At the MSP, you’re not just a number. We try to create an environment for students where you feel heard, where you feel safe and where you can work on becoming the best version of yourself—whatever you want to do in the future.

I love introducing students to the world of research and seeing them light up and enjoy themselves while learning to produce publishable work. For me, the key to being a true educator is to simulate the professional world as closely as possible and give students a taste of what lies beyond their diploma.

More than 17 million workers living or working in another Member State are exposed to possible violations of their rights, either because of poor implementation of EU rules, disinformation or lack of coordination among Member States. Therefore, the EU plans to set up a new authority that will support fair labour mobility within the EU, allowing citizens and businesses to seize the opportunities offered by the single market while supporting cooperation between national authorities, including in preventing and tackling social fraud and abuse. ITEM cooperates with authorities and societal actors on all levels to make fair mobility a reality, in particular for frontier workers. ITEM research supports common endeavours to remove obstacles that hinder cross-border labour mobility in everyday life. Considering the longstanding critique on the EU’s “social deficit”,this new European Labour Authority (ELA) may help blow new life into the long untended European Social Model.

The massive spreading of online disinformation and deep fakes poses an ever-increasing threat to democracy and fundamental rights in the European society.

Studying legal memes is not a usual and unfruitful endeavour but a method to understand the past, present, and future of principles and rules. It is an opportunity to include the mellifluous method of evolution in legal analysis.

With merely two weeks before the United Kingdom’s scheduled withdrawal from the European Union, Westminster still does not know what it wants and where it wishes to go.

As of 1 January 2019, the tax part of the tax credit will no longer be automatically granted to frontier workers who work in the Netherlands but do not reside in the Netherlands. This constitutes an obstacle for frontier workers. ITEM has already questioned this before. Recently, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) issued an interesting ruling[1] regarding the other part of the tax credit, the premium part: in this case, the Netherlands may proportionally reduce this part over time.

After Germany, Wallonia is also thinking about introducing a road toll. A resolution on tolls was recently discussed on 11 February at the Budget Committee  of the Walloon Regional Government.  The intention for the Walloon road toll follows the German idea: a road vignette, with a price differentiated over time. The Walloon taxpayer can deduct the cost of the road vignette from his road tax. The additional revenue is estimated at 50 million euros per year, which is actually paid by foreign car users, including the Flemish.

In a little more than one week we saw a series of judgements and a European Commission decision that may again test the limits of the European Union's state aid system in its application to matters of direct taxation.

A small change can have big consequences. Some of these changes may be unplanned and unpredictable. Some represent welcome developments that complement and contribute to long-running narratives of progress.