Suchergebnisse

The Report of the Iraq (Chilcot) Inquiry was published on 6 July 2016. The Inquiry was a very vast and complex undertaking both in scope (it aimed to scrutinize UK policy decisions linked to the 2003 Iraq war adopted in the period 2001-2009) and in size (the Report comprises 12 volumes which ran to over 2.6 million words). By way of contrast, the aim of this short comment is very limited as it examines only a few sections of the Report, namely those concerning the decision to go to war (sections 5, 6.5, 9.1, 9.2 and 9.8) and the period of belligerent occupation (sections 10.1 and 10.3).

A new set of international legal rules has been developed in the recent practice of investment law, intended to balance the promotion of foreign investments with the creation of safeguards for public policies. After a brief introduction, which addresses that trend in the light of the expansion of negotiations on mega-regional agreements as the "new" instrument of investment regulation, the second section of this article discusses the question of the convergence of the protection of private investors and the protection of States' regulatory power in the experience of NAFTA countries and the most recent European investment policy, developed after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty. The third section is devoted to an analysis of the substantive provisions of the recently concluded mega-regional agreements concerning three specific elements traditionally linked to investor protection (i.e. the free and equitable treatment standard, "umbrella" clauses, and indirect expropriation) in order to examine how they contribute to setting a new paradigm, or at least a move towards a new paradigm for the protection of investors' rights. Subsequently, investors' obligations – still a major topic under discussion in the practice of investment law – will be examined; and finally the new dispute settlement mechanism which has been proposed by the European Union will be assessed, discussing how it could fit with a reform of the procedural aspects of investor protection to guarantee the State's policy space.

With some 40 different types of restrictive measures in force, the European Union is undisputedly one of the major protagonists of today's sanction regimes. Measures such as selective trade embargos, asset freezes and travel bans have been adopted by the EU not only to implement Security Council mandated sanctions, but also in addition to (as with Iran and North Korea) or in the absence of UN action (as with Syria and Russia). Further, EU recent practice evidences that sanctions (Myanmar and Zimbabwe) have served the EU and its member states' own interests also with the view to promoting (the European construction of) values generally shared in international society. After outlining the legal discipline and the policy framework of EU restrictive measures, the present article analyses the legal issues emerging with respect to EU sanctions over the last four years. Among these, the 2017 ruling of the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the EU in Rosneft, Brexit and its consequences on the implementation/adoption of sanctions by the United Kingdom, and recent developments concerning the legal position of candidate countries which refused to align with the EU sanction adopted in reaction to the Ukraine crisis, are the most important.