The European Court of Justice and the International Court of Justice are both courts born of war, established by interstate treaties and having their seats in European cities. The relationship between Luxembourg and Strasbourg has been well explored, and has developed over the years. The major issue today seems to be one of the coherence of human rights protection in Europe—an issue addressed with knowledge, depth, and insight by Kruger and Polakiewicz in the October Human Rights Law Journal.2

Regionalism denotes social demands in regions for greater autonomy from the central institutions of their state.1 Its bottom-up character sharply distinguishes it from traditional ideas of top-down regional policy.2 National law may respond to such demands with decentralizing reforms. The reforms may entail federalisation, as in Belgium, or asymmetrical devolution, as in the United Kingdom. The legal significance of the responses may be expected to vary depending on whether legislative or merely administrative powers are allocated to regional institutions and on whether legislative powers allocated are entrenched at regional level or merely delegated to regional institutions.3

After nearly 10 years of proceedings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Court, on 16 March 2001, rendered the decision concerning maritime delimitation and territorial questions between Qatar and Bahrain. One may identify two interesting features in this judgment. First, the ICJ, in the Qatar/Bahrain case (Merits), peacefully resolved a difficult dispute regarding territorial sovereignty as well as maritime delimitation.1 In this connection, a question which arises is the interrelation between territorial disputes and maritime delimitation.2 As will be seen later, the status of low-tide elevations, in particular, generated a serious disputes between the Parties. Secondly, the equidistance method was, for the first time in the case law of the ICJ, explicitly applied to a delimitation between States with adjacent coasts under customary law. Considering that the Court has been reluctant to apply the equidistance method to delimitations in situations of adjacency, this may be said to be a new development.

The purpose of this paper is to raise several significant issues for debate which concern the sentencing of offenders to be convicted in the newly established International Criminal Court (ICC). Such has been the impact of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington that they have thrown into sharp focus critical deficiencies in the purpose, coherence and practical mechanisms developed for sentencing in the ICC.1 Not only did such events suggest a greater immediacy for the ICC, but also, more significantly, a realisation that crimes of this magnitude, loaded with so many ideological and political interests and crying out for a ‘just’ resolution, place the role of the international sentencer at the forefront of the debate.

The centuries old problem of protecting minorities with in multicultural states through international law is a recognised contemporary global issue.2 Minority protection schemes constitute an important facet in the arsenal of techniques available to states and international policy-makers in managing the potentially destabilising effects of nationalist aspirations, where manifested in ethnic conflict.3 These aspirations range from minimalist claims for personal autonomy to maximalist claims for spatial autonomy, even independent statehood.

Historically, the trend towards the harmonisation of commercial laws has been concerned either with the creation of a regime dealing with international transactions while preserving the identity of national laws or alternatively the emergence of supranational entities where the focus has been upon progressing a common market or political or economic grouping. The legal instruments that have promoted harmonisation1 have mainly revolved around a model law such as the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration (1985) or those instruments that deal with international commercial contracts and depend for their application on incorporation into contracts. Clearly there are limits on the effectiveness of international proposals for contractual incorporation. By definition, they are not mandatory and for them to have any realistic effect there must exist a considerable degree of homogeneity in commercial practice as seen, for example, with documentary letters of credit.2 In addition, contractual mechanisms have mainly an inter-partes dimension3 and are not therefore apt to deal with third party rights including the recognition and enforcement of international security interests.

Not many decisions of the Court of Justice have stirred such an intensive academic debate in Germany1 as the Court's well-known Centros judgment,2 dealing with a Danish couple that had registered a private limited company in England and had then applied to register a branch in Denmark. The Danish authorities refused a registration for the reason that under Danish law a ‘foreign limited company’ which does not transact business in its state of incorporation has to fulfil certain requirements of Danish company law, in particular the paying-up of the minimum capital fixed at DKK 200.000. The competent Danish Court referred the question to the Court of Justice whether the Danish regulation was compatible with Article 52 (now Article 43) ECT in conjunction with Article 58 (now Article 48) ECT.

Two conflicting forces beset any attempts to fit responsibility for environmental matters into modern constitutional structures. On the one hand the political desire for less centralised government calls for devolution of power to regional or local authorities, so that responsibilities are divided and distributed between different levels of government. On the other, the fact that no aspect of the environment can be treated as if it were a separate compartment suggests that responsibilities should be integrated in one place, an approach supported by the increasing awareness that there is a need for environmental considerations to influence all areas of policy if the goal of sustainable development is to be achieved. Fitting responses to the conditions1 of a particular locality is an important element in successful environmental policy, but so is ensuring that a coherent and holistic approach is taken, unhindered by institutional divisions.2 The purpose of this paper is to examine how two structures of devolved administration, for the Autonomous Communities in Spain and for Scotland, meet the challenge of reconciling these opposite forces, and how the constitutional structures influence the way in which potential problems are resolved.

Following the last update in this Quarterly,1 the European Union (EU) has been quite active in agreeing new measures relating to cross-border policing and criminal law. First of all, the Tampere European Council meeting in October 1999 agreed a list of measures to be adopted to develop the EU's ‘Area of Freedom, Security and Justice’, particularly as regards criminal procedure. Here the European Council requested the Council to agree a work programme on mutual recognition in criminal matters within a year, and to establish an EU organisation facilitating cross-border prosecutions (Eurojust) within 2 years. Following agreement in the meantime on a Convention on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters after 5 years’ negotiations,2 the work programme was duly adopted in November 2000, setting out a list of twenty-four measures which the Council should agree in the medium-term to facilitate cross-border investigations, prosecutions, and enforcement of judgments.3 Several Member States then began to implement this plan, tabling two versions of a proposed Decision to set up Eurojust and also making proposals for ‘Framework Decisions’ to harmonise national laws as regards enforcement of other Member States’ orders to freeze assets and evidence and enforcement of judgments imposing financial penalties.4

On 11 September 2001, four aircraft on internal flights within the United States were seized by passengers who crashed two of them into the World Trade Centre in New York and another into the Pentagon, Washington DC, the other falling into open land in Pennsylvania. The men who seized the planes were all non-US nationals. The total loss of life was over 3,000, including a number of UK citizens. The economic consequences were hardly calculable. Responsibility for the attacks was attributed to the Al Qaeda movement, a group regarded by the United States as being responsible for previous attacks against US targets, including the bombing of American embassies in East Africa in 1998 and on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. Although Al Qaeda was thought to have members in many states, the principal base for its operations was in Afghanistan.1

The World Summit on Sustainable Development took place in Johannesburg from 26 August to 4 September 2002. Its intended purpose was to hold a ten-year review of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (Rio Summit) in order to rein-vigorate the global commitment to sustainable development.1 Perhaps attempting to duplicate the products of other international meetings, national governments agreed to negotiate and adopt two documents: the Johannesburg Declaration2 and the Plan of Implementation3 However, differences emerged over the binding nature of the instruments and if so, the strength of the obligations therein. It appeared that this tension spilled over to all the negotiations. Some countries pushed for concrete timetables, reiterating other goals stipulated in previous international declarations or decisions, while other countries, weary of taking on new commitments that are unlikely to be met, preferred a more soft-law declaratory approach.