The 2005 World Summit: UN Reform, Security, Environment and Development

This article reviews the negotiations leading up to the High-Level Plenary Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, which centred on United Nations reform, a review of the Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and a follow-up of major UN conferences. The article considers the human security concept and the different perspectives of developed and developing countries in environmental negotiations. It provides an overview of the negotiations in the months before the Summit. The final part of the article considers the outcome of the World Summit and institutional questions related to the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and the new UN Peace-Building Commission.     

Problems and Prospects of Implementing UN Action against Terrorism

The article deals with two related problems in implementingUnited Nations action against terrorism: first, the ineffectivenessof deterrence when terrorism is motivated by beliefs powerfulenough to provoke suicide attacks; second, the risk that therule of law will be undermined if criminal justice measuresdo not prevent terrorism. A prospective common solution is todevelop aggressive and effective preventive measures explicitlydrawn from rule of law standards. A number of preventive strategies,as well as one evidentiary measure and one international cooperationdevelopment, are discussed. The goal to be achieved is the integrationof human rights guaranteed by the rule of law into a preventivecriminal justice strategy. When terrorist violence is preventedrather than merely punished, and human rights are protected,respect for the rule of law will be not merely safeguarded,but enhanced.     

Prospects and Limits of Democratic Governance in the EU

The EU Treaty contains for the first time a title on democratic principles. These provisions emphasise the importance of national parliaments and the EU parliament for the democratic legitimacy of the EU. The new chapter on democratic principles does not address the central challenge of the EU polity to the traditional understanding of democratic legitimacy, the disjunction of political and economic governance as expressed by the important role of independent institutions like the Commission, the European Central Bank and agencies in EU governance . This is a consequence of the fact that the status of independent regulatory institutions in a democratic polity has not been clarified—neither in the EU nor in the Member States. However, such independent institutions exist in diverse forms in several Member States and could hence be understood as a principle of democratic governance common to the Member States. Such an understanding has not yet evolved. The central theoretical problem is that regulatory theories which explain the legitimacy of independent institutions as an alternative to traditional representation remain outside the methodology of traditional democratic theory. Economic constitutional theory, based on social contract theory and widely neglected in the legal constitutional debate, offers a methodological approach to understanding independent regulatory institutions as part of representative democratic governance.     

EU citizens: Challenging the notion of German National Political Community, 1990–2005

This article assesses the extent to which Germany's adaptation of European Union legal norms through altering the criteria for access to territory and rights has challenged the judicial and conceptual boundaries of its notion of national political community. It compares the policies that directly affected EU citizens’ and other immigrant groups’ access to German territory, citizenship and social integration programs. It may be seen that, in enjoying a unique and privileged position between Germans and the other foreigners, this group not only challenges and undermines the justification for this very distinction, but also transforms the concept of ‘otherness’.     

Coalition Prospects and Policy Change: An Application to the Environment

In most developed democracies, parties adjust their positions to polls and public opinion. Yet, in a coalition government, the policy that emerges is often the outcome of negotiations between governing parties. We argue that the credibility of exit threats by current coalition members and the importance of outside parties for the formation of potential alternative coalitions both matter for policy adoption. Building on a new data set measuring the expected coalition‐inclusion probabilities of parties in parliamentary democracies, we estimate the effect of coalition prospects on an important policy outcome—environmental policy stringency—in nine European countries between 1990 and 2012. Our findings demonstrate that only polling shifts that alter coalition probabilities affect outcomes. Changes in the coalition‐inclusion probability of green parties—regardless of whether they are in government—predict changes in the environmental policy stringency of sitting governments. Political polls, in contrast, do not.     

Legal Needs of The Poor: Problems,Priorities and Attitudes*

The Legal Services Corporation is faced with the problem of allocating limited resources in order to meet the legal needs of the poor. It is forced into the dilemma of setting priorities, creating workable regulations to meet an ambiguously defined and elusive concept of legal need. Recently enacted regulations require annual reports by legal services programs that are based, in part, on the assessment of eligible clients' needs as expressed by their attitudes. These regulations are premised on unarticulated implicit assumptions relating attitudes, problems experienced, and legal need. This study examines these assumptions in an analysis of perceived problems, help seeking behavior, attitudes toward the allocation of legal services resources, and how these have changed over time for the eligible client population of one legal service program in California.     

Courting Rwanda: The Promises and Pitfalls of the ICTR Outreach Programme

This article aims to assess the contribution of the OutreachProgramme at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda(ICTR). The author introduces and discusses two general approachesor models of outreach that international criminal tribunalsmay pursue. The transparency model of outreach seeks to makea tribunal's opaque legal process more visible by disseminatingbasic information about the court to communities recoveringfrom human rights abuses. The engagement model goes beyond onlyinforming these communities by facilitating frequent and extensivetribunal interaction and dialogue through seminars, town hallpresentations, and training of legal professionals. Despitesome progress with limited resources, the efforts of the OutreachProgramme of the ICTR to engage the Rwandan population and tomake the Tribunal more transparent have been ineffective. Thearticle recommends that the ICTR bolster its outreach effortsby helping to train Rwanda's judiciary, appointing more Rwandansto serve in positions of authority at the Tribunal, and engagingdomestic and international non-governmental organizations inoutreach programme partnerships.     

The role of principles for allocating governance levels in the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development

The global deliberations on sustainable development took another step in their more than 20-year history at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. A recurrent dimension of these negotiations is the allocation of governance to one or more specific levels in the outcome document. This allocation reflects the international consensus on who at what level should do what in sustainable development, and it has implications for both the effectiveness and legitimacy of sustainable development governance. This paper investigates the negotiation process and outcome of the conference preceding Rio + 20, the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, analysing the extent to which normative principles played a role in the allocation of governance to specific levels. This was done through qualitative and quantitative analyses of the different drafts of the outcome document. The results show that, although there were clearly limited explicit discussions on principles, it was possible to infer elements of several normative principles for allocating governance in the arguments and outcome of the negotiations. Most prominent among these principles were national sovereignty, but both the principles of substantive and procedural subsidiarity could be detected as well as the principles of fit, culpability and capacity.     

EU Climate Change Litigation,the Role of the European Courts,and the Importance of Legal Culture

The purpose of this article is to show it is only in light of legal culture that climate change jurisprudence in the European Union can be explained. Examining the case law concerning the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, this article demonstrates that climate change proceedings in the European Union raise questions that stand at the heart of the EU legal order; that is, they demand that the boundaries of the EU's regulatory competences are drawn. In effect, the EU courts focus on ensuring that EU climate change laws are in accord with the rule of law or, in the context of EU law, the borders of the EU's environmental regulatory powers. As such, this article shows that attention needs to be given to the interaction between climate change laws and the constitutional role of the EU judiciary. These interactions are considered here together with the contingency of EU climate change litigation on EU legal culture.     

公证在物权流转中的角色与前景

2007年10月1日《中华人民共和国物权法》正式实施，此前的2006年3月1日，《中华人民共和国公证法》也开始正式实施。新中国历史上第一部《物权法》和第一部《公证法》先后颂布施行，昭示着我国的民商事领域迎来了划时代的发展契机。然而，欣喜之余我们不难发现《物权法》并没有如很多人所期待的那样，把法定公证条款明确地写进去。虽则遗憾，但这并不意味着公证被排斥在物权领域之外，或公证在物权领域就无所作为。恰恰相反，《物权法》与《公证法》，犹如“鸟之双翼、车之双轮”，二者缺一不可，紧密相连。要贯彻落实好《物权法》，就必然要充分发挥公证的作用，让公证成为物权制度发展的推进器。