Suchergebnisse

Can international judges be relied upon to resolve disputes impartially? If not, what are the sources of their biases? Answers to these questions are critically important for the functioning of an emerging international judiciary, yet we know remarkably little about international judicial behavior. An analysis of a new dataset of dissents in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) yields a mixed set of answers. On the bright side, there is no evidence that judges systematically employ cultural or geopolitical biases in their rulings. There is some evidence that career insecurities make judges more likely to favor their national government when it is a party to a dispute. Most strongly, the evidence suggests that international judges are policy seekers. Judges vary in their inclination to defer to member states in the implementation of human rights. Moreover, judges from former socialist countries are more likely to find violations against their own government and against other former socialist governments, suggesting that they are motivated by rectifying a particular set of injustices. I conclude that the overall picture is mostly positive for the possibility of impartial review of government behavior by judges on an international court. Like judges on domestic review courts, ECtHR judges are politically motivated actors in the sense that they have policy preferences on how to best apply abstract human rights in concrete cases, not in the sense that they are using their judicial power to settle geopolitical scores.

Analyses of roll call votes claim that the European Parliament is increasingly becoming a 'normal' parliament in which transnational party groups compete in a low-dimensional ideological space dominated by the classic socio-economic left-right conflict. This paper assesses the validity of this claim by comparing roll-call voting behavior in the European Parliament against preferences of legislators as expressed in the 1996 Members of European Parliament Survey. The results corroborate that low-dimensional ideological competition drives the behavior of parliamentarians to a substantial degree. The individual ideological convictions of parliamentarians are an important independent source of their voting behavior. Moreover, there is no evidence that gatekeeping institutions artificially suppress one or more important dimensions of policy contestation. Finally, European party groups are indeed effective in swaying legislators towards their ideal points. Previous research has, however, overstated the importance of socio- economic conflict to the detriment of value-based libertarian-traditional contestation.

Nicht zuletzt der Golfkrieg 2003 hat gezeigt, dass Staaten zumindest bemüht sind, ihr Handeln durch den UN-Sicherheitsrat zu legitimieren. Doch warum ist die Legitimierung durch eine internationale Organisation so wichtig? In dem Beitrag wird argumentiert, dass das Motiv hierfür weniger in dem Wunsch einer unabhängigen Bestätigung der Notwendigkeit einer Intervention liegt, als vielmehr in dem Bestreben, sich gegen die Folgen militärischen Handelns politisch abzusichern. Die Legitimität der Entscheidungen des Sicherheitsrates beruht hierbei weniger auf rechtlichen oder moralischen Grundsätzen als vielmehr auf durch wenige Staaten undemokratisch beschlossenen Kompromisslinien. Somit prägt die UN das Handeln von Staaten auf Grundlage einer Legitimation, die erst durch das Handeln bzw. die Stellungnahmen von Trägern staatlicher Macht zustande gekommen ist. Es wird deutlich, dass diese Legitimation größer wäre, wenn sie auf allgemein anerkannten normativen Grundsätzen beruhen würde. (rll-swp)