Q & A with Paul Seseke

Your current occupation and country of work?
I work at Paradigmes Avocats, a French law firm specialised in customs law, environmental law, and environmental taxation. We assist clients – including industrial operators, importers/exporters, and waste and logistics stakeholders – with regulatory compliance across the full life cycle of products: from market entry and international circulation to extended producer responsibility and waste treatment obligations.

How do you use European law in your work?
Many of the topics covered during the ERA Summer Course on European Environmental Law were directly relevant to this work. In particular, the sessions on waste legislation, chemical regulation, and producer responsibility provided practical insights into the EU’s evolving framework for product and waste management. These are core aspects of the issues we address when advising clients on how to align their operations with European environmental law.

How did you benefit from the scholarship and the knowledge gained?
The discussions were immediately applicable to the challenges our clients face in their day-to-day operations, particularly where product design, labelling, and disposal obligations intersect with customs and trade law.
While my main professional focus is on regulatory and compliance issues, I also found great value in the sessions on procedural rights and access to justice. The case study on climate litigation, for example, provided useful tools to frame environmental responsibility in a broader legal context, including human rights-based arguments, which I hope to develop further in my own practice.
The visit to the Court of Justice of the European Union, including the live hearing of a preliminary reference case and the meeting with Judge Anna Marcoulli, was a highlight of the course. It gave me a unique perspective on how the legal questions we work on in practice can evolve into questions of interpretation at the EU level.
The course gave me a more structured and updated understanding of the EU’s legal framework for environmental compliance, which will be directly useful in our advisory work at Paradigmes. It also broadened my awareness of how enforcement, liability, and procedural rights interact – not only to secure compliance, but also to empower public and private actors to hold each other accountable.
I am sincerely grateful to the Friends of ERA Association for the opportunity to participate in this excellent training. It has been an enriching experience – professionally, intellectually, and personally.