Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Dispute Resolution

            On June 27, 2001, the International Court of Justice (the World Court) issued its judgment on the merits of the LaGrand Case (Germany v. United States).  Walter LaGrand and his brother, German nationals living in the United States, were arrested in Arizona in 1982 on suspicion of armed robbery and murder.  They were not informed of their rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, a multilateral treaty to which both Germany and the United States are parties.  Article 36, paragraph (1)(b) of the Convention provides:

 

On May 2, 2001, President George W. Bush announced his administration's intention to deploy defenses against possible missile attacks from states other than those formerly regarded as major threats to the United States. He said that in doing so, "We should leave behind the constraints of an ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty that perpetuates a relationship [with the former Soviet Union] based on distrust and mutual vulnerability."

On April 11, 2001 the US and the EU reached an agreement (the "Agreement") in the decade-long dispute over the EU's banana import regime.  The Agreement requires the EU to abandon its proposal to institute on July 1 a "first-come-first-served" licensing regulation and to move in 2 stages to a tariff-only system by 2006.

 

Agriculture has traditionally been a primary source of economic tension between the United States and the European Union. The dispute over the EU's banana regime has been among the most contentious in recent years. It is also among the more legally and politically complex. 

 

In July 2003, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom invited proposals for a "Study into the Legal and Moral Framework for Marine Biotechnology Development in the UK." The study, when complete, should constitute a pioneering effort to deal with a growing and important field of international law that is poorly understood and researched but that is gaining considerable significance in practice, and poses complex legal, moral and environmental issues. [1]