Migration linked to trafficking in women and prostitution is one of the darkest features of the lack of equality between women and men. This form of migration has developed into a gigantic, highly organized criminal trade linked to the exploitation of women. The main reasons for female emigration are poverty, discrimination against women, unemployment, under-education, lack of resources, and political and economic instability. Some women are also motivated to leave their country in order to have the opportunity to work abroad and see something of the world. Another reason is that the situation of prostitutes in other countries is sometimes even worse in the countries of origin than in the receiving countries due to their illegal status.

Germany's Federal Constitutional Court held on June 9, 2004, that the weekend and holiday closing requirements of the federal Shop-Closing Act (Ladenschlussgesetz) are compatible with the Basic Law. At the same time, however, the Court's decision in this Weekend Shop-Closing Case situated the Act's Saturday closing requirement – and by implication its weekday closing requirements too – perilously close to the brink of unconstitutionality.

Ever since the incorporation of § 261, the offence of money laundering, into the Strafgesetzbuch (StGB – German Penal Code), the application of this statute to defence counsel has been discussed controversially. The debate stems from the extensive range of the statute, which calls not only for punishment of people who, for example, committed clandestine acts in order to conceal the criminal origin of a “dirty” object, but also from section 2, which addresses those who simply procured objects deriving from any prior crime enumerated in the money laundering offence. For defence counsel the risk of making themselves liable for prosecution is extraordinarily high. Since it is the nature of their profession that they deal with the accused and receive payment for their work, they are more likely to come in contact with and receive “dirty” money than most other people. The threat is intensified by § 261 sec. 5 StGB, a special rule on the mens rea requirement. According to this section, the money laundering offence does not necessarily require the person to know about or act with contingent intent as to the incriminated origin of the object. Instead, it is sufficient if he or she does not realise the origin, even though it was obvious, and thus acts grossly negligently concerning the incrimination of the object. Therefore, § 261 Abs. 5 StGB poses a serious threat to defence counsels since they obtain facts about their clients in order to fascilitate defence, which then may lead to the allegation that they should have realised the criminal origins of the money they received as a fee.

There are few cases in the law of corporate groups that have provoked as much interest, applause and critique as the Holzmüller decision of the Federal Supreme Court. On February 25, 1982, the 2nd Zivilsenat (Chamber of civil cases) of the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH – Federal Court of Justice), the highest court with assigned competences for company law, adopted what would later be known as the Holzmüller doctrine. Since then the Holzmüller case has influenced the course of countless shareholders’ meetings, been relied on in numerous shareholder actions and has initiated intensive academical as well as practical debate. What is it all about? At the core, Holzmüller deals with the balance of power between the Hauptversammlung (shareholders’ meeting) and the Vorstand (board of directors) of a German Aktiengesellschaft (AG – stock corporation) within the context of corporate groups. Practically, the protection of minority shareholders of a corporate group's parent company is a major underlying issue.

From March 1997 until 5 June 2003, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (Frankfurter Wertpapierbörse, FWB) maintained the “Neuer Markt“ as a segment of the over-the-counter-market for new economy/technology companies. The 50 “biggest” companies were admitted to the Neuer Markt Index (NEMAX50®) of Deutsche Börse AG, which is now only formally being continued, after termination of the Neuer Markt, until the end of 2004, and is already succeeded by the smaller TecDAX30®. Initially a success after rising some 500% from March 1997 to mid 2000, the Index dropped from over 9000 points to below 1000 points in March 2002, a loss of 90% or 200 billion Euros. The reasons for this development are manifold and not primarily to be found in the illegal behavior of the issuers or their officials. Still, legal proceedings concerning companies like Meta@box, EM.TV, Comroad, Biodata and Refugium uncovered that in many cases wrongful acts did occur, especially in the form of incorrect balance sheets and wrong or even fraudulent communication to the market. The three parallel cases the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof, BGH) had to consider, concerned one of these failing – and now insolvent -companies, Infomatec AG. In criminal proceedings the two executives (CEO and his deputy) of this company against whom the civil lawsuits had been filed, were convicted of insider trading and market manipulation. One criminal case is still on appeal. The findings of the criminal proceedings, however, were not relevant to the civil proceedings.

