Suchergebnisse

The paper deals with the issue of regulation of the right of natural and legal persons to environmental information, in relevant international legal documents. There is a survey of certain international conventions which envisage this right in their field of regulation. The right to access the information is in details regulated in the Aarhus Convention, which comprises significant part of this paper. This kind of regulation of the right to environmental information has performed a significant influence on states and international organizations, which created their domestic and international rules, using the solutions from this Convention. The European Union has enacted a significant number of directives on the right of a public to receive environmental information. The special emphasis will be on the work of the Aarhus Convention's Compliance Committee which has a significant role in supervising and deciding about the compliance with the application of the Convention in its member states.

Freedom of expression enjoys a particular protection in the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights. According to the Court, freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic society, and one of the basic conditions for its progress and for the development of every man. Moreover, it is applicable not only to 'information' or 'ideas' that are favorably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population, since these are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no 'democratic society'. This high valuing of freedom of expression is particularly striking when it comes to the political speech, the free political debate being a distinctive feature of a democratic society. Nevertheless, the European Court considers that whoever exercises his freedom of expression undertakes 'duties and responsibilities', and that the freedom of political debate is undoubtedly not absolute in nature. More concretely, when the hate speech is at issue the Court underlines that the tolerance and respect of equal dignity of all human beings constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic and pluralist society, and that in a democratic society, in principle, it may be considered necessary to punish and even to prevent all forms of expression which propagate, incite, promote, or justify the hate based on intolerance. Taking into account the notion of prohibition of hate speech in the constitutional system of the Republic of Serbia, and the place of the European Convention on Human Rights in its hierarchy of legal sources, this paper follows the evolution of the European Court's case-law as to the understanding and definition of conditions under which it may be considered necessary in a democratic society to restrict freedom of expression because of hate speech. This legal standard - necessary in a democratic society, is then compared to the clear and present danger test, which has been developed for almost a century in the case-law of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, and which application is sometimes recommended in Europe.

After the failure of the European constitutional process, the question of creating the European identity has become in the center of attention of the academic public again. According to the scientific literature about Europe it is mostly discussed as the set of institutional solutions, but not as the collective cultural space, the dominant paradigm discussing the European identity is the one that sees it as entirely political, indeed. The goal of this work is to show that insisting on creating of purely political European identity has its basic neither in theory nor in practice. In order to document the claim, in this work the author critically investigates different theoretical approaches studying the European identity and analyzing the results of available empirical researches tries to determine a role of cultural, civil and instrumental components in its creation.

The Lisbon Treaty has brought significant changes into the architecture of the European Union. The most important novelty, however, is the establishment of a full unity of the Union structure achieved by creating new and strengthening the existing elements. The new elements of this unity are the disappearance of the European Community, the 'independence' of the European Atomic Energy Community, constituting the European Union as a single entity and the introduction of EU values. At the same time, the Lisbon Treaty has strengthened the existing elements of the common institutional mechanisms, rules on amending the founding treaties and EU membership. However, constituting the Union as a single entity which has replaced and succeeded the European Communities has not abolished the EU elements of diversity. In the areas that differed, even before the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty, from the community pillar, there remain significant differences in the nature and the scope of competences of the Union institutions. This mainly regards the common foreign and security policy, which now includes the defense policy, where the existing model of inter-state cooperation has been only slightly interfered with. In contrast, in the field of police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters, which has become part of a larger Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, the inter-state model of cooperation has been abandoned in some of its most important elements. However, the implementation of some of the important elements of the supranational model has been postponed.

The basic problem that the process of Euro integrations faces today is the absence of the European identity. There are ideas how it could be built, on what it should be based, but the basic problem is the EU has give up in a great extent from the real European values - the ideals like freedom, equality, solidarity, social justice, etc. Human rights are the European achievement, but a distinctive, therefore identity difference between the European and the Anglo-American interpretation is that the European variant guaranteed social-economic rights, which was actually a concretization of the great ideal of solidarity. Today, with prevailing ideology of globalism, just this element of human rights has been brutally waded, a part of the European identity with it. A similar situation is with what the Europeans consider the greatest achievement of the EU - free movement of people, goods and capital. Free movement of people is questioned by building barbed wires and creation of a new ante murale christianitatis, even in Islamic states, far away from the Schengen Area that is proclaimed untouchable. Moreover, all those people swarming to the Europe actually have close connections with it - they originate from former European colonies, brutally exploited by their metropolises for decades and centuries. Not only that, but recently their new 'Europeanization' has been attempted through the initialization of the 'Arab Spring' , which resulted with increase of the Islamic fundamentalism, disintegration of certain Arab states and tribal war in them, increase of terrorism and, of course, migrants from those areas. Although it would be justified to try to return the evil gotten to them at least partly, by refusing to accept the miserable the Europe gives the mortal strike to some of the main values that are considered its identity characteristics - free movement of people and solidarity. All this, actually, indicates on the absence of the European identity consciousness. There is no clearly defined content of the idea of the Euroidentity, nor there is consciousness of it with the citizens of the EU. The citizens of the EU are still more French, Englishmen, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, Poles, Czechs rather than the Europeans. Their Europeanism exists only on the level of usefulness and efficacy, therefore, the prediction is that the model of the EU as an international organizations generis will be kept for a long time, while identities in future will be tied for (European) nations.