisbon Treaty by codification of previous case law of the Court of Justice of the EU (or the European Court of Justice) and an inclusion of foreign direct investment. Still, its boundaries have remained unclear. This state regularly created competences disputes between the European Commission and the Council on which parts of new ambitious free trade agreement negotiated by the Union are of exclusive or shared nature. Finally, in case of the EU-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (EUSFTA), the European Commission decided to request an opinion of the Court on the legal nature of the agreement. Due to its precedential value, the Court’s opinion has had significant implications on current and future development of the EU common commercial policy.

The book reconstructs how the normative yardsticks that underpin evaluations of international organizations have changed since 1970. Based on in-depth case studies of normative change in five international organizations over a period of five decades, the authors argue that, these days, international organizations confront a longer and more heterogeneous list of normative expectations than in previous periods. Two changes are particularly noteworthy. First, international organizations need to demonstrate not only what they do for their member states, but also for the individuals in member states. Second, while international organizations continue to be evaluated in terms of what they achieve, they are increasingly also measured by how they operate. As the case studies reveal, the more pluralist patchwork of legitimacy principles today’s international organizations confront has multiple origins. It includes the politicization of expanding international authority, but also a range of other driving forces such as individual leadership or normative path dependence. Despite variation in the sources, however, the consequences of the normative shift are similar. Notably, a longer and more heterogenous list of normative expectations renders the legitimation of international organizations more complex. Strikingly, then, at a time when many feel international cooperation is needed more than ever, legitimating the forms in which such cooperation takes place has become most difficult. International organizations have come under pressure.

The phenomenal story of China’s ‘unprecedented disposition to engage the international legal order’ has been primarily told and examined by political scientists and economists. Since China adopted its ‘open door’ policy in 1978, which altered its development strategy from self-su!ciency to active participation in the world market and aimed at attracting foreign investment to fuel its economic development, the underlying policy for mobilizing inward foreign direct investment (IFDI) remains unchanged to date. With the 1997 launch of the ‘Going Global’ policy, an outward focus regarding foreign investment has been added, to circumvent trade barriers and improve the competitiveness of Chinese firms, typically its state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In order to accommodate inward and outward FDI, China’s participation in the international investment regime has underpinned its efforts to join multi-lateral investment-related legal instruments and conclude international investment agreements (IIAs). China began by selectively concluding bilateral investment treaties (BITs) with developed countries (major capital exporting states to China at that time), signing its first BIT with Sweden in 1982. Despite being a latecomer, over time China’s experience and practice with the international investment regime have allowed it to evolve towards liberalizing its IIAs regime and balancing the duties and benefits associated with IIAs. The book spans a broad spectrum of China’s contemporary international investment law and policy: domestic foreign investment law and reforms, tax policy, bilateral investment treaties, free trade agreements, G20 initiatives, the ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative, international dispute resolution, and inter-regime coordination.

This paper introduces the description of Old Czech common nouns developed and used in a tool for tagging and lemmatizing common nouns occurring in transcribed digital editions of Old Czech texts. This description consists of four parts: the first features an overview of all declension type endings (approx. 100 declension patterns), the second part analyses alternations in the morphological basis accompanying declension (approx. 120 types of alternations), the third part deals with formal changes connected mainly with the language’s historical development (approx. 100 formal changes) and, finally, the fourth part contains a list of lemmas extracted from modern dictionaries of Old Czech (approx. 29 000 lemmas). Furthermore, the paper introduces the software developed and used for this purpose, namely i) the tool which makes it possible a) to generate word forms and subsequently search for multiple word forms in the texts at once, b) to create lists of word forms filtered by sequences of characters occurring at the end of the word forms, ii) the tool for assigning a declension pattern to a lemma, and iii) the tool enabling work with large databases. Finally, the paper describes two applications developed on the basis of Old Czech common noun description, i.e. i) a database of Old Czech common noun declension patterns connected with Old Czech dictionaries and the Old Czech text bank, ii) a tool for generating word forms, which is used for the lemmatization and tagging of Old Czech texts.

Book review of the volume edited by Photini Pazartzis and Maria Gavouneli and focused on recent developments of the concept of the rule of law in international law.

