The European Community and the Requirement of a Republican Form of Government

The European Community - that is, the factual entity composed of three legally separate communities which has been and still is one of the basic concerns of Eric Stein - cannot be understood without taking into account European history after 1933. As an irony of history, the stage for a new beginning was set by the man who destroyed the old Europe and who was the reason that so many academics left the old country for the new world. This new start was not only influenced by the determination of those Europeans who had lived through the darkness to overcome the dangers of rivalry but also by those European-Americans who were able to build the bridges between the old country of liberty and a Europe trying to find new structures. The role played by lawyers, historians and social scientists familiar with both the old world and the emerging new Europe is a story that remains to be written for the benefit of younger generations

European Integration Through Fundamental Rights

The conception of fundamental rights as natural rights of human beings developed in European legal thinking mainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and also Immanuel Kant should be mentioned. But it was in the new world that the principles of fundamental human rights were first put into practice. A little more than ten years after the first American declarations, the Declaration des droits de l\u27homme et du citoyen was adopted in Paris; it remains part of French constitutional law today. But, unlike the development in the United States, the French guarantees could not be enforced by judges. The legislature was seen as the last arbiter of whether or not a specific regulation could be accepted as compatible with the bill of rights. As soon as the legislature had adopted a law, that law could not be challenged. In 1958 a very limited challenge became possible, through the Conseil Constitutionnel, but only before the formal promulgation of the law

La promoción y aplicación del derecho internacional por conducto de los tribunales nacionales.

En Setiembre de 1993, el prestigioso Instituto de Derecho Internacional adoptó una resolución señalando el rol de las jurisdicciones nacionales en la aplicación del derecho internacional, en la cual rechazaba la practica según la cual esas jurisdicciones están influidas por la posición del poder ejecutivo cuando ellas se pronuncian sobre cuestiones de derecho internacional. El derecho internacional depende esencialmente de su aplicación y de su respecto por las cortes y los tribunales nacionales. La dependencia del derecho interno al derecho internacional es más evidente en 1995 que en 1905. En un mundo que ha devenido interdependiente y fundado sobre valores y principios comunes, los sistemas jurídicos nacionales no son tan perfectos que permitirían que el derecho interno fuerce a los órganos estatales a actuar en violación del derecho internacional. Hoy, las jurisdicciones de numerosos países han aceptado el principio de interpretación según el cual, una ley posterior a un tratado deberá ser interpretada en conformidad con el tratado

Panel Discussion: Europe 1992

Transcript of a panel on Europe in 1992