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The Constitutional Obstacles before the Promulgation of the Rome Statute
45-59Views:322July 17, 1998, can be considered as one of the most important milestones of the international judicial structure: it is the day when the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted by 120 states out of 148. Article 86 of Statute explicitly states that „States Parties shall […] cooperate fully with the Court in its investigation and prosecution of crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court.” As in the case of every international treaty, the principle of pacta sunt servanda enshrined in Article 26 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of the Treaties states applies, which explicitly states that “every treaty in force is binding upon the parties to it and must be performed by them in good faith.” As has been pointed out by the Permanent Court of International Justice, contracting states must make all the necessary internal measures which are required to fulfil its international obligations rising from a binding treaty. One could ask, why is this quite obvious argument important in the case of Hungary? Well, Hungary has ratified the Statute but still has not implemented it in its internal legislation. This can be considered as a serious constitutional omission, since if the Court would require the cooperation of Hungary – e.g. in the case of an arrest warrant – and it would not be able to fulfil it because of the lack of the internal legal norms, it would be considered as international legal responsibility of Hungary. In this article, I try to explore the reasons behind this omission and outline the possible solutions.
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A Missed Opportunity: the Judgement of the International Court of Justice on the Environmental Related Legal Dispute of Costa Rica and Nicaragua
181-199Views:375This article introduces and evaluates the judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) regarding the case concerning certain activities carried out by Nicaragua in the Border Area (Costa Rica v. Nicaragua) proceedings joined with construction of a road in Costa Rica along the San Juan River (Nicaragua v. Costa Rica) from an environmental point of view. The case was one of the latest environmental related affairs before the ICJ and the Hungarian literature had been looking forward with great expectation regarding the Court’s award. The conclusion of this essay is that in spite of the nature of the dispute, the symmetry of the conflict and the constant need for the improvement of the general international environmental law, the ICJ missed the opportunity to develop international environmental customary law and the case will stay in the shadow of the ICJ’s previous judgement on Pulp Mills on the River Uruguay.
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The right to strike in the case-law of the ECtHR
115-133Views:225The right to strike has been long recognized as an important labour right in the European countries protected by constitutions and international conventions on labour and social rights. However, these international conventions mainly contain mere declarations to only pursue the right to strike and do not have an effective protection mechanism. Nevertheless, in the last few decades a human rights perspective on labour law gained ground and thus international organizations and international courts started to derive labour rights like the right to strike from civil and political rights and therefore some of these labour rights enjoy the same level of protection as the first generation human rights. In its recent judgements, the European Court of Human Rights stated that the right to strike is protected under Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights and developed a case law on the requirements of a lawful strike action, secondary strike actions and the restrictions of the right to strike.
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Withdrawal from the European Union: Article 50 TEU and Brexit
97-117Views:450The unilateral right of a member state to withdraw from the EU is an entirely new feature of EU Law introduced by the Lisbon Treaty. The practical application of the withdrawal clause was placed on the agenda as a result of the 23 June 2016 Brexit- referendum in the UK. The exit raises some non-legal and legal, theoretical and practical issues which – as we are talking about an unprecedented event – have to be elaborated on now. The paper analyzes Article 50 TEU by analytical methods, summarizing the incomplete frameworks, the main procedural rules, and those issues that require the interpretation of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The paper aims to highlight the points of the withdrawal clause that have interpretative gaps, which might not have been unintentionally left by the EU legislator.
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Crimean Secession in International Law
9-28Views:306This article provides detailed insights into the validity of remedial secession, the two major judicial opinions that have addressed it (Kosovo advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice, and the Quebec Secession Reference case decided by the Supreme Court of Canada), and the steep, but evolving, path to legitimacy it may now be travelling. This article does so within the context of Crimea’s secession referendum, declaration of independence, and de facto statehood, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. It covers the international community’s reaction to these events – and the disparity among academic reactions to the vitality of remedial secession. It traces the UN General Assembly’s 2014 Crimean debate – concluding that it is the most authoritative referee for judging Russia’s claim to the validity of the Crimean secession.