Turkish private international law is regulated by the Statute Regarding International Private Law and Procedure which was enacted on 20 May 1982 and became effective on 22 November 1982. This law repealed the former Temporary Law on Rights and Duties of Foreigners in Ottoman Lands of 23 February 1330 (1915) (hereinafter ‘Temporary Law’), which, although intended as a temporary law when enacted during the Ottoman period, was effective until 1982.

The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is founded upon certain values and institutions common to the legal systems of all the Contracting States. In the absence of such common values and institutions the attempt to create generally applicable guidelines for the balancing of the rights of individuals against the general interest will run into difficulties.

You will at once observe that the title of my talk does not ask you to consider whether trial by jury is an ideal mode of trial, nor whether the English law of defamation is ideal or even the best that there is. I rather suspect that Professor Markesinis has already told you that it is not. And certainly it is he and not I who is competent to undertake that wide comparative study. My purpose is simply to take our substantive law as it is and to ask whether, at the end of the 20th century, it is better that civil actions for defamation should be tried by judge and jury or by judge alone.

The constantly increasing pressure on the environment caused by the transboundary effects of human activities has posed the problem of defining the limits beyond which such transboundary deleterious effects become legally relevant under international law, giving rise to interstate claims of a compensatory, preventive or procedural nature. The abstract characterization of a certain intensity of transboundary environmental interference by using such attributes as ‘serious’, ‘appreciable’, ‘significant’, ‘considerable’, etc., has become an important method of describing that threshold. It is used in State practice mostly in rules of a general character – often in the absence of or in addition to specific environmental quality standards, limits or prohibitions. It plays a major role in defining the scope of the emerging rule of general international law prohibiting ‘significant’ transboundary environmental harm.

The sea level is rising. One of the causes of this phenomenon is the so-called ‘greenhouse effect’. This concept refers to the rising of the temperature of the atmosphere as a result of the increase of the concentration of carbon dioxide and several other gases in the atmosphere. One of the consequences of this rise in temperature is the melting of land ice, in particular glaciers and the ice-caps of Greenland and perhaps Antarctica. This melting water enters the ocean, which results, in combination with the expansion of sea water as a consequence of its higher temperature, in a rising of the sea level.