The fundamental right to an effective remedy as guaranteed in Art. II-107(1) of the ‘Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe’ (CT) is part of a comprehensive guarantee of effective legal protection and procedural guarantees. In the following, this fundamental right and how it relates to Parts I and III of the CT will be investigated in detail. First, the scope of Art. II-107(1) CT will be identified in Part B. Part C comments on the binding effect of this right. Finally, in Part D, some aspects of the Union's system of legal protection will be investigated in the light of Art. II-107(1) CT, and it will be discussed whether this right could be an instrument to close gaps in the legal protection of individuals against measures of the European Union.

After last year's successful Academia Juris Internationalis workshop on local products, Prof. Dr. Thilo Marauhn and Dr. Sebastian Heselhaus (Academia Juris Internationalis Franz von Liszt, Faculty of Law, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen) organized the second Jean Monnet – Workshop in the Senate Hall of the Main Building of Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany, on 2 July 2004.

Explaining the work of the German Law Journal has become almost second nature to student editors; at one point in our legal careers we all have to justify to a colleague, a future employer, a parent, or potential student editor recruits the existence of a journal that, based on name alone, appears to centre on a civil law country in Europe at a North American law school that teaches the common law. Most of us have some version of this statement ready:

Empirical research had already lost the possibility of a naive claim to objectivity when empirical legal sociology began work in post-war Germany. From the mid-1960s general sociology was involved in the “Positivismusstreit” and was discussing the influence of preconceived interests of perception, commonplace theories and social interaction on empirical observation. Social scientists widely accepted the view that social reality does not exist objectively, but emerges intersubjectively. Science also shapes social reality. For sociology there is nothing which can simply be counted and measured.

“The existing federal system is obsolete”, said Federal President Horst Köhler, announcing his decision, in a television address of 21 July 2005, to dissolve the German Bundestag (Parliament) and to call new elections. The following day, the German Law Journal hosted its third international workshop on theory and developments in German Federalism at the Max Planck Institute for the Research on Collective Goods, Bonn. The setting was appropriate, since the Institute is located between two former permanent representations of the federal states (Länder). The building itself once housed the Egyptian embassy, and so presented “neutral ground” for a discussion on federalism.

“Not a year goes by without some fresh blueprint being drawn up and fed into the continuing debate. Each succeeding blueprint can be likened to the way in which some artists go over their work again and again, gradually building up a deep richness to the emerging picture.” “Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter ‘repented,’ changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.”

In The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria's Jews Survived the Holocaust, Tzetvan Todorov offers the following lesson from his study of the “rescue” of Bulgarian Jews from the Nazi killing machine:

“It seems that, once introduced into public life, evil easily perpetuates itself, whereas good is always difficult, rare and fragile. And yet possible.”

The White House statement of February 7, 2002, according to which the Taliban and Al-Qaeda members detained in Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay following the September 11, 2001, events had no right to prisoner of war (POW) status but were merely ‘unlawful combatants’ had broad repercussions in the public opinion as well as among legal scholars. The debate focused on the legal status and treatment of the persons held in Guantanamo Bay mainly in light of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Comparatively little attention has been paid to the treatment due to the detainees in light of the Military Order on the Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism issued by the US President on November 13, 2001 (Military Order). Also the treatment to which the detainees are entitled by virtue of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 relative to the Protection of Civilians in Time of War has been largely overlooked. This brief paper intends to contribute to remedying such lacunae but will be limited to an analysis of the provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions in light of the events of September 11th without reference to previous practice.

The United States is a party to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (“the Consular Convention”). It requires in Article 36(1)(b) that the competent authorities of each State party inform the consulate of another party if the latter's national is arrested and requests that the consulate be notified. Article 36(1)(b) further requires the authorities to inform the person arrested of the right to communicate with the consulate. Article 36(2) says that the rights in Article 36(1) are to be exercised in conformity with the laws and regulations of the receiving State, subject to the proviso “that the said laws and regulations must enable full effect to be given to the purposes for which the rights accorded under this Article are intended.”

The European Court of Human Rights has issued a judgment which adds to the developing law of Article 6, Section 1 (right to a fair hearing) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR or “the Convention”) and which sheds light on Article 10 (freedom of expression) and its interaction with the law of defamation. Practically, the decision in Steel and Morris v. the United Kingdom (hereinafter referred to as Steel) is likely to prompt a review of the availability of legal aid for defendants in civil cases in the United Kingdom (“UK”), and may be a small step towards balancing the arms in ad terrorem suits brought by large corporations against private citizens in order to silence public debate.

