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Daniel Futej Zuzana Steklacova The Slovak National Council passed the draft amendment to the Labour Code on October 25 2012, strengthening the position of employees and trade unions while slightly disadvantaging employers. The amendment came into force on January 1 2013. Starting this year, if trade unions want to represent all employees they no longer have to prove to employers that at least 30% of the employees are unionised. The employer's duty to consult on termination of employment with the trade unions has been reinstated, and failure to do so will render a termination of employment invalid.

If the pessimists are to be believed, modern science has failed us. Yes, it has delivered smartphones and supercomputers, but according to a growing band of US academics and economists, that's not quite good enough. Seemingly, until our generation produces something as useful, and transformative, as modern sanitation or transportation, we have an innovation problem. And the implications of that are massive.

Asia’s debt capital markets have long lived in the shadow of the region’s buoyant listing markets. Not for much longer

Carolyn Dong

Olivier Clevenbergh

Shunsuke Minowa As a result of continuing low domestic demand for funding, the amount of syndicated loans made in Japan has remained stagnant, at a level of approximately ¥25 trillion ($281 billion) per year, since 2006. Certain trends have begun to appear in the Japanese market in response to this situation. Before the amendments to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Law (FIEL) in 2012, despite the fact that syndicated loans arranged by financial institutions are generally not regulated under the FIEL, loan receivables from educational institutions are an exception to this general principle and regulated under the FIEL as 'deemed securities'. Accordingly, syndicated loans provided to these institutions have traditionally been considered as regulated under the FIEL and the arrangement of such loans considered a so-called Type II Financial Instruments Business, which carries with it many restrictions under the FIEL. Accordingly, even in situations where all of the lenders in the syndicate were sophisticated financial institutions the applicable FIEL protections were nonetheless applied, hindering the supply of financing and flow of funds in the market.

Lord Peter Goldsmith The former UK Attorney General has called for a more flexible form of deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) than that proposed by the UK government. For DPAs to be an effective enforcement tool, prosecutors must be able to offer agreeable terms and incentivise companies to self-report, Lord Peter Goldsmith told IFLR. This could be difficult under the stringent approval process the government proposes to introduce as early as next year.

The Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 was recently enacted in the Philippines in line with the State's recognition of the vital role of information and communications industries in the nation's overall social and economic development and the need to protect and safeguard computer systems and networks from all forms of misuse, abuse and illegal access.

A new law which focuses on the processing of an individual's personal information was approved by the President of the Philippines on August 15 2012. The Data Privacy Act of 2012 (Republic Act No 10173, full title An Act Protecting Individual Personal Information in Information and Communications Systems in the Government and the Private Sector, Creating for this Purpose A National Privacy Commission, and for Other Purposes) took effect on September 8 2012. A violation of this law is a crime, and penalties imposed include fines and imprisonment (see Chapter VIII of the Act).

The nominees for IFLR’s 2013 Asia and Americas awards have been announced