Does the Community legal order constitute a closed ‘self-contained regime’ or will it be an ‘open system’? While founded on the basis of an international treaty, the European Community still has to determine – not unlike national legal orders – the effects of public international law...

The following Report will be presented to the 22nd FIDE Congress to be held in Limassol, Cyprus, 1-4 November 2006. It has been prepared in response to a questionnaire devised by the General Rapporteur, Professor Piet Eeckhout, which is reproduced as an Annex. It seeks to do two things: first,...

Since the Conclusions of the European Council on the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) at Tampere in 1999 the Union has recognised the significance of the external dimension to this policy field, and over the last decade the Union’s activity in this field has both intensified and...

Joschka Fischer's well-known speech at the Humboldt University on 12 May 2000 marked the start of a wide-ranging and unprecedented debate on the future of Europe. Subsequent developments have led us from the Nice and Laeken declarations to the establishment of a 105 members comprising Convention...

The third part of the Constitution for Europe has been submitted to hard criticism. The content of this part however, is indispensable to a Constitution of the European Union as it is a consolidation of the legal bases and institutional details which are necessary to the functioning of the EU....

The aim of this paper is the study of the enhanced cooperation mechanism in the framework of the Lisbon Treaty as it applies to the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) of the EU. The concept of enhanced cooperation was introduced into the...

This paper discusses the legal effects of a seemingly paradoxical situation: an international agreement falls at least in part within the exclusive competence of the Community, and yet the Member States are parties to the agreement and the Community is not. This situation, while not common, is...