In autumn 2005 a group of Sudanese asylum seekers and refugees discontented with the unbearable conditions in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refuges (UNHCR) office in Cairo started a sit-in protest near the office. The protesters were, besides venting their anger at the suspension of Refugee Status Determination procedures for Sudanese refugees due to the ceasefire between the Sudanese government and Sudan's People Liberation Army, also making their frustrations heard regarding UNHCR's lengthy procedures, its failure to provide them with proper assistance, the high numbers of rejected applications, improper interviews and their general treatment by UNHCR's personnel as well as their difficult social and health conditions which had been aggravated by the lack of proper assistance. They were demanding that this situation be remedied and calling for transparent and fair procedures. Shortly thereafter they were joined by many more protesters so that in the following three months a group of between 1,800 and 2,500 people stayed around UNHCR's premises. However, meetings and negotiations with UNCHR eventually failed. The crisis ended in a tragedy. On December 30, 2005 the Egyptian security forces proceeded with the forcible removal of the protesters from the venue in an action in which 28 refugees were killed, more than half of which were children and women, with several protesters missing after the events. The Cairo incident illustrates what the cited report on the events has rightly called “a tragedy of failures and false expectations” regarding international humanitarian and human rights institutions.

The Treaty Establishing a European Constitution seems to have failed. The problems continue to exist: a centralizing tendency is inherent in the European Union like in supposedly every federal or supra-national system. This is why, for years, there has been a growing demand for a barrier against the subtle loss of competence for the Member States and their sub-national units, which also potentially threatens the acceptance of the Union's legal acts and therefore the progress of European integration overall.

The Bundestag's 1998-2002 term witnessed an unprecedented agenda in private law legislation. Besides profound changes in various areas, including a radical overhaul of the German Law of Civil Procedure, the German Bundestag (parliament) enacted a sweeping reform of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (German Civil Code). Compared to these radical changes the proposed Act to Prevent Discrimination in Private Law seemed a rather modest endeavor. The project nonetheless turned out to be more troublesome than expected. In May 2002, it was shelved, due also to heavy lobbying activities by, inter alia, the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Yet it will no doubt soon re-enter the stage as Germany is under an obligation to translate two EU anti-discrimination directives into national law.

There was a principle, which read: \“All persons are equal before the law.\” It is this achievement of the French revolution with its quest for \“egalité,\” which is today enshrined in international human rights treaties and national constitutional law, including the American Constitution. This principle no longer seems to apply since the passage of Security Council Resolution 1422 (2002) of July 12th, at least not in international criminal law. It now reads: \“All persons are equal before the law, with the exception of those that are citizens of the United States of America.\” That the principle was set aside at the same time for other non-treaty parties of the International Criminal Court (ICC), above all China, Russia and India, does not improve the matter. They are joyful beneficiaries of the US initiative.

The reality of ideological phenomena is the objective reality of social signs. The laws of this reality are the laws of semiotic communication and are directly determined by the total aggregate of social and economic laws. Ideological reality is the immediate superstructure above the economic basis. Individual consciousness is not the architect of their ideological superstructure, but only a tenant lodging in the social edifice of ideological signs.

Irish legal education is under increasing pressure to reform and reinvent itself in the face of various challenges, especially those implied by the Bologna process. In line with two of the main priorities of the process, namely employability and student-centred learning, a growing number of Irish law faculties have incorporated, or are planning to incorporate, more practice-related components into the law curriculum and, in some cases, a fully fledged Clinical Legal Education programme. This is an important shift in the paradigm of legal education in Ireland which should be welcomed and encouraged by all stakeholders – students, academics, practitioners, judges and those involved in myriad capacities in the administration of justice.

In the first part, a comprehensive presentation is given about the general structure of legal education in Ireland dealing with the main legal education providers, academic and professional requirements for legal training, as well as figures on the legal population and the approximate cost of legal education. The second part goes on to consider three views about the role of practice in Irish legal education, namely the ‘traditional’ view, the ‘holistic’ view and the ‘clinical’ view. These schematically presented views reflect different perspectives on the nature and purpose of legal education. They do not necessarily compete with each other, especially the last two which could arguably complement one another in the general renewal that Irish legal education is facing at the moment. The traditional view is that the status quo, i.e., in which practical elements are not a big feature of legal education at third level, has worked well and should, more or less, be preserved. The holistic view encourages the teaching of some element of practical preparation, but that this can best be provided to students by third level institutions through interdisciplinary courses that put law in context. The view which favours clinical legal education is that more can, and indeed should, be done to enhance the preparation of students for law practice, although it has to be pondered in light of economic realities, competing views about pedagogy and the Bologna context.

The second decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court on the Islamic headscarf declares a general ban on headscarf to be unconstitutional and, in particular, a violation of freedom of religion. This case note examines whether this decision is an ill-conceived weakening of a religiously neutral state or, to the contrary, an encouraging manifestation of a liberal constitutional order that takes its aspirations in a highly contested area of law seriously.

