A key strategic measure of the international community needed over the next decade is the enhancement of the international rule of law in order to reinforce multilateralism and enhance global... Show moreA key strategic measure of the international community needed over the next decade is the enhancement of the international rule of law in order to reinforce multilateralism and enhance global governance capabilities. A project to significantly upgrade the existing international legal architecture should be launched upon the occasion of the UN’s 75th anniversary, making good on core UN Charter and related international commitments. In this paper, we propose an ambitious, yet realizable “International Rule of Law Package” of reforms meant to substantially enhance the integrity of the international governance system. Key international justice institutions the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and the UN’s Human Rights architecture should be strengthened in terms of both their jurisdiction and effectiveness. In addition, the UN75 anniversary represents an opportunity to pave the way for new bodies to fill existing institutional gaps. Hence, we support the creation of an international anti-corruption court as well as an international judicial training institute to ensure the requisite capacity, skills, and knowledge across international courts. The international community, on this historic occasion, should begin focused discussion on such an international rule of law reform package with the goal of modernizing and making more robust and legitimate the core international governance architecture, fit for the range of global challenges it now confronts. Show less
Ensuring good global governance through trade is not just a powerful idea, or a ‘global strategy’; it is also firmly anchored in the highest laws of the European Union. Promoting good global... Show moreEnsuring good global governance through trade is not just a powerful idea, or a ‘global strategy’; it is also firmly anchored in the highest laws of the European Union. Promoting good global governance through trade policy brings together two of the hallmarks of the EU as an international actor. On the one hand, it concerns the area of the EU’s most obvious asset, its economic clout. On the other hand, this relates to the idea of the EU not only as a ‘civilian power’, but as a ‘normative power’ which shapes the world around it by harnessing its economic strength according to a larger vision and based on values which go beyond the strictly economic realm. In order to capture the constitutional moorings of the mandate to pursue ‘good global governance’ through trade and to elucidate its implications, the present chapter shines the spotlights on this issue through three different lenses: historical, comparative and legal-institutional. First, it retraces the evolution of this idea and its progressive codification in the course of time. Second, it puts the EU’s constitutional ‘conscience’ as a trade power into a comparative context. Against this double backdrop, the chapter then turns to the legal significance of such norms, addressing what they can – and cannot – achieve as norms of EU constitutional law. Show less