Moving Beyond Judicial Conflict in the Name of the Pre-Eminence of Fundamental Human Rights

AbstractSentenza 238/2014 can be criticized insofar as it seems to ground Italy's refusal to comply with the Jurisdictional Immunities Judgment of the International Court of Justice on the basis of the right of access to a judge for the victims of the conduct of German armed forces during World War II. Indeed, the principle of state's immunity to the civil jurisdiction of other states regarding the conduct of their own armed forces does not in itself breach a victim's right of access to a judge, which theoretically in this case might also be granted by a German court. However, Sentenza 238/2014 has the merit of highlighting, in the specific case of the Italian Military Internees (IMIs), the violation of the victims' right to an effective judicial protection of their fundamental rights, given that German jurisdictions excluded every reparation that favoured IMIs. Such fundamental rights must prevail over the international rules relating to state immunity because, according to the supreme principles of the Italian constitutional order and to international law itself, fundamental human rights violations related to crimes against humanity must benefit from an effective protection. The impasse between Italy and Germany should be solved through a new joint initiative between the two governments (carried out ideally under a common understanding of the two Presidents of the Republic), which should examine the applicants' cases in order to grant them reparation. Though symbolic, such reparation will have an important moral dimension

Excitonic effects in solids described by time-dependent density functional theory

Starting from the many-body Bethe-Salpeter equation we derive an exchange-correlation kernel $f_{xc}$ that reproduces excitonic effects in bulk materials within time-dependent density functional theory. The resulting $f_{xc}$ accounts for both self-energy corrections and the electron-hole interaction. It is {\em static}, {\em non-local} and has a long-range Coulomb tail. Taking the example of bulk silicon, we show that the $- \alpha / q^2$ divergency is crucial and can, in the case of continuum excitons, even be sufficient for reproducing the excitonic effects and yielding excellent agreement between the calculated and the experimental absorption spectrum.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur