Constitutional judicial review in Central and Eastern Europe has become an entrenched and powerful factor in the politics and constitutional life of these countries; indeed, it would be impossible to give even a rough account of these new democracies without bringing constitutional courts into the picture. For all their importance and activism, their introduction had not been preceded by any thorough debate concerning the merits and demerits of the model transplanted from Western Europe—especially, from Germany—and the developing jurisprudence of the courts was strangely silent about the grounds and the limits of the courts ‘legitimacy, especially when replacing parliamentary choices on rights implicating matters with the courts’ own views about the proper articulation of vague rights-provisions. This Article explores some of the reasons and consequences of this silence.

During the 1980s the Israeli Supreme Court went through revolutionary changes, becoming more active in public life and in the political arena. Scholars predicted that the institutional legitimacy of the Court, based on its image as an objective, neutral, and apolitical institution, would decline following these changes. However, public polls showed that the Court's institutional legitimacy remained very high long after the 1980s. This Article aims to explain the lack of a decline in the institutional legitimacy of the Court during those years by presenting an empirical study of the Court's news television coverage beginning with the inception of Channel One (1968) until just before the entrance of the commercially financed Channel Two (1993). The Article shows that the increase in the visibility of the Court was not substantial enough to diminish the Court's image. Moreover, television continued to present the Court, by and large, through a mythical perspective as an objective, neutral, and apolitical body. The Article concludes that the Israeli public, unaware of the changes in the Court's adjudication, continued to award the Court support based on the Court's unchanged fabled image presented by the news media. Hence, a politically active court may continue to receive high public support based on in its mythical image if the changes in its adjudication are not visible to the public. Research of the portrayal of courts in the media is thus of utmost importance in understanding changes in the institutional legitimacy of courts.

When exploring the sources of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) obligations of multinational peacekeeping forces, legal scholars have thus far focused mainly on the UN (and, to a lesser extent, NATO), whilst other organizations have remained largely in the shadows. Whereas the UN Secretary-General's Bulletin on the Observance by UN Forces of International Humanitarian Law has been widely debated and extensively investigated, little or no attention has been paid to self-regulatory solutions adopted by other international and regional organizations.

This Article focuses on the European Union (EU), holding that this regional organization—by virtue of its sui generis nature and of its increasing engagement in the field of crisis management—can be regarded as one of the most interesting newcomers to the realm of jus in bello. More specifically, it looks at the EU's internal legal order with a view to verifying whether and to what extent it may complement customary IHL in regulating the conduct of the EU as a military actor. The Article surveys the primary and secondary sources of EU legislation which may prima facie spell out obligations for the EU-led troops engaged in European Security and Defence Policy military operations. Finally, the Article seeks to draw some broader conclusions on the nature of the relationship between EU law and IHL, as well as on the complementarity and inherent normative value of their sources.

Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip has created a situation in which this territory is dependent on the supply of various necessities by Israel, in particular the supply of electricity, In 2008 Israel decided to withhold 5% of the supply of electricity to the Gaza Strip, prompting several Gaza residents as well as human rights organizations to petition the Supreme Court of Israel against this decision. In Jaber Al-Bassiouni Ahmed v. The Prime Minister the Court assumed that the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip had ended with the disengagement and treated this issue on the basis of general humanitarian law. The basic questions of whether the occupation had ended, and whether certain duties remained with Israel, even assuming that Gaza is no longer occupied, have not been explored. This Article addresses these two questions.

It is the conclusion of this Article that regardless of the terms imposed by Israel after disengagement and other reservations that have been raised in this regard, occupation ended following the complete withdrawal of any Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip. Israel's disengagement raised difficulties that are not only unique to the Gaza Strip; these difficulties emerge in most cases when occupation is replaced by a process of self-determination rather than the return of the former sovereign. The contention presented herein is that Israel continues to have certain post-occupation duties even after the occupation of Gaza. These duties correspond to the occupant's duties to care for order and civil life in the territory during the occupation. These obligations will end once the new regime in the area is able to perform the duties that fell upon the shoulders of the occupant during the occupation, or until the non-performance of the new regime is attributable to its own failures and not to the ending of the occupation. In light of these contentions, Israel is still under certain obligations regarding the Gaza Strip, among them the regular supply of electricity to that area.