As the Action Plan on Modernising Company Law and Enhancing Corporate Governance in the European Union (2003) makes clear, the EU has sought to develop company and securities law as vital pillars of an overall attempt to improve Europe's international competitiveness. An important part of this is the creation of an integrated capital market in the EU. The regulation of takeover bids was deemed to be a key element of such an integrated market. This paper will focus on Directive 2004/25/EC on Takeover Bids and will seek to examine it under the regulatory microscope. It is too early to make a complete judgment about the Directive's effectiveness as a regulatory mechanism as this would involve determining whether it achieves its goals, secures high levels of compliance from Member States and market participants and is democratically accountable to the extent that its provisions affect the public interest. It is however possible to reflect upon some of its potential strengths and failings in respect of these criteria.

This article introduces Turkey's Law on Utilization of Renewable Energy Sources for the Purpose of Generating Electrical Energy (hereinafter “Law”) which, almost unnoticed abroad, was adopted on 18 May 2005. It provides an overview of the general provisions of the Law, as well as other supporting legislation regarding renewable energy sources (“RES”). However, the legislation on bio-fuel will not be taken into account.

In this paper I will analyze the relation between the limitations on freedom of speech and the increasingly intense defense of “security” intended as a psychosomatic and material condition of well-being. I will consider, in particular, the evolution of the legal limitations on the freedom of speech, moving from the apparently new dilemma of the protection of self-preservation contrasting with the guarantee of individual liberties. I will describe the transition from an internal foundation of this kind of limitation, caused by the will to destroy the potential enemies of State power, to a new form of “thought control” existing in the international construction of general paradigms of “well-thinking”, in addition to those of a “well-doing.”

[Editors’ Note: This short note concerns the most recent acquittals in the Mannesmann criminal trial against former Mannesmann CEO, Klaus Esser; Deutsche Bank's CEO (Vorstandssprecher) and then Member of Mannesmann's supervisory board, Josef Ackermann, and other members of the Supervisory Board. The Landgericht [Regional Court] Düsseldorf acquitted all six defendants on 22 July 2004, and this timely note provides but for a first rendition of the circumstances, the reactions and the thrust of the judgment. For more extensive background to the criminal proceedings against Esser, Ackermann et al. and the importance that domestic and international observers have regularly been assigning to this case in the context of a worldwide corporate governance debate, see already Peter Kolla's article in the 1 July 2004 Issue of German Law Journal. German Law Journal will publish a more extensive case commentary in the coming months. Meanwhile, the Mannesmann proceedings have, once more, highlighted to German, European and International observers the particular features of law and politics in “Germany Inc.”, “Rhenish Capitalism”, or “Rhineland Capitalism”. As begun in the aftermath of Josef Ackermann's inthronization at the head of Deutsche Bank and Ackermann's subsequent transformation of the Board's control structure, German Law Journal has published several contributions to the ongoing changes in German corporate governance and its embeddedness within the specific German economic and legal system. In this issue, we are publishing a fine piece by Jürgen Hoffmann, Professor of Sociology in Hamburg, on the current interdisciplinary debate over the future fate of so-called Rhineland Capitalism. In the next issue, to be published on 1 September 2004, Professor Christopher Allen of the University of Georgia will further deepen this inquiry and place the contemporary debate over the possible end of Rhineland capitalism in the historical context of Germany's development in the 20th Century. The Editors of German Law Journal are very pleased and honored to be able to provide for a further forum for this important debate, bringing together lawyers, economists, political scientists and sociologists, for a much needed exploration of the historical and political origins as well as of the legal framework of Germany's much critizised and, at the same time, ardently praised system of corporate governance and industrial relations. We invite our readers to contribute to this debate, which has so far found too little resonance in Germany itself. The Editors.]

There has perhaps been no greater thinker of the future than Jacques Derrida. Throughout his entire body of work Derrida constantly returns to the thinking of the “perhaps,” of the arrizant. This thinking of the “perhaps” takes shape as what is “new” and other to our world, something that is therefore unknowable even as a horizon of ideality that both arises out of and points to what ought to be in any given world. I renamed deconstruction the philosophy of the limit so as to emphasize Derrida as the protector of what is still yet to come. My argument was fundamentally that Derrida radicalized the notion of the Kantian meaning of “laying the ground” as the boundaries for the constitution of a sphere of valid knowledge, or determinant judgment. In Kant, to criticize aims to delimit what is decisive to the proper essence of a sphere of knowledge, say for example science. The “laying of limits” is not primarily a demarcation against a sphere of knowledge, but a delimiting in the sense of an exhibition of the inner construction of pure reason. The lifting out of the elements of reason involves a critique in the sense that it both sketches out the faculty of pure reason and surveys the project as the whole of its larger architectonic or systematic structure.

