Showing papers in "Common Market Law Review in 2000"

The European Union as a Human Rights Organization? Human Rights and the Core of the European Union

Abstract: It is tempting to understand the progress of European integration as a process of growing centrality of human rights in the European legal order: human rights as being ever more important for the ever closer union. The story has been told many times: although human rights did not figure in the original Treaties, they steadily gained in importance from the late 1960s on.1 This process appears to have accelerated recently. A most prominent piece of evidence is European Council’s decision at its Cologne summit that a human rights charter should be drafted for the European Union because “[P]rotection of fundamental rights is a founding principle of the Union and an indispensable prerequisite for her legitimacy.. . .There appears to be a need . . . to establish a Charter of fundamental rights in order to make their overriding importance and relevance more visible to the Union’s citizens.”2 The group entrusted with the task of developing a charter presented a “Draft Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union” on 21 September 2000.3 The solemn declaration of such a charter,4 whatever its provisional or its final legal status, might be part of an ongoing process that has the potential

European company law: Quo vadis?

Abstract: The study \"Quo Vadis EU gas regulatory framework\" was carried out to analyse whether the current regulatory framework in the EU gas sector is efficient in order to maximise overall EU welfare or whether changes may be necessary, and if so provide recommendations. The study identifies potential inefficiencies of the EU gas market regulatory framework assuming the full implementation of the Third Energy Package and related gas Network Codes, and discusses possible additional regulatory measures which could potentially lead to the improvement of EU welfare. The first \"Klaus Vogel Lecture\", entitled \"European Tax Law, quo vadis?\", was held on 25 October 2007 at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien). The lecture was delivered by Prof. Leif Mutén, after which Prof. The comments consider tax treaty law and European law, and temporal limitation of ECJ judgments. Order Article. (WP 2004-08:)o European Company Law and Corporate Governance: Quo Vadis? Rabels Zeitschrift für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht. Company Law and Corporate Governance in Europe, 2005, Bd. 69, 787-794. o Key Problems of Company Law and Corporate Governance in Europe. K. Hopt and E. Wymeersch, Rabels Zeitschrift für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht. Company Law and Corporate Governance in Europe, 2005, Bd.611-615. Reforming Company and Takeover Law in Europe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-19-927380-4. o HOPT K. & WYMEERSCH, E. (Eds.) – European Company and Financial Law – Third edition. Texts and leading cases. Oxford University Press. COMMON MARKET LAW REVIEW RSS All Journals RSS This Journal Etoc Alerts

Minimum Harmonization and the Internal Market

Abstract: Given the attention currently being lavished on the Treaty of Amsterdam’s new Closer Co-operation provisions and their potential to revolutionize the nature of regulatory strategies within the European Union, 1 it might at first sight seem rather old-fashioned to ponder instead what is in many ways a familiar characteristic of the existing Community legal order. After all, minimum harmonization has been a standard quality of directives on a range of environmental, consumer and employee protection matters since the early 1970s, well before its institutionalization within the Treaty itself by the Single European Act and the Treaty on European Union. However, the argument presented by this paper is that the mere existence of minimum harmonization says something intensely significant about the developing economic and political character of the European Community and, moreover, that the full vocabulary of minimum harmonization as a legal expression of this ongoing evolution is far from exhausted. To this end, Section 2 offers an overview of the now widespread occurrence of minimum harmonization within the Community legal order. Section 3 then examines the conceptual significance of this phenomenon in terms of the expanding functions of the Community and the changing legal and political environment in which those functions are pursued. In particular, it will be seen that minimum harmonization represents a partial solution to the dilemmas posed by an inchoate transformation in the Community’s role from bastion of free trade to vanguard of citizens’ welfare. The regulatory ideal of a Treaty-based “level playing-field” inherent in the drive for a single market

European Consumer Law After the Treaty of Amsterdam: Consumer Policy In or Beyond the Internal Market?

Abstract: American law is not superior to European law in the sense that ius commune was to the European law of that time....The lack of th[is] degree of superiority..., however, is compensated for in other areas; in particular by the political and economic dominance of the United States. 6 Principles of the Internal Market. Among the various Community policies listed in art. 3 EC the establishment of the Common Market which was later renamed the Internal Market is of central significance. After the SEA, renewed political commitment to the internal market combined with extended majority voting on the Council—with each member state given a weighted number of votes based roughly on population—transformed European integration. The Treaty of Amsterdam was approved by the European Council held in Amsterdam on16-17 June 1997 and signed on 2 October 1997 by the Foreign Ministers of the fifteen member countries of the European Union. On 1 May 1999, it came into force having been ratified by all the member States, following their own constitutional rules. The Treaty of Amsterdam (1992). As a legal document, the Treaty of Amsterdam has as main objective to modify certain regulations of the Treaty of the European Union, the constituent treaties of the European Communities (Paris and Rome) and of some acts related to them. I 1. The evolution of consumer policy in the European Union THE CHALLENGE OF CONSUMER POLICY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION Consumer protection . . . has a bearing on what is probably the most central issue of European economic integration, for it brings into very sharp relief the dialectics of open borders, protectionism, and bona fide intervention of the Member State to protect legitimate societal values and. But consumer policy too is a richly illustrative area of inquiry. An emphasis on market deregulation breeds opposition to active regulatory policies at Community level; such a perspective is suspicious of EC consumer policy as anti-competitive. CONSUMER POLICY UNDER THE TREATY OF ROME The Treaty of Rome was COMMON MARKET LAW REVIEW RSS All Journals RSS This Journal Etoc Alerts

The inside looking out: Consistency and delimitation in EU external relations

Abstract: The three-pillar structure of the European Union, placing the common foreign and security policy (CFSP) as well as the police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters (PJCC) in a separate second and third “pillar”, apart from the three European Communities in the first pillar, is often used as a justification for separate analyses of the three pillars. In the early days after the signing of the Treaty on European Union, the pillar-structure was the form in which the Union was perceived, and subsequently analysed by many authors. To this very day one can observe the existence of largely isolated EC, CFSP and PJCC research communities, in which research is frequently “content driven”, rather than the impetus being taken from legal institutional starting points. It cannot be denied that the Treaty on European Union indeed separates the three issue areas: the new policies can be found in separate titles (Titles V and VI respectively) of the Treaty, which are meant to “supplement” the European Communities (Art. 1 (ex A) TEU). At the same time, however, more recent literature points to the fact that the “bits and pieces” which together make up the entity which is referred to as the European Union, are more connected than many observers were willing to admit in the early days, and that the metaphor of the Greek temple may not be the best way of describing what the Union is about.1