During their inaugural meeting in Durban, South Africa, on 9 July 2002 the African heads of state replaced the 39-year-old Organization of African Unity (OAU) with the latest international organization: the African Union (AU). With the exception of Morocco that was not a member of the OAU and Madagascar, whose president is not recognized by the OAU/AU all African heads of state attended the ceremony. The AU will be headquartered in Addis Ababa in the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.

Ever since its enactment, Sec. 39 para. 1 of the South African Constitution has fascinated lawyers with an inclination for comparative law. Subsections (b) and (c) of this provision compels the South African judiciary to consider international law and enables it to consider foreign law in the interpretation of any of the fundamental rights espoused by the Constitution. Sec. 35 para. 1 of the Transitional (Interim) Constitution, which preceded the 1996 Constitution, contained a similar provision. Meanwhile, it has become a feature of the South African Constitutional Court's decision-making process to work comparatively in the solution of many of the issues brought before it. Thus, the new Constitution, apart from introducing a new constitutional and political order in South Africa, gave rise to renewed interest in comparative law and the reception of foreign legal principles.

After recognizing that the motions in the party-ban proceedings against the “National Democratic Party of Germany” were partly based on evidence provided by so-called V-Männer informants (members of the party who were supervised and paid by the secret-services) and after suspending the decision to hold the substantive hearing because of this information, the Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG – Federal Constitutional Court) last Tuesday, 8 October 2002, resumed the party-ban proceedings with an extraordinary and – in the history of the Court - unique session.

As the Bundestag (German Parliament) has finally achieved the sought-after Rechtssicherheit (legal certainty) with respect to ending the threat of foreign claims being brought against German corporations, and as the first compensation payments have been made, the alarm over restitution for National Socialist forced labor seems to have quieted itself. At least, public discussion and media coverage has grown silent on the issue. Since The end of Judge Kram's recent “revolt” seems to have signaled the end of the forced labor issue. Well, our attention is limited. Had it not been a long and winding and somewhat tiring road marked by lawyers having it out with other lawyers? And had there not been enough confusing and embarrassing fits and starts, all that turbulence along the way? Now that the first claims are being paid, apparently there is not much to theorize about. While this is likely not true about the legal element of the matter, this article argues that it is also not true for theorizing about the issue. Instead, legal theory could primarily look at forced labor compensation as a highly rewarding piece of scientific research. This concerns not only the compensation process itself, but certain striking aspects of the public perception expressed in the discussion surrounding the compensation-process.

During the last decade, there has been a widespread trend in Germany and internationally away from litigation towards Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) procedures. In recent years, the German interest has especially focused on mediation as a means of dispute resolution. The year 2000 saw the introduction of a federal mediation law that permits all German states (“Länder”) to launch mandatory court-connected mediation with respect to certain kinds of civil disputes. However, mediation is still in its infancy in Germany. Thus, it could be helpful for the purpose of improving the German system to look to other jurisdictions that have mature mediation systems.

The Product Liability Directive of 1985 (85/374/EEC) (“the Directive”), which sought to harmonise a strict liability regime for defective products across the European Union, has now been implemented into domestic law by all EU member states. In some countries the implementing legislation has been in force for more than 10 years. Nevertheless, until recently, there were few decided cases, both in the United Kingdom and across Europe generally, considering in detail the often critical provisions of articles 6 (definition of defectiveness) and 7(e) (the development risks defence).

The Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG – Federal Constitutional Court) recently issued two leading decisions on the competence of the Federal Government to warn the public of poisoned wine and psycho-sects. In these recent decisions the court affirmed an earlier ruling and at the same time ignored the almost unanimously harsh criticism of it. For some two decades the question of furnishing information to the public on the part of the Federal Government has kept busy, to a remarkable extent, all levels of the judiciary and a great number of scholars.

The First Senate of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court), in its decision from 16 January 2002, found one section of Germany's heavily debated Ladenschlussgesetz (LadschlG – Shop Closing Act) to be unconstitutional.

Restrictions on political association and expression are problematic from a democratic point view. The default assumption seems to be that democracy minimally entails that all citizens have claims to participate in the legislative programming of society, which, given the size and complexity of democratic societies, they have to realize to a significant degree as participants in the debates of a political public sphere or through their membership in and support for political organisations such as parties. If they lack such chances, political decisions will lack democratic legitimacy. Where the law prohibits such options, \“it cuts off the possibility of participating in the open ended future required by democracy. Precisely to the extent the law imposes a version of what the future can or cannot be …[people] are reduced to heteronomous subjects, instead of autonomous citizens.\” It follows that the burden of justification for future-constraining regulations on freedom of association and expression is on those who propose and favour them.

