The completion of a Community system of unitary intellectual property protection has come to a halt when the Commission’s proposal for a Community Patent Regulation was shelved by the Council on political grounds in late 2004. By contrast, under the auspices of the European Patent Organization...

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,...

The paper is a first critical analysis of the Prüm Convention on deepening transfrontier cooperation, amongst others in view of combating terrorism, transfrontier crime, and illegal migration, which was signed by Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Spain on 27 May...

Since the nineties of the last century two opposite trends have marked the development of international intellectual property protection. On the one hand, world trade negotiations have resulted in the establishment of a globally uniform system of adequate protection of intellectual property by...

This paper examines the explicit linkage in the recent work of Habermas betweencosmopolitanism and the constitutionalization of international law. Whereas previous thinking on the constitutionalization of international law has tended either towards the utopianism of world government or the...

This paper examines the main questions raised by the accession of the European Union to the Revised European Social Charter, under the new architecture of the Union provided by the Treaty establishing a European Constitution. The paper is divided in five parts. The historical background is...

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...