The accession of up to twelve East-European States to the European Union in the next decade is likely to change the possibilities for substantive consensus within the Union for the worse. Yet, the consensus on the means to pursue the objectives of the Union has thus far made European integration successful. Insofar as the feasibility of substantial consent between the Member States diminishes, the need to have rules and principles regulating the conflict between the relevant actors increases. These rules and principles must facilitate the creation of solutions to the new challenges that face the Union. Thus, it is essential for the Union's future that the law of the European Union offers both such rules and principles. One of the most outstanding principles which could perform this important task is the principle of loyalty as developed by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) based on Article 10 EC Treaty.

Since the German Federal Constitutional Court's 1994 decision on the deployment of AWACS surveillance aircraft over the Adriatic Sea, it is one of the cornerstones of German constitutional law that Parliament (the Bundestag) needs to consent to the external use of German Armed Forces in situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is likely. However, the Bundestag may neither determine “the modalities, the dimension and the duration of the operations, nor the necessary coordination within and with the organs of international organizations.” As the requirement of constitutive parliamentary approval is not directly set out in the German Basic Law, the Federal Constitutional Court (in the following: FCC or the Court) derived it from the general constitutional framework. The concept of “parliamentary army”, designed by the Court, attempts to strike a balance between executive effectiveness and parliamentary participation.

By addressing the question “Are the roles and values of stakeholder participation qualitatively different for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and national human rights institutions (NHRIs), and if so, how?” this article dissects stakeholder participation in UN human rights treaty body activities. First, it normatively posits that stakeholder participation in treaty body activities carries three values, which weigh differently based on the actor and the treaty body activity concerned: facilitating “bounded” national deliberations, promoting international deliberations on human rights treaty standards, and supplementing the treaty bodies’ fact-finding capacity. It offers concrete normative guidance for treaty bodies on their engagement with NGO and NHRI participation to maximize the benefits of these values. It then empirically analyzes their current practice in light of the above-mentioned normative guidance. This article contributes, first, to the theorization of stakeholder participation in treaty body activities, which has been discussed but only in generalized or fragmented ways in previous studies. Second, it supports the effectiveness and legitimacy of treaty bodies by endorsing their practice that is consistent with the guidance and finding space for improvement. Finally, it provides a rationale for establishing and strengthening NHRIs by showing that NHRI participation has unique roles distinct from those of NGOs.

In the western part of India, on the edge of the Thar Desert, a wealthy camel herdsman died, leaving his seventeen camels to his three sons. His final wishes distributed the camels to his heirs in specific proportions: one-half to the eldest, one-third to the middle son, and one-ninth to the youngest. The sons quickly appreciated the immediate obstacle to complying fully with their father's wishes. How could they make this specific distribution? They could not wait for the camels to breed; nor did they choose to sell them off and share the proceeds because herding camels was all they had ever known. Accordingly, they decided to consult their village leaders from the local panchayat. Seemingly uncertain of the appropriate solution, one of the five elders suggested that the boys accept a loan of one of his camels, go home, think it over again, and return the camel to him on the very next day. Disgruntled by the ostensible futility of this advice, they returned to their tent, under their breath cursing the stupidity of the old man.

While shaking their heads over tea, the youngest quickly rose in excitement. “Brothers,” he exclaimed, “we now have eighteen camels.” “So?!?,” the eldest mocked him, “we will have seventeen only tomorrow. What good will that do, you fool?!?” “But bhaya, with eighteen camels, we can divide them up according to the wishes of our papa: you get nine; our brother gets six; and I get two. That makes seventeen. We divide the herd, and give the eighteenth camel back to our elder!”

This essay is an outcome of the pandemic, which in 2020 pushed me to reorient a sabbatical to studies of German legal culture. It combines an autobiographical background in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s with a longstanding interest in legal history, legal pluralism, legal culture, and gender and law. These fields are addressed from different angles, which demonstrate considerable changes of political and legal systems and cultures in German (speaking) areas. Within the last half century, a culture of silence and shame has attempted to come to terms with a patriarchal past, while also combining political cultures and economies from two parts of Germany, which merged a generation ago, and are still very diverse.

The determination of the tax residence of companies – as a fundamental issue of (international) tax law – emerged between the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century. This emerged as an issue in cases where companies which were found to have their place of management, in the sense of a decision-making centre, in the United Kingdom (UK), carried out all their business activity, in terms of production and commercialization, in another country. At a time when the UK was establishing its tax system earlier than other countries, the tax courts of this country began to develop the “central management and control test” as a test for establishing companies' tax residence in these situations and to consider the companies at stake as tax residents in the UK on the ground that their decision-making centre was located there. Such decisions appeared to have been driven by an interest to prevent companies carrying out their business abroad from escaping UK taxation on their worldwide income, and thus to have been motivated by a specific anti-avoidance purpose. Nonetheless, the “central management and control” test formed the basis of the “place of effective management” test which, under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Model for bilateral conventions against double taxation, is currently adopted as a tiebreaker rule, i.e. as a criteria for allocating the tax residence of companies in cases where both contracting