Zastánci vystoupení Spojeného království (UK) z Evropské unie (EU) v kampani před referendem v roce 2016 tvrdili, že UK mimo Unii bude sjednávat obchodní dohody efektivněji a úspěšněji. S probíhajícím procesem vystoupení UK z EU však vyvstala otázka, kdy bude možné vytvořit samostatnou britskou obchodní politiku, protože v současnosti je obchodní politika výlučnou pravomocí EU. Zaměření tohoto příspěvku bude proto spočívat v posouzení současných a plánovaných obchodně-politických aktivit UK vůči třetím zemím a pokusu o nalezení řešení, které by vyhovovalo britským ambicím, aniž by nutně UK porušovalo závazky plynoucí z členství v EU. Příspěvek se zaměří nejdříve na právní rámec EU, konkrétně výlučnou povahu společné obchodní politiky v rozdělení pravomocí mezi Unii a členské státy, zásadu loajální spolupráce a její dopad na vnější vztahy a konečně na výstupový proces z Unie stanovený v čl. 50 Smlouvy o Evropské unii (SEU). Prostor bude také věnován prozkoumání možnosti, za které by UK bylo umožněno zahájit co nejdříve samostatná obchodní jednání a získat tak volnost ve sjednávání obchodních dohod.

There have been many studies that have analysed the impact of a set of indicators on the economic resilience of countries and regions, but none that focus on the effects of determinants on the resilience of employment and GDP. This paper is a preliminary attempt to fill that gap by providing new cross-country, as well as cross-regional, evidence of the different effects of determinants on resilience measured in terms of GDP and employment. The analytical part of this paper is based on an analysis of the resilience of employment and GDP of EU countries, as well as at the NUTS 2 regional level, within the context of the economic crisis that began in 2008. The main method used in this study is correlation analysis. The results show the existence of specific determinants for a different type of resilience at the country level (e.g. indicators of economic structure). The determinants connected with human capital show a strong positive relationship with regards to resilience both at the country and regional levels (especially in terms of growth of employment and product).

Miroslav Hroch: Hledání souvislostí: Eseje z komparativních dějin Evropy. 1. vydání. Praha: Sociologické nakladatelství, 2016, 339 stran, ISBN 978-80-7419-232-6.

Development of the dorsal aorta is a key step in the establishment of the adult blood-forming system, since hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) arise from ventral aortic endothelium in all vertebrate animals studied. Work in zebrafish has demonstrated that arterial and venous endothelial precursors arise from distinct subsets of lateral plate mesoderm. Here, we profile the transcriptome of the earliest detectable endothelial cells (ECs) during zebrafish embryogenesis to demonstrate that tissue-specific EC programs initiate much earlier than previously appreciated, by the end of gastrulation. Classic studies in the chick embryo showed that paraxial mesoderm generates a subset of somite-derived endothelial cells (SDECs) that incorporate into the dorsal aorta to replace HSPCs as they exit the aorta and enter circulation. We describe a conserved program in the zebrafish, where a rare population of endothelial precursors delaminates from the dermomyotome to incorporate exclusively into the developing dorsal aorta. Although SDECs lack hematopoietic potential, they act as a local niche to support the emergence of HSPCs from neighboring hemogenic endothelium. Thus, at least three subsets of ECs contribute to the developing dorsal aorta: vascular ECs, hemogenic ECs, and SDECs. Taken together, our findings indicate that the distinct spatial origins of endothelial precursors dictate different cellular potentials within the developing dorsal aorta.

Book Review: EU Trade Law, by Rafael Leal-Arcas (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019, ISBN 9781788977401), 352 pp, £90,00.

