The increasing role professional service firms play in the reform of shareholders' meetings

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of consultants, professional service firms or knowledge intermediaries in articulating the collective action of shareholders. The regulatory background is the current proposals for the reform of General Meetings of Shareholders in Spain. General Meetings are particularly revealing of shareholder activism, as they are the forum in which shareholders' actions can be most effective. We believe that our arguments are, to a very large extent, equally applicable to other European countries, as these proposals have been put forward in Spain within the context of the wider governance reforms promoted by the Winter Report in Europe and other national and supranational regulatory efforts.shareholders meetings; corporate governance; consultants;

Lessons From The Akayesu Judgement

The judgment issued on September 2, 1998 by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (hereinafter ICTR) finding Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty on various charges of genocide and crimes against humanity is likely to please those who have long struggled for the progressive development and effective enforcement of international criminal law

The New Treaty Makers

The erosion of sovereignty that is said to characterize globalization is not generally associated with any deviation from the fundamental principle that states must freely consent before they can be said to be bound by any international agreement. With few exceptions, as with respect to Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War, states are rarely told that they must adhere to any particular treaty-despite emerging notions of global governance. The initiation and conclusion of modern treaties is still generally seen as the affirmation of sovereignty, rather than its diminution. Modern treaties, the only source of international obligation said to emerge from conscious attempts to make law and still requiring the unambiguous, genuine consent of states, remain the embodiment of sovereignty as classically understood. This Article challenges this view by examining how international organizations have altered the methods by which treaty negotiations are initiated as well as the final results achieved through such negotiations. If state sovereignty has been eroded or transformed in the wake of World War II, the new forms of treaty making and the new treaty makers are part of that story

The Likely Legacies Of Tadic

How will historians and others judge the Balkan war crimes tribunal? In my brief time, I would like to indicate how the prosecution of Tadic, the first case before that tribunal, has raised some doubts about that body\u27s legitimacy and likely legacy

Crimes of States/Crimes of Hate: Lessons from Rwanda

This Article critiques international lawyers\u27 assumptions about how best to pursue criminal accountability for perpetrators of atrocities such as those committed in Rwanda during 1994. It contrasts an internationalist paradigm for dealing with such atrocities, characterized by international law\u27s state-centric orientation, with the more grass-roots perspective seen in many journalistic accounts which characterizes the underlying offenses as prototypical crimes premised on hatred of the other. The author uses the dichotomy between these two perspectives to illustrate the fallacies perpetrated by the international community\u27s principal response to the Rwandan genocide: namely, the establishment of an international war crimes tribunal for Rwanda based in a foreign country, with foreign judges on its bench, and charged solely with the application of international norms. The author argues that the International Tribunal for Rwanda is fundamentally misconceived and may undermine the rationales for its creation to the extent that it relies on jurisdictional primacy over domestic courts, ethnic neutrality, and an emphasis on prosecuting primarily high-level perpetrators.T he author also draws larger lessons from the Rwandan example, contending that it is important to be more attentive to the characteristics of particular instances of mass atrocities and that it is wrong to adopt a one size fits all approach to international criminal adjudication. The author contends that international forms of accountability, including the proposed international criminal court, need to truly complement, and resonate with, local efforts for accountability where these are likely or can be made available

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

Courts and scholars often attempt to draw legal conclusions from the status of entities, whether states, international organizations or corporations. Debates concerning whether corporations are “subjects” of international law and the legal conclusions that supposedly follow from this are particularly vociferous within Alien Tort Claims litigation in U.S. courts. Using the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Citizens United as a cautionary tale, the author argues that drawing legal conclusions from the fact of “subject-hood” is fraught with peril, particularly in the case of corporations. He argues that such top-down approaches are likely to lead to unintended consequences and that corporations, like international organizations, should more properly be seen as “participants” than “subjects.

U.S. Policies Towards And In The U.N Security Council

For at least twelve years, Security Council reformers have proposed many ways to enlarge the size and diversify the composition of that body

Genocide - Then and Now

The following essay is based on a talk delivered at the UN during the American Bar Associations Conference Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention, March 12-13, 1998. The panel on which Professor Alvarez participated, charged with examining the legacy and future of the Genocide Convention also included John E Murphy, professor at Villanova University Law School, Ambassadors William J. vanden Heuvel and Robert E Van Lierop, and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. An assessment of the Genocide Convention requires comparing the goals of its drafters to its achievements. The goals of the Genocide Convention, as adopted in 1948, were, first, symbolic: to stigmatize actions specifically intended to destroy people because of stable and largely immutable characteristics, integral to their human identity. Branding at the international level certain acts of violence directed at groups defined by nationality, ethnicity, religion or race served notice that these constitute unique affronts to humanity because they target the right of existence of entire communities, along with the cultural and other contributions of human collectives. Second, they hoped to give fair warning - so that future perpetrators could not claim, as revisionist critics of Nuremberg maintained, that the international community was imposing ex post facto criminal liability. Third drafters hoped that by legalizing the duty to prevent and to punish genocidal acts they were helping to ensure that such acts would never again \u27 occur. They were hoping to promote the many lofty goals pursued at Nuremberg: namely, to deter future perpetrators; to tell the truth of what occurred, thereby preserving an accurate collective memory; to vindicate victims and their families; to channel the thirst for revenge into the more peaceful channels of a courtroom; to make atonement possible for perpetrators; to affirm that national and international rule of law; and to help restore the lost civility of tom societies and thereby achieve national reconciliation. Fifty years and numerous mass atrocities later, we must acknowledge that they failed . The Convention has failed to stigmatize as genocide many mass atrocities of our time that target people based on political beliefs or other characteristics. While acts by the Khmer Rouge directed at Vietnamese, Chinese and Thai minorities, or against religious groups, such as the Buddhist monkshood, appear to be acts encompassed by the Convention, atrocities against the general Cambodian population are more difficult to encompass if victims were targeted solely as members of political, professional, or economic groups. Similar difficulties arise with respect to the treatment of Kurds by Iraqis, Mengistus actions in Ethiopia before 1991, or the treatment of political opponents throughout Latin America