PluriCourts Blog - Page 5

For more than two decades, one Austrian lawyer has strategically represented cases to eliminate discrimination against lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people before domestic and international courts. On 5 December 2017, the Austrian Constitutional Court decided that two persons of the same sex must be able to enter into civil marriage.

On the 21st of September, PluriCourts, with generous funding from the Norwegian Research Council and Lovsamlingsfondet, brought together young researchers from around the world for the first postgraduate colloquium on the frontiers of international environmental law. Topics from the creation of a court for the environment, to prosecuting the crime of ecocide at the ICC, to the legal consequences of space debris were discussed.

EU Commision President Juncker has suggested to carve out contentious clauses on investment protection from trade agreements. Szilárd Gáspár-Szilágyi provides comments on this EU Commission’s potential policy shift, which is most likely a response to recent EU law developments.

^{This comment was first published on the International Economic and Policy Blog.}

Opinion 2/15 is already causing quite a stir in legal academia. While some take an EU law perspective, others look at it from the perspective of investment law or public international law. In this short post I will not focus on purely legal issues. Instead, I will look at the Opinion’s effects on the EU’s investment policy and propose a change in the Commission’s approach to the negotiation of international economic agreements.

In February this year, Slovenia legalized same-sex marriage. From a European standpoint, this may not seem particularly ground-breaking considering that the Netherlands were the first to legalise same-sex marriage in 2001. However, marriage equality has been an uphill battle.