The cellular pathology of schizophrenia and the potential of antipsychotics to target underlying neuronal dysfunctions are still largely unknown. We employed glutamatergic neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) obtained from schizophrenia patients with known histories of response to clozapine and healthy controls to decipher the mechanisms of action of clozapine, spanning from molecular (transcriptomic profiling) and cellular (electrophysiology) levels to observed clinical effects in living patients. Glutamatergic neurons derived from schizophrenia patients exhibited deficits in intrinsic electrophysiological properties, synaptic function and network activity. Deficits in K+ and Na+ currents, network behavior, and glutamatergic synaptic signaling were restored by clozapine treatment, but only in neurons from clozapine-responsive patients. Moreover, neurons from clozapine-responsive patients exhibited a reciprocal dysregulation of gene expression, particularly related to glutamatergic and downstream signaling, which was reversed by clozapine treatment. Only neurons from clozapine responders showed return to normal function and transcriptomic profile. Our results underscore the importance of K+ and Na+ channels and glutamatergic synaptic signaling in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and demonstrate that clozapine might act by normalizing perturbances in this signaling pathway. To our knowledge this is the first study to demonstrate that schizophrenia iPSC-derived neurons exhibit a response phenotype correlated with clinical response to an antipsychotic. This opens a new avenue in the search for an effective treatment agent tailored to the needs of individual patients.

On 16 May 2017, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) delivered a long-awaited opinion on the legal nature of the free trade agreement between the EU and Singapore (Opinion 2/15). This decision was highly anticipated as it was expected to clarify uncertainties of several aspects of the EU Common Commercial Policy (CCP) which has broadened in scope after the Lisbon Treaty. The CJEU’s conclusion on the division of competences and its possible impacts on the CCP immediately sparked a debate within the Union’s institutions about its future direction. In particular, the architecture of EU free trade agreements, the dominant tool of the CCP at the beginning of the 21st century, is now under scrutiny. Trade deals without investment provisions could potentially simplify many steps which now burden the treaty-making process. This paper discusses Opinion 2/15 and its significance for the future development of the CCP. It explores and analyses the implications for shaping the post-Lisbon CCP with regard to two specific areas: investment protection and sustainable development. The paper concludes that a new architecture for EU trade agreements could be further improved as there is a potential to preserve the CCP as both an operational and ambitious trade policy. In this respect, comprehensive FTAs encompassing trade, investment and sustainability deserve a second thought in the EU.

Hematopoiesis is a precisely orchestrated process regulated by the activity of hematopoietic cytokines and their respective receptors. Due to an extra round of whole genome duplication during vertebrate evolution in teleost fish, zebrafish have two paralogs of many important genes, including genes involved in hematopoiesis. Importantly, these duplication events brought increased level of complexity in such cases, where both ligands and receptors have been duplicated in parallel. Therefore, precise understanding of binding specificities between duplicated ligand-receptor signalosomes as well as understanding of their differential expression provide an important basis for future studies to better understand the role of duplication of these genes. However, although many recent studies in the field have partly addressed functional redundancy or sub-specialization of some of those duplicated paralogs, this information remains to be scattered over many publications and unpublished data. Therefore, the focus of this review is to provide an overview of recent findings in the zebrafish hematopoietic field regarding activity, role and specificity of some of the hematopoietic cytokines with emphasis on crucial regulators of the erythro-myeloid lineages.

We employ ab initio calculations to investigate energetics of point defects in metastable rocksalt cubic Ta-N and Mo-N. Our results reveal a strong tendency to off-stoichiometry, i.e. defected structures are surprisingly predicted to be more stable than perfect ones with metal-to-nitrogen stoichiometry. Despite the similarity of Ta-N and Mo-N systems in exhibiting this unusual behaviour, we also point out their crucial differences. While Ta-N significantly favours metal vacancies, Mo-N exhibits similar energies of formation regardless of the vacancy type (VMo, VN) as long as their concentration is below . The overall lowest energies of formation were obtained for and , which are hence predicted to be the most stable compositions. To account for various experimental conditions during synthesis, we further evaluated the phase stability as a function of chemical potential of individual species. The proposed phase diagrams reveal four stable compositions, , , and , in the case of Mo-N and nine stable compositions in the case of Ta-N indicating the important role of metal under-stoichiometry, since and significantly dominate the diagram. This is particularly important for understanding and designing experiments using non-equilibrium deposition techniques. Finally, we discuss the role of defect ordering and estimate a cubic lattice parameter as a function of defect contents and put them in the context of existing literature theoretical and experimental data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]