Opening Remarks to The Editorial Team and Members of International Law Observer by Salma Yusuf

Greetings to fellow members of the international legal community representing the diverse jurisdictions and legal systems of the world! It is both a pleasure and a privilege to be welcomed to the distinguished Panel of Authors of the Editorial Team at the International Law Observer. Thank you, Dominik Zimmerman, Editor-in-Chief of the International Law Observer, [...]

Shared responsibility for injury despite the existence or not of a wrongful act?

Here follows a scenario and a number of inter-related questions, which those looking to write an exciting master thesis might find interesting. This post relates to an underexplored, though interesting issue of shared responsibility for injury caused by acts which can or not be considered as ‘wrongful’. After all, injury can be sustained by a State [...]

EU-Israel Trade Agreement Does Not Apply to Products from the Occupied Territories

On 29 October 2009, Attorney General Bot published his Opinion on a preliminary reference addressed to the European Court of Justice by a German court on the application of the EC-Israel Association Agreement in the context of products originating from the occupied Palestinian territories and the question of their entitlement to preferential customs treatment under [...]

EU Fundamental Rights and Counter-Terrorist Blacklisting in the Next Round: The El Morabit Decision of the CFI (T-37/07 and T-323/07)

A brief follow-up on the ECJ’s Kadi decision and the Court of First Instance’s (CFI) – slightly less famous – PMOI decisions we reported earlier on (see here, here and here). The Kadi decision dealt with an EU regulation implementing a UN blacklist which provided for the freezing of financial means of suspected Al Quaida [...]

Waste and the Law

If you hold an interest in international environmental law, you might find the special rapport in this week’s Economist on waste interesting. Although waste does not at first sight concern international law and related areas, the rapport fascinatingly describes many of the challenges and problems which waste gives rise to.  Given that, on average, each [...]

ECJ Elgafaji judgment and the ‘exceptional objectivity’ test for refugee protection

Having only recently considered the normative importance and weight of the provision in Article 15(c) of the European Refugee Qualification Directive (mentioned here and here), the following is a timely and, to a certain extent, also welcomed judicial instance. On 17 January the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Justice rendered its preliminary ruling [...]

EU Council removes Iranian organisation from terror list after EU Court judgment

After a battle of several year the Iranian opposition group People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (“PMOI”) has succeeded in getting its name off the EU’s black list of terrorist organisations. As EUobserver reported on Tuesday, the EU Foreign Ministers agreed to remove the name of the organization from the list due to a lack of evidence [...]

Future of the ECJ

Vlad Perju of Boston College of Law has just posted his recent paper “Reason and Authority in the European Court of Justice on SSRN (the paper is also available via the website of Virginia Journal of International Law, where the paper was recently published). The paper is very interesting and makes the, to many critics [...]

The ECJ’s Kadi judgment facilitates the review of international law for compliance with fundamental rights

The European Court of Justice handed down its decision in the Kadi and Al-Barakaat joint cases on 3 September 2008.[1]  After reviewing the treatment of the case by the Court of First Instance with considerable attention, the Court divided its conclusions into three separate but interdependent issues: (i) the Council’s competence in adopting the regulation [...]

Roman Herzog: “Stop the European Court of Justice”

This is the appeal stated by Lüder Gerken, director of the Centre for European Policy, and Roman Herzog, former President of Germany and former judge at the German Federal Constitutional Court. They illuminate their reasons behind this rather radical-sounding position in an article published in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from the 8 September. An [...]

Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union

In the case C-432/05 (Unibet [London] Ltd, Unibet [International] Ltd v. Justitiekanslern) the European Court of Justice once again managed to refer to the – still legally non-binding – Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. And as before in the case C-540/03 it seems as if the Court did not actually have to [...]

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