Volume 26, Number 3, 1995

EN:

The increasing importance of international trade explains in great part the role that dispute resolution plays in trade agreement. Diversification, government's intervention in the economy, readiness of interest groups to defend their cause, all these elements make trade negotiations a much more difficult task today thon it used to be fifty years ago. Quarrels and dispute over international trade are therefore more likely to arise and it's impossible today to negotiate international trade agreements without dispute resolution mecanism.

Success or failure of different type of arbitration lies in the definition of the substantive rules of trade agreements. For binding arbitration to work properly, such rules must be clear and precise. But this solution implies that independant countries renounce in part to their sovereignty. To do so, Canada and the United States decided to keep their own trade laws and accepted to submit them to binding arbitration. The same thing was done when free trade was extended to Mexico. At multilateral level, this type of arrangement would be much more difficult to implement.

EN:

The study attempts to make a theoretically informed analysis of technology assessment (TA) as part of postfordist global governance. It focuses first on the FAST programme of the EC, designed to regulate the relationship between producers of new technologies (industry, states) and civil society. The author shows that this regulation, based on the expertise of the social sciences, is largely asymmetrical in favour of the former and an attempt to engineer social consensus at the supranational level. The focus shifts then downwards to the numerous national and regional TA institutions in Western Europe which are all parts of a FAST dominated transnational network, as well as upwards to various related global TA activities (OECD, Lisbon Group, etc.). These different levels of analysis demonstrate that TA is politically constructed as a polycentric, non-hierarchical web of interrelated regulation mechanisms. As such, it is argued, it steadily permeates and recombines existing political structures and levels in order to meet as quickly as possible precise demands of legitimization and accumulation, and should therefore be called a « fractal » regulation.

EN:

The Security Council adopted Resolution 808 on February 22, 1993. This resolution created an international tribunal to judge people presumed responsible for grave breaches of humanitarian law committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991. The tribunal's status is defined by Resolution 827, whereby its jurisdiction covers all serious violations committed by individuals in the former Yugoslavia. The principle nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege is fully respected. The tribunal's effectiveness, however, depends on the rulings the judges will hand down and on support from all states.

Creating the ICT has been deemed a very important step. By judging criminals, the tribunal not only hopes to introduce the idea of justice into a sphere of international life dominated by power relationships, but also wishes especially to dampen the victors' feeling of impunity. AU of this requires one thing : the goodwill of the states so that this tribunal may carry out its task.

EN:

In the early nineties, parallel to the increasing integration processes of the European Union, realized through the formation of a uniform common internal market and the conclusion of the treaty of Maastricht of the formation of the European Union, systemic reforms were also taking place in Poland and the other countries of Middle-East Europe. Their substance was transformation of the economies - which up to the present were guided centrally - into market economies. At the same time Poland and the other countries of Middle-East Europe made efforts to come into closer economic cooperation with European Union. An important role in speeding up the economic growth of Poland and the other countries of Middle-East Europe, besides internal financial means, play such sources as external financing, in the form of profitable credits, and also the opening of ready markets.