The case law generated in just over two years' operation of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), enables stocktaking rather than definitive appraisal.1 This article begins by recalling the markedly contrasting roles in United Kingdom law of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) before and after the HRA, the better to appreciate judicial approaches to, and use of, the HRA in the areas surveyed. The second part of the article focuses on judicial use of key provisions of the HRA to interpret primary legislation said to conflict with one or more Convention rights and on judicial use of the power to make a declaration of incompatibility. It considers a selection of decisions, principally of the House of Lords and the Court of Appeal, which raise important points regarding the purpose and scope of the HRA as a constitutional document and indicate judicial uncertainty as to how the HRA should be conceptualised, interpreted and applied. With this emerging picture of a cautious and uncertain judiciary in mind, the final two sections of the article give detailed consideration to the post-HRA jurisprudence within two discrete areas of English law. Part III explores the impact of the HRA on judicial approaches to the clash between the freedoms of expression and assembly, on the one hand, and public order, on the other. Part IV considers the ‘use and abuse’ of the HRA and of Article 8 ECHR in private law family disputes. Finally, certain tentative conclusions as to the perhaps disappointing story of the HRA so far, will be proffered.

There is a widespread belief in this country that while England and the other common law countries have an adversarial system of civil procedure, continental countries use the inquisitorial system. The fact is, however, that the only kind of situation in which a truly inquisitorial procedure can be envisaged is exemplified when a policeman who, arriving at the scene of a fracas, opens the proceedings with the time honoured formula, ‘What's going on here?’ Short of that, there is nothing to which an inquisitorial judge can direct his inquiry unless and until a complaint of some kind is addressed to him. Even writers on French administrative law, whose procedure is claimed to be inquisitorial, find it difficult to avoid language that might be thought more appropriate to an adversary system. So for example, it is said that notice of the complaint must be given to all those whom the claimant indicates as his opponents.

We are indebted to Professor Brian Simpson, in his brilliant work on executive detension in wartime Britain,1 for giving greater prominence to a very characteristic and memorable Churchillian utterance:

The European Court of Justice and the International Court of Justice are both courts born of war, established by interstate treaties and having their seats in European cities. The relationship between Luxembourg and Strasbourg has been well explored, and has developed over the years. The major issue today seems to be one of the coherence of human rights protection in Europe—an issue addressed with knowledge, depth, and insight by Kruger and Polakiewicz in the October Human Rights Law Journal.2

The issue of women's under-representation in politics continues to be controversial and pressing in countries all over the world. According to the Inter Parliamentary Union, only 14.7 per cent of the world's legislators are women.1 In no country do women achieve parity with men in terms of parliamentary representation. The record of many of the world's most developed countries is particularly poor. Looking at lower houses of the legislature, in the US women's representation is only 14 per cent, in the UK 18 per cent, France 12 per cent and Italy 10 per cent. These countries are considerably out-performed by others such as South Africa and Argentina, both at 30 per cent.2

Much ink has been spilled over the question of the legality of the invasion of Iraq and of the extraordinary claims to a right to override ‘unreasonable’ uses of veto in the Security Council. That invasion has taken place, and as the United States and the United Kingdom withdrew from the Security Council the draft resoluation that would have expressly authorised that invasion, there was no occasion to override any veto that might have been cast against such a resolution had it been put to the Council. Writing while fighting in Iraq is still processding, it is both too late and too early to consider those questions of legality in great detail: too late to have any practical value; and perhaps too early for the measured appraisal of the situation that will be needed in due course. I want instead to address a slightly different question.

Regionalism denotes social demands in regions for greater autonomy from the central institutions of their state.1 Its bottom-up character sharply distinguishes it from traditional ideas of top-down regional policy.2 National law may respond to such demands with decentralizing reforms. The reforms may entail federalisation, as in Belgium, or asymmetrical devolution, as in the United Kingdom. The legal significance of the responses may be expected to vary depending on whether legislative or merely administrative powers are allocated to regional institutions and on whether legislative powers allocated are entrenched at regional level or merely delegated to regional institutions.3

This comment discusses three recent judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in the cases of McElhinney v Ireland, Al-Adsani v UK, and Fogarty v UK. All three applications concerned the dismissal by the courts of the respondent States of claims against a third State on the ground of that State's immunity from suit. They thus raised important questions about the relation the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention)—especially the right to a fair trial and access to court enshrined in Arcticle 6(1)—and the law of State immunity.

This article explores the consequences of the expansion of the domain of individual responsibility for the law of state responsibility. It is induced by a number of recent cases in which state responsibility claims were accompanied by prosecutions of individuals whose acts led to the responsibility of the state. An example is the parallel attribution of (alleged) acts of genocide in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995 to Yugoslavia and to Slobodan Milosević.

The subject of this article is public participation in the NAAEC. It will be analysed against the background of certain other international conventions that make provision, in one way or another, for public participation in relation to environmental protection, in particular, the 1998 Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (the ‘Aarhus Convention’) and the 1974 Convention on the Protection of the Environment between Denmark, Finland and Sweden (the ‘Nordic Convention’). The 1950 European Convention of Human Rights will also be referred to in so far as it secures public participation and from the point of view of its effectiveness in assisting in the enforcement of national environmental law. Reference to these instruments will, however, be limited to that which is relevant to the present essay.

