The summer holiday season has begun. While many employees are looking forward to a well-deserved break, companies often ask themselves how best to manage staff capacity during the holiday period. In Austria, there are relatively strict holiday rules for both employers and employees.
In an article published in HR magazine, David Woodward gives advice on what businesses should consider when conducting a workplace investigation.
Defining, identifying and addressing inappropriate workplace behavior is increasingly a business-critical issue. Although local differences apply, many jurisdictions have similar legal requirements for protection of employees. This article explores the current legal framework, as well as the risks and litigation landscape, in the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.
The EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive exempts financial institutions from due diligence to identify, mitigate and remedy potential adverse impacts, whether human rights or environmental, in their downstream “chain of activities”. In practice, however, it will be hard to escape entirely, not least as the sector will still need to adopt and implement transition plans.
The Hungarian Government has published a new draft decree, which, once adopted, will establish new fines for failure to provide data, either within the deadline or at all, that is necessary for the registration of organizations under Act XXIII of 2023 on Cybersecurity Certification and Cybersecurity Supervision (“Cyber-certification Act”), which is the Hungarian transposition of the NIS2 Directive [Directive (EU) 2022/2555]. For numerous organizations, the above-mentioned deadline was 30 June 2024.
The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine issued Resolution No. 650 on “Some Issues with Reservation of Persons Liable for Military Service during Martial Law”, dated 5 June 2024 (“Resolution”), which came into force on 8 June 2024. The Resolution provides for an opportunity, in addition to the existing paper-based procedure, to reserve employees of certain companies online through the Unified State Web Portal of Electronic Services (“Diia Portal”).
Under the recently published Act XXIX of 2024 amending certain acts concerning the operation of the State, as of 1 January 2025, certain decisions on named patient reimbursement of medicinal products will be made by a newly created public benefit foundation in addition to the NEAK. Further, starting from 1 January 2026, the operator of the National eHealth Infrastructure (EESZT) may give access to the stored data for the purpose of AI development.
On 3 May 2024, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) published new Q&As for applicants, marketing authorization holders of medicinal products, and notified bodies on the implementation of the EU Regulations on medical devices and in vitro diagnostic medical devices (i.e., EU Regulations 2017/745 and 2017/746). The new Q&As are based on the experience gained from the application of the regulations and the specific cases encountered so far, and aim at providing practical considerations on the relevant implementation, with particular reference to those products that consist of a combination of medicinal products with medical devices.
The EU has approved the new Regulation on Substances of Human Origin (SoHO) aimed at improving the safety and quality of blood, tissues and cells used in health care and facilitating the circulation of these substances within the EU. The new regulation broadens the scope of SoHO to human breast milk and intestinal microbiota and covers a variety of activities, ranging from registration and testing of donors, collection and processing to human application and clinical outcome monitoring of substances of human origin.
New transparency rules related to the Clinical Trials Information System (CTIS), adopted by the Management Board of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in October 2023, became applicable on 18 June 2024. These rules aim at striking a balance between transparency and the protection of commercially confidential information for the benefit of patients, who will have early access to key clinical trial information, of healthcare professionals, who will enjoy simplification in accessing to trial information and enrollment, and of trial sponsors, who will interact with a more user-friendly system.