Groundwater Remediation Using Biological and Photocatalytic Methods

The degradability of two commercially available pesticides was studied using heterogeneous photocatalytic and activated sludge treatment methods. The first pesticide contained 5% quizalofop-P-ethyl as an active ingredient and petroleum naphtha as a solvent, the latter causing difficulties both in photocatalytic and biological treatment methods. The active ingredient of the second compound was acetamiprid. The photocatalysis proved to be effective both under laboratory conditions (using UV light) and when exposed to sunlight, but the pesticides remained stable during the employed biological treatment. Preliminary information on its behaviour in soil was obtained from transport modelling

Regulation of the cyanide-resistant alternative respiratory pathway in the fungus Acremonium chrysogenum

K

International Law in the Service of Minority Protection—Hard Law, Soft Law, and a Little Practice

With the increase in the number of international organizations directly or indirectly involved in the protection of human rights on the European continent, a kind of competition has developed in recent decades in the field of fundamental rights: By widening the scope of the rights to be protected on the one hand, and by expanding the forms of legal remedies for their protection on the other, the organizations concerned are becoming increasingly integrated into the internal legal systems of the European states. This is why the shortcomings in the effective, systematic protection of minority rights in Europe are quite obvious. It is therefore a contradictory area of law, which must be exam- ined in the light of the potential and the obvious weaknesses of the existing norms and monitoring systems of minority rights. There are tensions and contradictions at many points between the typi- cally individualistic constitutional systems of our time and the concept of minority rights today. It is also clear, however, that it is precisely the highly developed fundamental rights systems that are expected to protect the rights of minorities. The history of the development of minority rights protec- tion, which has its roots in the distant past, provides ample examples of mistakes to be avoided and of the details to which particular attention should be paid in the course of regulation