For want of an effective and accessible universal system for redress of international human rights abuses, victims of human rights violations increasingly seek reparations in domestic civil courts. In the United States in particular, the federal courts, since the 1980 Filártiga decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, have already decided on a remarkable number of civil suits alleging human rights violations committed abroad, the most recent example of this trend being a class action of members and supporters of opposition political groups in Zimbabwe who invoke the so-called Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) against President and Foreign Minister Robert Mugabe with respect to alleged acts of torture. According to the proponents of such lawsuits, international human rights litigation in domestic civil courts can serve as an important tool in the worldwide effort to enforce international norms concerned with the protection of the individual which may complement criminal prosecutions of the offenders. As stated by Professor Stevens, who has litigated many of the international human rights cases in the U.S. federal courts, \\\“civil lawsuits for human rights violations […] serve a role similar to tort litigation in a domestic forum: to offer victims of violence a legal remedy which they control and which may satisfy needs not met by the criminal law system.\\\”

The idea of a European constitution has been a constant refrain in academic and political discourse on European integration, and has recently gathered considerable momentum due to the intervention of politicians and the media and its explicit institutional recognition in the Laeken Declaration on the Future of the European Union. If much of the debate is characterised, tainted even, with a top-down logic of legal-constitutional engineering - a logic which arguably flows from the elitist political roots and philosophy of the project itself - there is nevertheless a growing tendency to examine the theoretical alternatives through which a more open and inclusive constitutional process might be understood. There is considerable irony in an endeavour to ‘democratise’ a postnational polity through a constitutional settlement, brought out when the theoretical underpinnings of the constitutional movement are laid bare, and the alternatives to a hierarchical or legocentric understanding of constitutionalism's reach are examined. The purpose of this paper is to suggest some of the possible pitfalls in a constitutionalist position fixated on a hierarchical or federal arrangement, and highlight some theoretical alternatives which appear accommodating, even demanding, of a more bottom-up approach and conducive to a radical inclusion of civil society, both organised and disorganised, in the structures of constitutional construction and negotiation.

In a recently published decision the Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG – Federal Constitutional Court) was concerned with the basic right of free speech of PKK sympathizers. The decision draws a fine line between, on the one hand, preventative measures which aim to inhibit radical associations and, on the other hand, the protection of free speech which lies at the core of democracy. The Court's decision touches upon the debate about security triggered by the events of September 11th and Germany's proactive stance towards right-wing radicalism, characterized by the Court's present consideration of an application to ban the extreme right-wing National demokratischen Partei Deutschlands (NPD – National Democratic Party of Germany).

On May 3rd, 2002 the Court of First Instance (CFI) issued its ruling in the case Jégo-Quéré. According to its press release published at the same day, the CFI had undergone the task to “redefine the rules governing individual access to the Community courts” recognizing, thus, “the need to ensure effective protection of legal rights for European citizens and businesses.”

The incendiary image of German soldiers, serving as members of a proposed UN peace keeping force assigned to the Palestinian territories, formed the emotionally-charged and highly controversial backdrop to the Constitutional Court's recent consideration of the constitutionality of Germany's military/civil service obligation. The conflict in the Middle East aside, the military/civil service obligation has also emerged as a hot domestic issue as the campaign for the September federal elections catches its stride. Given this political climate it is hardly surprising that the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) opted to dismiss, on procedural grounds, two cases that posed distinct but related challenges to Germany's military/civil service obligation. It is, however, precisely the Court's explicit recognition of the politically-loaded nature of questions concerning Germany's military/civil service obligation that makes its decision in the first of the two cases remarkable.

On 17 July 2002, the First Senate of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) upheld the recently enacted Lebenspartnerschaftsgesetz (Lifetime Partnership Act). The Court found, unanimously, that the process leading to the law's enactment was constitutional. The Court further found, over three dissenting votes, that the substance of the law conforms to the Grundgesetz (GG - Basic Law).

The bewildering number of articles and books which concern or touch upon the European constitutional debate remind one, at times, of a children's orchestra in which each child plays as loud as possible (more in order to hear themselves than to make themselves heard) and without listening carefully to the parts of others. The result is, simultaneously, an inharmonious cacophony of individual instruments to the skilled listener; an encompassing and confusing wall of sound to the amateur. Refined only slightly, the crude and unoriginal analogy is not far off the mark in describing the community of scholars working in the field of European constitutionalism: it is rare to find a commentator willing to grasp the score as a whole; most choosing, instead, to focus only on their section. Interdisciplinary research seems to be just as often proclaimed as it is ignored. While it would be both undesirable and impossible to have (keeping with musical metaphor) everyone singing from the same song-sheet, an orchestra can accommodate a wide variety of sounds and parts before it descends into the sort of tuneless noise one associates with so many school orchestras.