In its most recent term, the United States Supreme Court heard a case arising out of the activities of a price-fixing cartel in the vitamins market. The defendants were a number of major international pharmaceuticals companies, including F. Hoffman-LaRoche, Rhone-Poulenc, Daiichi Pharmaceutical, and BASF, that had fixed prices for bulk vitamins and vitamin pre-mixes in markets around the world. The cartel, which has been described as “probably the most economically damaging cartel ever prosecuted under U.S. antitrust law,” is estimated to have affected over $5 billion of commerce worldwide. Previous proceedings against the participants in the cartel, initiated in Australia, Canada and the European Union as well as in the United States, included administrative investigations and criminal prosecutions of individual executives. In these various proceedings, the cartel participants were found to have violated antitrust laws in the United States and elsewhere, and were subjected to heavy – indeed, record – fines in many countries. By all accounts, the countries engaged in investigating and then prosecuting the cartel participants did so in full cooperation with each other. In particular, they made use of the mutual assistance and information sharing agreements that have become an important component of coordinated international antitrust enforcement.

One of the consequences of the method the International Court of Justice employs to draft its pronouncements is that, at times, its reasoning is less candid than one might desire. The Court's advisory opinion on the Legal consequences of the construction of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of 9 July 2004 provides a clear example. To reach unanimity, or near unanimity, on the points decided, one can only assume that the judges bargained hard over the discursive normative component of the Opinion.

[Editors’ Note: This is the fourth consecutive article published in German Law Journal since July 2004 that is dedicated to the ongoing debate over the fate and prospects of the German model of Capitalism, welfare policy and corporate governance. The 22 July 2004 acquittals of all six defendants in the criminal proceedings against former Mannesmann CEO, Klaus Esser; Deutsche Bank's CEO (Vorstandssprecher) and then Member of Mannesmann's supervisory board, Josef Ackermann, and other members of Mannesmann's Supervisory Board have, once more, highlighted to German, European and International observers the particular features of law and politics in “Germany Inc.”, “Rhenish Capitalism”, or “Rhineland Capitalism”. As begun in the aftermath of Josef Ackermann's inthronization at the head of Deutsche Bank in May 2002 (exactly two years and two months before his acquittal before the Landgericht Düsseldorf) and Ackermann's subsequent transformation of the Board's control structure, German Law Journal has published several contributions to the ongoing changes in German corporate governance and its embeddedness within the specific German economic and legal system (see http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=156). In the Journals July issue, Peter Kolla, a law student of Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto, meticulously traced the background debates to the closely observed criminal proceedings in the Mannesmann aftermath (http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=460), and in our August issue, Jürgen Hoffmann, Professor of Sociology in Hamburg, surveyed the current interdisciplinary debate over the future fate of so-called Rhineland Capitalism and reconstructed Germany's recent history in an international context of globalization and privatisation (http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=485). Also in the August issue, Max Rolshoven, writing his Ph.D. in law at the University of Münster, offered a first assessment of the acquittals in the Mannesmann case (http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=480). In the article, published here, Professor Christopher Allen of the University of Georgia further deepens this inquiry from an economic point of view, while placing the contemporary debate over the possible end of Rhineland capitalism in the historical context of Germany's development in the 20th Century. The Editors of German Law Journal are very pleased and honored to be able to provide for a further forum for this important debate, bringing together lawyers, economists, political scientists and sociologists, for a much needed exploration of the historical and political origins as well as of the legal framework of Germany's much critizised and, at the same time, ardently praised system of corporate governance and industrial relations. We invite our readers to contribute to this debate, which has so far found too little resonance in Germany itself. The Editors.]