After nearly 10 years of proceedings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Court, on 16 March 2001, rendered the decision concerning maritime delimitation and territorial questions between Qatar and Bahrain. One may identify two interesting features in this judgment. First, the ICJ, in the Qatar/Bahrain case (Merits), peacefully resolved a difficult dispute regarding territorial sovereignty as well as maritime delimitation.1 In this connection, a question which arises is the interrelation between territorial disputes and maritime delimitation.2 As will be seen later, the status of low-tide elevations, in particular, generated a serious disputes between the Parties. Secondly, the equidistance method was, for the first time in the case law of the ICJ, explicitly applied to a delimitation between States with adjacent coasts under customary law. Considering that the Court has been reluctant to apply the equidistance method to delimitations in situations of adjacency, this may be said to be a new development.

Even if an external observer who takes an interest in the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Communities and of the Court of First Instance of the European Communities may not have such an impression at first sight, comparative law plays a central role in the activities of these courts. It means much more than simply looking at solutions given to certain problems in the legal orders of the Member States. As a former president of the Court of Justice rightly observed, recourse to comparative law is for the Court of Justice essentially a method of interpretation of Community law itself.1 For the Court of Justice and the CFI (below often referred to as ‘Community judge’ or ‘Community courts’), it is one method amongst other methods of interpretation of the law (such as literal, exegetic, historical, systematic interpretation) and it constitutes a tool for establishing the law.2

In December 2000 the European heads of government, gathered at Nice, took several important steps in the constitutional development of the European Union. Chief among them are the various provisions in the Treaty of Nice1 disposing of the so-called ‘Amsterdam leftovers’, ie, those issues of institutional reform left unresolved by the Treaty of Amsterdam. The central focus of IGC 2000, and of the publicity surrounding its negotiations, was reform of the political institutions, notably the Commission and the Council, in preparation for enlargement. Reform of the Community courts was a less conspicuous but, ultimately, no less important item on the agenda. In the case of the judicial branch, the new provisions are inspired in large part by the well-publicised need to remedy overburdened dockets and the attendant inefficiencies in the administration of justice in Luxembourg.2

This article documents and discusses recent developments in English law towards polygamy. It begins by introducing the question of the legal treatment of polygamy in the Afro-Asian context, and discussing the consequences that colonial and post-colonial developments may have had on the character (or visibility) of English case law on the subject. The article then turns to the examination of English developments in response to different phases of non-European immigration

The European Union is soon to be composed of twenty-seven Member States. The first wave of enlargement is to take place in 2004 and may see the accession of Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the three Baltic states. A few years later, Bulgaria and Romania are also expected to join the EU. Although previous enlargements have taken place,2 the imminent accession of ten countries, mainly from Central and Eastern Europe, is unprecedented not only in terms of scale, but also for its political symbolism: for these states, EU membership confirms the success of their democratic and economic transition efforts and represents their (re-)integration to the European family after decades of isolation under the Soviet domination.

The purpose of this paper is to raise several significant issues for debate which concern the sentencing of offenders to be convicted in the newly established International Criminal Court (ICC). Such has been the impact of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington that they have thrown into sharp focus critical deficiencies in the purpose, coherence and practical mechanisms developed for sentencing in the ICC.1 Not only did such events suggest a greater immediacy for the ICC, but also, more significantly, a realisation that crimes of this magnitude, loaded with so many ideological and political interests and crying out for a ‘just’ resolution, place the role of the international sentencer at the forefront of the debate.

In its work to maintain and develop the free mobility of judgments within the European Union, the EU approved on 22 December 2000 a new regulation1 (hereafter the Jurisdiction Regulation) that replaced the Brussels Convention with effect from 1 March 2002.2 Possibly the most discussed and disputed new development in the Jurisdiction Regulation is Section 4, which concerns jurisdiction over consumer contracts. Before the approval of the Regulation, the provisions of Section 4 were heavily debated. The unreserved right of the consumer, under certain circumstances, to sue the other party in the courts of the State where the consumer is domiciled met strong resistance. This was particularly the case in relation to e-commerce, where there was an expressed fear that the provisions would lead to a scenario where anyone doing business through the Internet or by other electronic means could face the risk of being hauled into court in every state in Europe. It was asserted that this would significantly increase the costs of establishing new businesses online, and that, as a result, small and medium size enterprises would be deterred from offering their products online throughout the EU, and restrain the development of e-commerce in Europe.

An injunction to restrain foreign proceedings is probably the most powerful remedy available in an English court for dealing with a jurisdictional dispute. It is certainly the most controversial because the court is interfering with proceedings in another jurisdiction and no comparable remedy exists in civil law systems. The influence of European Community law has intensified the controversy because it has become increasingly doubtful whether the remedy is compatible with the scheme for allocating jurisdiction under the Brussels Convention (or its successor, the Brussels I Regulation) The House of Lord's decision in Turner v Grovit is an important development because their Lordships have made a reference to the European Court of Justice asking, ‘Is it consistent with the Brussels Convention for the courts of the United Kingdom to grant restraining orders against defendants who are threatening to commence or continue legal proceedings in another Convention country when those defendants are acting in bad faith with the intent and purpose of frustrating or obstructing proceedings properly before the English courts?’ (The issue is probably identical to that which would arise under the Brussels I Regulation and references herein to the Convention are generally equally applicable to the Regulation).

The centuries old problem of protecting minorities with in multicultural states through international law is a recognised contemporary global issue.2 Minority protection schemes constitute an important facet in the arsenal of techniques available to states and international policy-makers in managing the potentially destabilising effects of nationalist aspirations, where manifested in ethnic conflict.3 These aspirations range from minimalist claims for personal autonomy to maximalist claims for spatial autonomy, even independent statehood.

At the 2002 conference of ICCA (International Commercial Congress of Arbitration), the conference participants debated the following proposition: ‘the parties, not the arbitrators, control the arbitration.’ Thus, the proposition permitted only two answers—either the parties or the arbitrators control the arbitral process. Both answers were consistent with the contractualist theory of arbitration: