The Court of Justice has delivered an extensive body of case law concerning the obligation of domestic courts to provide effective judicial protection to claimants relying upon Community law rights - including such landmark judgments as Factortame and Francovich. This book offers a critical analysis of the Court's fast-changing approach to UK procedural autonomy and explores the difficult conceptual framework underpinning the case law. The author demonstrates how Community intervention in the domestic systems of judicial protection cannot remain unaffected by wider debates about the evolving...

This book offers the first systematic investigation of the phenomenon of soft law within the framework of the EC (the first pillar of the EU), and its use by the European Commission and Council of Ministers. It focuses upon how soft law fits into the Community legal system, how it is used, and how it relates to Community legislation. Differentiation of the Community instruments, including the instruments of soft law, is often thought to enhance the effectiveness, legitimacy and transparency of the Community. This book asks whether soft law indeed provides a satisfactory alternative to...

This monograph examines the legal dimension of European defense integration from the Second World War to the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe. It covers the evolution of European defense and security law in its legal, historical, and political context. The notion of defense law describes the entire field of rules created to regulate the defense of a nation or alliance. The analysis leads from the earliest mutual defense treaties to the failure of the European Defence Community and the eventual separation of defense from the mainstream of European integration in the 1950s, further...

The reform of the European Constitution continues to dominate news headlines and has provoked a massive debate, unprecedented in the history of EU law. Against this backdrop Monica Claes' book offers a -bottom up- view of how the constitution might work, taking the viewpoint of the national courts as her starting point, and at the same time returning to fundamental principles in order to interrogate the myths of Community law. Adopting a broad, comparative approach, she analyzes the basic doctrines of Community law from both national constitutional perspectives as well as the more usual...

This book considers the case for modernizing partnership rights in EC family reunification law. Existing Community law guarantees immigration rights only to spouses and yet there is a growing diversity of national laws on registered partnerships and recognition of cohabitation. The Community institutions currently framing legislation seem to view this as a question that can be settled by political agreement with little or no outside constraint. The book challenges this assumption. Drawing on basic ECHR principles, the place of the ECHR in Community law, and on basic Community law principles...

The phenomenon of trafficking in women for sexual exploitation, which in the last decade has changed from a marginal 'non-issue' to a legitimate concern in many parts of the world, has become familiar through newspaper coverage. Now, finally, legislators and law enforcement agencies have begun to act. In Europe, many EU Member States now have, or are developing, at least some sort of anti-trafficking policies, with some of States in the forefront of global anti-trafficking efforts. Moreover, the EU itself has become markedly more active with regard to curbing trafficking in human beings as...

This work examines the system of co-ordination of national social security laws in the European Union from a gender perspective. The central concern is the level of social security protection for women moving throughout the EU in the case of work interruption or marriage dissolution. The social security protection of women has traditionally been based on two criteria, namely economic activity and family/marriage. Work interruptions, in particular for child-rearing, challenge the invocation of economic activity as an effective basis for social security rights. Changed social and family...

This book offers the first comprehensive assessment of the various internal and external measures undertaken by the European Union to guarantee security of oil and gas supply. It analyzes in a coherent and thorough manner those aspects of EU external policy that are relevant in establishing a framework for guaranteeing energy security for the Union. What makes the book unique is that it is the first of its kind to bridge the gap between EU energy and EU external policy. The book discusses EU policy towards the major oil and gas producing countries of Russia, the Mediterranean, and the Persian...

Presents an integrated approach to general questions of European administrative law and offers some possible solutions to the problems which it poses, the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe being the main point of reference. This book examines t