Suchergebnisse

Images of widespread looting were the first to come from Baghdad following the entry of US forces into the Iraqi capital city in April 2003. In particular, it is hard to forget the powerful images of smashed display cases, empty vaults, and desperate staff in the Iraqi National Museum. Worse still, the National Library was burnt down. The looting of the Iraqi National Museum took place between 8 April, when the security situation prompted staff to leave the museum, and 12 April when some of them managed to return. Despite early pleadings with US forces to move a tank to guard the museum gates, US tanks did not arrive until 16 April.1 Cynics would say that the protection of the Oil Ministry appeared to take priority at the time.2 Early reports estimated that around 170,000 items went missing from the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad.3 This figure was completely exaggerated and the Bogdanos enquiry established that over 13,000 items had been stolen and about 3,000 recovered by September 2003.4 This article seeks to determine to what extent the US can be held legally responsible for the looting, and then to examine the international legal framework in place to facilitate the recovery and return of the items stolen from the Iraqi National Museum and other Iraqi cultural institutions

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,2the 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.

We examine the ways in which candidate countries which are to join the EU in 2004 are responding to increasing asylum migration from the East and assess the impact of accession on their asylum and immigration laws and policies. It will be argued that recent changes in asylum and immigration laws in candidate countries have been largely affected by current EU efforts to devise a common immigration policy and a possible common asylum system. Instead of devising their own response to asylum migration, candidate countries are merely aligning their asylum policies with EU practice and expectations.

The Dayton Peace Agreement, signed in November 1995, explicitly put property issues at the heart of the return process & the overall peace framework for Bosnia & Herzegovina.

The objective pursued by the policies of ethnic cleansing carried out during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina has been largely achieved, & the main challenge of the international intervention is to reverse this situation by focusing on minority returns. More than four years into the peace process, very few minority returns have taken place despite the exceptional level of international involvement in the country. This paper looks at the strategies employed to recreate a multiethnic country, & attempts to analyze why such strategies have so far failed to produce the desired result. Such failure cannot only be explained by the inadequacies of some international initiatives to promote minority returns, but also, & mainly, by political obstruction from local officials. The paper will end by proposing some directions for the future. 2 Tables, 22 References. Adapted from the source document.