An Act passed by a Parliament may fail to apply to a given set of circumstances for one of two reasons, neither of which is mutually exclusive of the other. The first of those reasons is that the Act falls outside the legislative competence of the Parliament, in which case it is usually said that the Act is unconstitutional or legally invalid. The second is that the Act does not attempt to apply even though the Parliament possessed the competence to make it apply to the same circumstances. The process by which it is determined that the Act does not apply for that reason is one of statutory construction or interpretation. It is possible to describe such an Act as merely non-applicable or non-operative. There will be situations where both reasons may coincide, especially if there is created a statutory presumption in favour of giving an Act a construction, which will ensure its validity. But only the first of the two reasons mentioned above involves a challenge to the supremacy of the Parliament concerned.

The process of European legal integration has long been understood to engage the workings of domestic legal orders, EC law and, to a lesser extent, the law of the ECHR. In general terms, the relationship between these bodies of law has been characterised as involving the direct and indirect interchange of principle and practice across jurisdictions. An example of direct interchange is found in the EC law requirement that national courts give effect to rules emanating from the EC legal order in all cases raising EC law issues. The indirect form occurs in disputes which do not raise EC law issues but which see national courts voluntarily borrow from their experience within the EC legal order by way of developing the domestic legal system. Likewise, national courts and the European Court of Justice have relied upon the law of the ECHR, a “foreign” body of rules, in developing their respective legal orders.

Sweden is well known as a high tax society and it is also well known for its spending on welfare. Just over 50 percent of GDP is consumed by taxation. This is an enormous amount of money. How is it possible to avoid strong conflicts between the citizen and the state? Must not this huge appetite for funding tempt the democratic state to pass the borderline and become almost a despotic state? How are human rights protected?

“The European Union continues to be strongly committed to the stabilisation and development of South-Eastern Europe. The Union’s strategy is to draw the countries of the region closer to the prospect of European integration.” This confident statement opens the joint Report on EU action in support of the Stability Pact and South-Eastern Europe (SEE) presented by the Finnish Presidency and the European Commission to the European Council at Helsinki in December 1999. It contains three ideas which are key to the EU’s policy towards the region: stabilisation, development and integration. The Stability Pact seeks to provide a framework for the coordination of effort towards these objectives: greater political stability, security and democratisation; economic reconstruction and development; political, economic and legal integration both within the region and between the countries of SEE and the EU.

The European Convention on State Immunity provides for the immunity of states and their organs from the domestic courts of the respective Contracting States. In doing so, it makes no apparent distinction between those courts’ civil and criminal jurisdictions. Yet the vexed question of the immunity of state officials from the latter, especially in respect of crimes established under international law, has been spectacularly brought to the fore by the Pinochet case. It is on this question—the immunity of individual state officials from the criminal jurisdiction of foreign states specifically in respect of international crimes—that this article focuses.