This article focuses on state recognition in the European context and on the admission of states to the Council of Europe after the end of the Cold War. It argues that two global trends identified by John Dugard in the 1980s have continued since then: a common approach to state recognition has been adopted and the criteria for state recognition have increasingly been given normative content. This reflects that the constitutive theory of state recognition continued to be popular. The two trends have not automatically resulted in a more legal approach to the issues, as the case study of Bosnia and Herzegovina illustrates.

You may not have noticed, but 2006 was the European Year of Workers' Mobility. The symbolism was prompted by concerns that a genuine European ‘mobility culture’ still does not exist. As the Commission has observed, rates of mobility remain extremely low despite initiatives to promote the free movement of workers: ‘Many obstacles of a legal or administrative nature, but also of a linguistic or socio-cultural nature, continue to hamper workers’ freedom of movement and to discourage them from taking advantage of the opportunities for mobility.

Following the dramatic No votes in the French and Dutch referendums on 29 May and 1 June 2005, a need was felt in the European constitutional law profession to react to the shock.

EuConst invited members of its Board and members of the European Constitutional Law Network to write a short comment about possible and possibly salutary effects of the events on the ways of European scholarship and teaching. Below are the reactions received. Authors are all members of ECLN and/or the Board of EuConst.

The contributions to this issue of EuConst by Jacques Ziller, Sacha Prechal and Herman van Gunsteren carry their comments on the events incorporated.

Now that the EU Constitution has been adopted, one might be inclined to think that the debate on the position of human rights in the legal order of the European Union has come to an end. For more than 25 years academics and politicians have discussed the desirability of EC/EU accession to the European Convention of Human Rights and have argued for or against a separate bill of fundamental rights. That is all over now: Article I-7 of the Constitution provides for Union accession to the European Convention, whereas part II incorporates the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

It would seem, therefore, that a solid framework for the protection of human rights in the EU legal order has been put in place. The rest will be a matter of implementation: taking fundamental rights into account when drafting and executing European legislation; invoking these rights before the Court of Justice; lodging complaints with the European Court of Human Rights when the EU institutions, despite everything, failed to secure these rights. All very important, albeit that some may find the daily application of human rights not as sexy as the large constitutional questions of the past.

So is this the ‘end of history’ for human rights? Quite the opposite. The best is yet to come!

In a previous contribution on the protection of human rights in Europe, I discussed some developments taking place in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Despite the major changes that have occurred in the CSCE during the last year, I would like to address the matter this time from quite a different perspective.2 This short note will focus on the importance of human rights in the legal order of the European Communities – cynical as it may seem to address this rather ‘sophisticated’ issue at a time that in the Yugoslavian civil war human rights are violated with a harshness that has been unknown to Europe for decades.

By now it is commonplace that developments in Europe take place faster than any observer, who intends to write an analysis, would prefer. The degree of difficulty to predict the directions in which Europe will develop itself, is only matched by the importance to study the landmarks that have already been reached.