After the EU Enlargement of 2004, the law courts of the new Member States now fulfill a twofold role of applying both national and European law. The application of European law also entails the duty of judges to construe their own domestic law as close as possible with EU law, and, if that is not possible, the duty arises to set aside the domestic law found to be incompatible with European law. In consequence, developments in the next decade will test judges’ capacity for properly applying European law and this process will inevitably present a serious challenge to the Central European judicial systems. While evaluations can first be made no sooner than a few years after the EU Enlargement, there are important indications that can suggest the probable outcome of that challenge. This article briefly outlines the application of European law in those countries prior to EU Enlargement and then deals with the important factors which are likely to influence its future application in the new Member States.

Nations compete for investment capital, and the assurances investors seek as they decide to provide that capital are universal. Motivated by the growing appetite for a global benchmark of corporate behaviour, this paper examines the relationship between the measured quality of corporate governance at the firm level and national competitiveness. It begins by analyzing the perceived quality of institutions in the 23 largest capital markets. Hypothesizing that good corporate governance at the company level may compensate for perceived weaknesses in the institutional framework, the paper then focuses on the pilot governance index developed by the Financial Times and ISS and compares it with new survey evidence from the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report. Finally, the paper discusses corporate governance in the EU accession countries and the extent to which the quality of governance has affected the mode of entry for foreign investment.

In the crusade against organized crime, it has become more and more accepted that the often trans-border crime cannot sufficiently be tackled by enhanced enforcement and cooperation between states alone. An alternative tool may be what can be termed the instrumentalization of the victims to enable the prosecution of organized criminals. This brings to the fore the dilemma that the victims are often themselves offenders, as a rule, breaching provisions of immigration law. Therefore, it is typically not in their interest to bring offences of trafficking and smuggling, of which they are the victims, to the attention of the authorities. Initiatives at the international and EU/EC level, which grant limited residence rights to those victims who collaborate in the prosecution of the offenders, attempt to deal with this conflict of interest. This implies at least a partial recognition of the status of the victim.

Until recently, cheap fiction and corporate finance most famously met in the creative accounting of companies like WorldCom and Enron. Now, however, both the spoof James Bond, Austin Powers, and the securities regulators of Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and France face common, twin malevolence: Doctor Evil and Mini Me. These reportedly were the names of a trading strategy devised at the London based European government bond desk of Citigroup Inc. to correct – as reported in the The Wall Street Journal Europe – what a senior bank executive had referred to as their not “making enough money for the firm.” According to the Journal, “Citigroup wanted to use the futures market to push up prices for bonds traded on the cash market, which tend to follow futures prices. Then they would dump a large amount of bonds in the cash market, reaping profits from their holdings and forcing down prices, to the detriment of other market participants.” At 10:00 am on August 2, 2004, six Citigroup traders launched “Mini Mi” by building up positions in the Eurex futures market, then at 11:29 am they unleashed the “Dr. Evil” trading program, which placed sell orders for various European government bonds, with a total aggregate value of € 83 billion, of which only € 12.4 found buyers; once “the price of the bonds had fallen because of the flood of sell orders, Citigroup bought back € 3.8 billion in bonds … and is estimated to have made around € 15 million in profit.” The spot sales were primarily conducted on the MTS fixed-income trading platform, and constituted 42% of the platform's total value for the day; the traders had cash positions of only about € 8 billion in the securities for which they placed sell orders of up to € 83 billion, which could have left them with a much larger short position than the € 4.4 billion they eventually had.

In June 2004, the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH – Federal Court of Justice) handed down a verdict in one of the longest trials involving terrorist criminal activities in German history. The so called “La Belle” case provided legal action resulting from the bombing of the discotheque “La Belle” in West Berlin in 1986, which, at the time, was attended mostly by American soldiers. The BGH had to review the ruling of the Berliner Landgericht (LG – District Court), where the trial started in November 1997. After 281 days of trial and 170 witnesses a guilty verdict was handed down by the Berliner LG, which found the defendants guilty of murder and of aiding and abetting murder in the deaths at the “La Belle.” Four defendants were sentenced to prison terms ranging between 12 and 14 years. In its final ruling on the case, the BGH, in principal, affirmed the verdict of the lower court by overruling most of the appellate claims of the prosecution, the defendants and the joint plaintiffs.

The thesis that, after September 11, 2001, there were categorical differences between Europe and the U.S. in their approaches to the dangers of terrorism, rests essentially on the claim that “Old Europe's” constitutional pacifism has failed. In this view, the global pax americana has a Hobbesian commitment to military power, and this is said to be the form adequate to realize the universal concept of peace. In principle, this is not an especially original notion. Robert Kagan, who nevertheless helped it gain a certain prominence, is merely the intellectual beneficiary of a series of classical theorists of realpolitik who agreed that conflicts could, “at the end of the day,” only be settled politically and not legally. Ironically, the prophets of this thesis were confessed Old Europeans. Carl Schmitt as well as Hans Morgenthau laid the cornerstone of these forms of cosmography, insisting that, on a global level, it is not law that rules but the free interplay of state-forces.

It has long been disputed whether a consumer under the Distance Selling Directive has the right to revoke a contract concluded as the result of an Internet auction. There is no doubt that contracts concluded by means of electronic trading platforms are to be qualified as distance selling contracts if there is a business-to-consumer-situation. Hence, at first glance, contracts entered into in the course of an Internet auction should be treated in the same manner so that consumers may exercise their right to revoke the contract. On the other hand, a right to revocation would hamper significantly an Internet auction because this form of trading depends on its character as a game and, thus, on the finality of the resulting contracts. If buyers are enabled to revoke their contracts after the end of an auction there would be no risk for a buyer in making the highest possible bid, thus rendering the auction a farce.