The Article argues for a new assessment of the significance of Israel's Law of Return—that the Law of Return reflects not the sovereign prerogative of a state to control immigration, but the right of every Jew to settle in the Land of Israel. This understanding of the Law of Return explains why Section 4 proclaims that as far as the Law is concerned, the status of Jews born within the State of Israel is the same as those arriving to Israel from abroad. Resolving the anomaly of Section 4 dispels several misinterpretations of the Law of Return and the critiques of the Law which grow out of these misinterpretations. The Article also surveys and answers several liberal objections to Israel's policy of granting preference in immigration and naturalization based on ethno-national identity and presents an argument, for giving priority to Jewish immigration and naturalization based on the extra benefits (religious, political, and communal) that Jews receive from such immigration and naturalization. Finally, it is submitted that the State of Israel has an obligation of justice to admit Jews into the state as full citizens upon their demand, since this was a reasonable expectation of those in past generations who had contributed to the existence and maintenance of the state.

The Article examines the “transnational” use of torture evidence, i.e., the use of evidence obtained by torture by third states or parties in national criminal trials. The analysis of the law of the international criminal tribunals shows that supranational torture evidence must be excluded since such evidence is unreliable and damages the integrity of the proceedings. The same applies to the admission of transnational torture evidence before national tribunals. The strict exclusionary rule of Article 15 Convention Against Torture (CAT) confirms this view. The rationale for this rule is found in the general unreliability of torture evidence, its offensiveness to civilized values and its degrading effect on the administration of justice. The burden of proof must, as a rule, rest with the state as the party that presents the controversial evidence. For practical and fundamental considerations of fairness, such evidence should not be admitted if there is a real, serious risk that it was obtained by torture.

The legal framework in effect in Germany since 1991, bars all research on human embryos and permits, since 2002, the import of embryonic stem cells only under the fulfillment of relatively demanding conditions. Legislation linked this position to the goal of ensuring freedom of biomedical research (only) to the extent that it could be justified in view of the state's obligation to protect human dignity and the right to life. Underlying this was the assumption, understood by the draft of the law that embryonic stem cells, given the destruction of embryos, which necessarily precedes their utilization, “cannot be viewed just like any other biological material from an ethical perspective.” In the meantime, however, the legal-political, would-be “enlightened”; Zeitgeist has become oriented toward a hidden or openly displayed “liberalization” of human embryonic stem cell research, which raises the question of what could have fundamentally changed about the previously named “ethical problem.” Great uncertainties obviously exist regarding the central significance of the “human dignity” guaranteed to be “inviolable” as well as about the relevance of this “iron ration” of libertarian-humanist legal thought in the context of destructive embryo research. The present essay gives an overview of the potential interpretive possibilities and subjects them to critical examination against the background of current legal-political developments, which are perceived in Germany not only as a “revolution” not only in the sphere of biological policy, but also ultimately in that of the central determining factors in general in the relationship between state and individual. In this light, how can the kernel of the ideal of human dignity be preserved even against the demands of the (post-) modern (age)?

This Article aims to provide the first thorough description of the developing asylum system in the State of Israel. It argues that despite the inherent moral and doctrinal differences between asylum and immigration regimes, the Israeli asylum system is essentially an extension of Israel's immigration and citizenship regime, which excludes the non-Jewish refugees and frames the refugee as the “other;” with the Palestinians and other enemy nationals facing maximum exclusion. While this phenomenon is not uncommon in today's world, which suffers from “compassion fatigue,” diluted protection, and adherence to national self-interest, the Israeli example is exceptional for a number of reasons: 1) it came into being only decades after the rest of the democratic developed countries developed their asylum systems; 2) it is rooted in challenging—albeit not exceptional—geo-political conditions; and 3) it works against the background of a very unique immigration law.

The Parliamentary Council, the constitutional assembly for the German Basic Law, split over the question whether the guarantee of human dignity should be understood as the result of a democratic decision or as the incorporation of a pre-existing universal principle of Christian origin. The subsequent constitutional practice was dominated by a moral understanding of the norm that stressed the contradiction between democracy and human dignity. This Article rejects this interpretation and attempts to show, using the exemplary German case, that a democracy-oriented interpretation of human dignity is not necessarily less effective than a moralized understanding.