The Pfizer and Alpharma judgments, both delivered by the Court of First Instance (hereinafter “the Court”) on 11 September 2002, provide us with interesting precisions on the interpretation and scope, within the European Communities’ legal order, of the much discussed precautionary principle. In particular, they attest to the Court's willingness to leave the Community institutions a certain margin of appreciation in this field, while ensuring that the judicial review of such decisions is thorough enough to prevent abusive reliance on the precautionary principle.

Corruption poses an increasingly serious threat against Turkey as well as the rest of the world in many respects. The fight against corruption is crucial, in particular, to achieve an economic and political stability, to attract foreign investors and to establish the rule of law. In addition to those interests, which are common for almost all countries, anti-corruption has a particular importance for Turkey in the achievement of its goal of becoming a European Union member, since anti-corruption is expected to feature prominently in Turkey's talks on European Union accession.

On 31 July 2003 Peru submitted an extradition request to the Japanese authorities requesting the extradition of former President Alberto Fujimori. Along with the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission, and the numerous penal proceedings against the former presidential councilor and head of the secret service Vladimiro Montesinos Torres, the extradition request is another important effort of the Peruvian government to bring human rights violators to justice. Since Peru's legal system does not allow trials in absentia, Fujimori will escape prosecution if he is not extradited or tried in Japan.

In his lecture on The Repressed State of Emergency, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde argues for the constitutional possibility of a partial superimposition of certain laws in times of emergency. Repressing the state of emergency would ultimately lead to greater and more permanent damage to the rule of law and liberal rights. This warning bears some similarities to Giorgio Agamben's analysis of the emergence of a permanent state of emergency, which loses the feature of exceptionality by becoming “the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics.” Agamben thus proposes a shift from structure to practice, which focuses on the features of emergency politics instead of states of exceptions. The European Union's recent financial crisis is a promising object of research in this regard. After a brief discussion of Böckenförde's illuminating lecture on the repressed state of emergency, this Article will analyze a comment written by Böckenförde at the beginning of the Euro crisis. While this comment has sometimes been interpreted as an unconditional defense of unlawful emergency measures, a closer look at this statement reveals a much more nuanced argumentation. Böckenförde concurs with other legal scholars—such as Paul Kirchhof—in emphasizing the danger of an erosion of the rule of law through illegal measures. Böckenförde's intervention, however, leaves room for interpretation that this emergency action could—in principle and under specific circumstances—nevertheless be legitimate, although he was critical towards the handling of the crisis. On a more general level, this Article will discuss if the suspension of law can ever save the legal order it disregards. Next, the legality of EU crisis management—which has not been judged unanimously—will be scrutinized. At least, the circumvention and adaptation of EU primary law involved in this management has crucially changed the law of “normal affairs.” Finally, this Article will argue that the managerial style of emergency politics challenges the EU's project of “integration through law,” hollows out democratic procedures, and enforces, with its one-sided austerity policy, a form of economic integration that bears strong traces of an “authoritarian constitutionalism.”

From its inception, the philosophical-legal vehicle of citizenship has exhibited Janus-like qualities. For Karl Marx, the “first” citizenship of the classical world was a lodestone in the edifice of the “symbolic city”; a legally-delineated status that, just as surely as it included Greeks within the unitary polis, condemned the vast mass of the classical population to servility. The particularism within an originating citizenship paradoxically survived the Enlightenment, as a result of which, the figure of the citoyen became the point at which a Judaic-Christian preoccupation with the inalienable personality of man could be conceptually reconciled with the perceived need to maintain a secular community of horizontal bondage within the republican state. Exclusionary impulses similarly only hardened in an age of nationalism. Even the most inclusive of “industrial” citizenships, just as they expanded the liberating potential of socialized belonging, continued to exclude the alien from their New Jerusalem with direct reference to his lack of communitarian, contractual or “accidental” concordance with the nation.

In 1969, the language philosopher John R. Searle published his book “Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language,” wherein he developed the theory of speech acts of John L. Austin into a more normative direction. Though the philosophy of language is not the main issue of this article, Searle spoke out, for the first time, on a fundamental distinction between two different kinds of rules, namely constitutive and regulative rules. Actually, since that time the distinction between these two different types of rules has become fairly common in legal theory, but not in criminal procedure law or in the theory of procedure law. Only sporadically have German legal scholars gone into this distinction. This is astonishing with regard to criminal procedure law in particular because, even before 1969, some scholars had construed procedural rules as rules of a game. In doing so, they addressed an important characteristic of constitutive rules, namely the expression of the conditions of a certain result. However, the construction of procedural norms as rules of a game is imprecise because not all procedural norms actually work in this way. This becomes clear when one transfers Searle's distinction to criminal procedure law.