The following elements may be used in regulations to:
- authorise public authorities to act in a particular way vis-à-vis natural or legal persons, other public authorities or other States;
- oblige natural or legal persons and authorities to take certain measures directly by virtue of the regulation.
Click here to download the list of powers and obligations.
The list was in the first round drawn up on the basis of model laws developed by the Regulatory Institute (www.howtoregulate.org) because these model laws integrate regulatory knowledge from many jurisdictions and sectors alike. They therefore provide an excellent international and cross-sectoral basis. It was entirely drawn up by various artificial intelligence programmes, known as Large Language Models (LLMs)1. It is the result of a long series of instructions and tasks that took the human in charge several days to complete, whilst the document was only marginally revised by humans.
Namely the LLM interface Perplexity2 has in many cases suggested additional very sensible rules based on regulations that have been sifted through around the world. In doing so, Perplexity continued the Regulatory Institute’s approach of learning from regulators in all sectors around the world and making the knowledge gathered available globally and across sectors. It is this approach that has been continued by regulatory practitioners supporting the Regulatory Institute who manually redacted the text to a modest extent. The document is therefore the result of three rounds of international gathering of regulatory knowledge. Feel free to suggest further improvements.
We asked the LLMs to provide their references. The elements, and therefore the references, come from legislation all over the world, but mainly from wealthy jurisdictions. The letters “ML” stand for “Model Law of the Regulatory Institute”. You can therefore find the relevant model law provisions via this website: https://www.howtoregulate.org/category/ri-model-laws/.
The list overlaps slightly with the parallel list of sanctions and accompanying measures which is recommended as an extension of this list for cases where this list is not considered sufficient3. The difference between the two lists is that this list here is aiming at directly ensuring compliance whereas the list of sanctions pursues the goal of compliance only indirectly. Both lists complement the document “Cross-sectoral standard provisions for regulation“, which already contains some basic powers and obligations.
Despite many deletions, the list might still contain some redundancies. We also feel that the order of the elements could still be improved. Finally, we are concerned that some of the references might not be correct or do not contain an empowerment, but only an obligation directly applicable by virtue of the law. Nonetheless, the list can already be used as a quarry to make draft legislation more complete in terms of empowerment. The list can also be used as a source of inspiration for the establishment of obligations for natural or legal persons and authorities at the level of the regulation itself.
1 By far the best performing LLM for extracting elements from the Regulatory Institute’s model laws was Claude Sonnet 3.5 (Anthropic). By far the best performing LLM for completing the list with examples from the internet was Perplexity. However, some contributions were made by Chat GPT 4o, Deepai and Mistral.
2 Strictly speaking, Perplexity is not an independent LLM, but an interface that builds on various LLMs.
3 In theory, any kind of obligation can be imposed to sanction a person.