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Arctic environmental protection and the protection of species living in the Arctic are subject to a number of multilateral international treaties, bilateral agreements, and instruments of soft law, and they are touched upon by the national laws of the Arctic coastal countries as well. Based on the theoretical approaches of Oran Young, the paper construes the current environmental protection in the Arctic as an international regime. The paper defines the basic features of the Arctic and Antarctic environmental regimes, such as duration, resilience, an institutional structure, internationalization and the agreed procedures and processes of the regime's development. The paper discusses whether their differences (e.g. ocean versus continent, inhabitants, military use) have been reflected in their environmental regimes. By comparing these features and regimes, the paper concludes that the procedure used in the Antarctic might not be fully transferrable to the case of the Arctic. Adapted from the source document.

The application of Elias's Theory of civilization, in the field of international relations, is the theoretical concept of civilian power. In this analysis, I concluded that there are several attributes that allow the use of military force by civilian power. These attributes consist of: (1) using military force as a last resort for dealing with conflicts, and only when all other means have failed; (2) playing an active role in seeking non-militant ways of crisis resolution and military conflict prevention; (3) conducting only military operations that conform to international law and (4) that intend to support and defend human rights while (5) minimizing destruction and casualties, not only on its own side but also on the side of its enemy and finally, (6) having military operations (with the exception of self defense) take place in a multinational framework, which would not be used as a tool for unilateral policies. Adapted from the source document.

Contemporary normative debates about justice increasingly revolve around the problem of extending the principles of justice (and corresponding theories) beyond the level of the nation-state, to which they have been for a long time confined. The article below discusses several authors from the wide and heterogenous politico-philosophical current of liberal egalitarianism, which can be considered one of the leading contemporary schools of thought, or the mainstream. There are two interrelated goals in this enterprise: First, to show how varied and cross-cutting the normative landscape of justice is, even within this specific current. Second, since I concentrate on the problem of extending the principles and theories of justice to supra-state levels, the universality (or the "cosmopolitan reach") of these ideas stands out as one of the most interesting features of these discussions. The work of Brian Barry, David Miller, Onora O'Neill and John Rawls exemplify many crucial issues that any theory of justice with cosmopolitan ambitions must cope with. The article concludes that the concept of (universal) human rights seems to be the only value that can buttress any cosmopolitan theories of justice; however, the normative debate over (1) their grounding, scope and corresponding obligations and (2) their connection to a comprehensive account of a good society, i.e. liberal democracy -- and therefore, the acknowledged danger of ethnocentrism -- is still far from being resolved. Adapted from the source document.

The article discusses the normative responses of the tradition of Rawls's political philosophy to the fact that globalization is not working according to the principles of distributive justice and that the existing global distribution of income and wealth is highly unjust. The first section presents the cosmopolitan theories of Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge, both of whom draw their concepts from Rawls's masterpiece "Theory of Justice". These advocates of the Rawlsian approach see our world as forming one basic global structure that entails complex economic, political and cultural relationships across state borders. These relationships have important distributive implications that require the application of Rawlsian principles of justice at the transnational level. In the second part, Rawls's work developed in "The Law of Peoples", which is the extension of his own approach to the transnational domain, is critically examined. Its major notions (Society of Peoples, liberal and decent peoples, outlaw states and burdened societies, etc.), as well as the reasons for rejecting this approach from a cosmopolitan point of view are closely analyzed. In the third part, globalism and statism are conceived of as two main paradigms of current debate on global and international justice. The article concludes with the thesis that Rainer Forst's conception of transnational justice may provide the possible transcendence of this opposition. Adapted from the source document.

This paper seeks to find out to what extent the process of EU accession has influenced legal regulations concerning the creation & functioning of social & political actors. Through the analysis of various statutes & changes made to them, the paper tries to determine the role the EU plays in amending assembly legislation. The actors under scrutiny include political parties, professional organizations, labor unions, & civil society organizations. The paper concludes that the most influenced field of actors was the area of chambers of professionals which was obliged to conform to requirements for the free movement of people & services in the European Union in order to comply with European law. The Czech Republic was quite leisurely in their harmonization of statutes, with the majority of them passed just before accession to the EU. An interesting part of the problem concerns the question of political party membership, which is still reserved only for Czech citizens. However, European citizenship, with its voting rights to the European Parliament & local magistrates, is arguably going to push slowly for change even in this domain. Adapted from the source document.

Traditionally, political rights are an important component of the relationship between the state and its citizens, and therefore only citizens are entitled to bear them. Nevertheless, due to international migration this approach is subject to change and nowadays many countries give voting rights also to foreigners who are resident there. The attitude of the Czech Republic has so far been conservative, which means that only the minimum standard enacted by European law is accommodated. However, preparatory work on a new electoral code has given rise to a discussion on the possible extension of voting rights also to foreigners from third countries resident in the country. This article tries to enhance the discussion in three ways. The first part consists of an analysis of what the potential percentage of foreign voters is, taking into consideration their geographic distribution in particular municipalities and thus providing an estimate of their influence on local councils. According to the results, potential foreign voters form a relevant minority only in 11 out of 6251 municipalities. The second part is focused on the actual exercise of voting rights by European citizens resident in the Czech Republic, who have it already. A representative survey conducted on a sample of 5% of municipalities shows that the turnout of these voters is negligible (approx. 2.4%), far below the EU average. The last part of the article deals with the legislation in this area which causes crucial obstacles to the real exercise of political rights by foreigners, and therefore is incompatible with the European law. Adapted from the source document.

Due to the different and mutually incompatible interpretations of Article X of the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, there is still an ongoing dispute between the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Spain on the question of the sovereignty of Gibraltar. In the United Kingdom's view, which is largely shared by legal scholars, Article X of the Treaty of Utrecht grants full and entire sovereignty over Gibraltar to the UK. Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Spain argues that Article X yielded to the crown of Great Britain only the property of Gibraltar's castle, town and port. Sovereignty over Gibraltar, however, continued to be retained by the Spanish state. In spite of their disagreement, both states started negotiating a form of condominium at the beginning of the 21st century. In the end, they failed to achieve this goal, which seems to be incompatible with the UN General Assembly resolutions on the decolonization of Gibraltar. The people of Gibraltar, who are the third actor in the Spanish-British dispute, claim their own sovereignty and their right to self-determination. However, according to the UN General Assembly, the decolonization of Gibraltar requires as a precondition that the Kingdom of Spain and the UK solve their dispute on the question of sovereignty. Otherwise the decolonization of Gibraltar cannot occur. Both the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Spain are European Union members but their inter-state dispute under international law cannot be solved within the EU context. Thus, three hundred years after the signature of the Treaty of Utrecht, the future of Gibraltar remains completely unclear. Adapted from the source document.