Since its foundation, the Council of Europe has established a common legal system for European states, based on democracy, the rule of law and human rights. Its standard-setting texts have helped its members meet the challenges of changing societies and now apply all over Europe given the organisation¿s unprecedented geographical enlargement since 1989. In this connection, the Council of Europe has played a key role in the accession of the new member states to the European Union. The first section of the book deals with the "constitutional" law of the Council of Europe, or its internal statutes in the broad sense. It covers the 1949 Statute, which, along with related texts, lays down the Council¿s aims and determines its membership and operating methods. The second section concerns the role played by the Council of Europe - which has always been very active in standard-setting - in the harmonisation of European states¿ domestic law. The third section situates Council of Europe law in the European context. For instance, it studies the extent to which Council of Europe conventions have been incorporated in domestic law and how Council of Europe law and European Union law co-exist.
The Council of Europe, of which all European States are members, plays a pivotal role in the promotion and protection of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law in Europe. Bringing together specialist scholars and practitioners, The Council of Europe: Its Laws and Policies offers profound insights into the functioning of the organization. The organization's primary and secondary law, its institutional structure, and its far-reaching fields of activities are comprehensively and systematically analysed. This volume investigates the impact of the Council's activities within the national legal systems of the Member States and the dense web of relationships between the Council of Europe and other international organisations. An important reference work on one of the most influential organizations in Europe, the book concludes that the Council of Europe has played a considerable role in the constitutionalization process of regional public international law.
This book examines the theoretical, historical, and practical dimensions of how a city operates internationally. It explores the various approaches of the contentious term ‘city diplomacy’, its impact and follows examples throughout history, the origins of city diplomacy and its evolution through traditional town-twinning, city networks and smart cities. Cities have become important actors on the world stage, they have developed diplomatic apparatus, and play an important role in securing sustainable futures across a range of key global issues, including climate change, inclusive economic growth, poverty eradication, housing, infrastructure, basic services, productive employment, food security and public health. Practitioners along with scholars and students of political science, spatial planning, economic geography, international relations, and local government will find this an insightful, invaluable view of the subject.
The conflicts in the South Caucasus are now a decade old, but still appear impervious to solution. The hopes that independence raised have been dashed by an insidious cocktail of past and present regional hegemony, historical antipathy and Soviet planning. Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, thus, continue to wait for their long awaited Spring. In a region where Western academic writing has focussed, during the last decade, almost exclusively on the dynamics of regional security and Great Power rivalry, even in the context of conflict, this volume provides an important and necessary legal appraisal of the possible processes and structures which may, ultimately, facilitate the finding of constitutional settlement in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In the work, Tim Potier, an academic lawyer with much experience in the Caucasus, has written a powerful but dispassionate account which will prove not only to be of use to academics, diplomats and government officials working in the region, but also be of lasting value to the ongoing development of the international law on self-determination and autonomy. Dr Potier also considers the fate of what he prefers to term, `regionally non-dominant titular peoples'.