The General Assembly first proposed that the International Law Commission look into the issue of state immunity in 1977. As State immunity, by its very nature, sits at the interface between traditional and contemporary notions of international law, the span of the negotiations over three decades inevitably exposed the resulting Convention to gaps and inconsistencies with evolving areas of international law. In 1999 the International Law Commission established a Working Group on Jurisdictional immunities of States and their property,

After a hectic period of law reform, which has also provoked major governance reforms in the form of significantly increased levels of transparency and market consultation and major institutional innovations (with allied accountability and governance risks), the 1999 Financial Services Action Plan (FSAP)1 has now been completed. It has radically transformed the regulatory landscape for financial services in the EC, and set a seal on the recharacterization of EC financial services law from a minimum harmonization-based market construction regime to a highly interventionist and increasingly sophisti-cated market regulation system. In particular, the coincidence of legislative reform under the FSAP with the development of a new institutional process for law-making, which has rapidly become embedded in the financial market architecture (the Lamfalussy process),2 produced a reform agenda of immense depth and range. The FSAP period has also seen the use and development of a wide range of regulatory tools in EC financial services policy in line with the growing sophistication of the regulatory regime. While disclosure has long been a key policy tool of EC financial services law, the FSAP saw a closer focus on conflict of interest management across the financial sector, on more interventionist controls such as transparency, suitability, and best execution requirements, and on calibrating regulation to different investor profiles and different market risks. This article considers a selection of key recent developments.

The Republic of Cyprus became independent on 16 August 1960 with the conclusion of three agreements between Cyprus, Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom: the Treaty of Establishment,1 the Treaty of Guarantee,2 and the Treaty of Alliance.3 Due to limited space, this article will not consider the troubled history of the new Republic the structures of which were literally shattered by an unworkable and dysfunctional Constitution a few years only after its establishment and which eventually led to the Turkish invasion and continuing occupation of one third of its territory.4 Rather, this article intends to focus on recent legal developments provoked by Turkey's refusal to recognize the Republic of Cyprus, a Member State of the United Nations and as from May 2004 a Member of the European Union, in the context of Turkey's own aspirations to become an EU Member State.

1. The adoption of the 1994 Convention on the Safety of United Nations and Associated Personnel (‘the Convention’)1 was a response to rising casualties among UN peacekeepers and other personnel as a result of their increasing deployment to dangerous situations following the end of the Cold War. It requires States parties to: prohibit attacks on UN personnel and others associated with UN operations; prosecute or extradite perpetrators of such acts; take all appropriate measures to ensure the safety of such personnel; and promptly release any who are captured or detained.

On 30 June 2005 a Convention to respect choice of court agreements was finally born. The Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements aspires to be parallel to the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (1958) (‘New York Convention’). The exception is that if an equally broadly accepted convention exists with respect to choice of court agreements,1 business parties will have an alternative to choosing arbitration in their contracts. If they have the assurance that a judgement will be recognized and enforced in a large number of States, some might be more inclined to insert a choice of court clause instead of an arbitration clause. This assumption has been confirmed by ICC research.2

The Surveys of the law of the free movement of goods carried in the Quarterly since 1989 have followed a largely consistent pattern. The Court's case law interpreting the nature and purpose of Article 28's legislative institutions. The readier the Court is to treat national measures as barriers to trade, the deeper the incursion of EC law into national regulatory autonomy. And vice versa. The Wider the scope allowed to the possibility to justify barriers to trade, the more room for manoeuvre is handed back to national regulatory autonomy—and the more weight is placed on the process of legislative harmonization or, increasingly, other forms of policy coordination at EC level as the way to advance integration. And vice versa. All these trends are in view in the period covered by this survey. The complex institutional rhythms reveal that the creation of the internal market was not a short-term project that was completed in 1992, nor even an enterprise that gently begged to have a few loose ends tidied up before being triumphantly pronounced historical fact. In reality the internal market, as an exercise in creating a unified economic space underpinned by a constitutionalized system of supra-State legal rules in a politically fragmented but interdependent environment, is one manifestation of the extraordinary exercise in multi-level governance which is evolving in Europe. Systems of this complexity do not stop fluctuating; ‘free’ markets are politically contested.

Agriculture continues to maintain a very high profile in the Community, notwithstanding calls that the sector should occupy a place commensurate with its overall contribution to the economy. Such calls grew yet stronger during the United Kingdom Presidency from July to December 2005. Indeed, shortly before the United Kingdom assumed the Presidency, Tony Blair stated that [i]t simply does not make sense, in this new world, for Europe to spend over 40 per cent of its budget on the common agricultural policy, representing 5 per cent. of the EU population producing less than 2 percent. of Europe's output.’1 In similar vein, there has been trenchant criticism of the extent to which agriculture has dominated the Doha Development Round negotiations under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (‘WTO’). For example, Commissioner Mandelson has expressed ‘a real fear that a continuing overnegotiation and overbidding in agriculture will stymite the progress we urgently need to demonstrate across the range of the talks’.2

Social policy is undergoing review, the aim being to consolidate the fragmented nature of social policy law, and to provide for the integration of all Community policies. This is part of a larger where the EU is attempting to provide a holistic approach towards all policies, ensuring that they meet the demands placed upon governments, as well as private undertakings, in the enlarged single market. Of particular significance is the interaction between social policy law and competition law, especially in relation to state aid and merger policy. The Lisbon Process, now at mid-term, has not been successful in delivering the projected results. Thus throughout 2005 the European Union focused upon revitalizing the Lisbon agenda with the focus upon improving the quality of work as well as combating unemployment.1