Benedikt Pirker

Making Interpretation More Explicit: International Law and Pragmatics

Building on earlier research, the present article integrates linguistics and pragmatics into the study of interpretation of treaties in international law. This approach aims to make the reasoning of interpreting agents and their appeals to interpretive canons more explicit and transparent. This is consequently demonstrated with a number of practical examples in which the process of legal interpretation and its accommodation of the mentioned norms of interpretation can be adequately described and modelled. At the same time, it is shown that legal language possesses certain particularities, but nevertheless ultimately follows the basic pragmatic rules of communication. Nonetheless, linguistics and pragmatics can only provide an ultimately descriptive account of interpretation, so that evaluative judgements on the normative questions of how to respect the norms of international law still need to be made and – from a normative perspective – the rules of international law are not replaced or abrogated.

The Binding Effect of EU Fundamental Rights for Switzerland

The Bilateral Agreements concluded between Switzerland and the European Union rely on the parallel wording of part of their provisions to EU norms and references to EU secondary legislation to achieve a parallel legal situation between the EU and Switzerland. As the present contribution shows, this transfer of notions and concepts of EU law also encompasses EU fundamental rights standards, which possess thus binding effect for Switzerland under certain circumstances, although they are not explicitly mentioned in the agreements. As a result, fundamental rights protection in Switzerland has gained an additional source of protection and increased its effectiveness, which comes, however, at the price of rising complexity.

The Case Law of the European Court of Justice on Access to Justice in the Aarhus Convention and Its Implications for Switzerland

The present contribution assesses the case law of the European Court of Justice interpreting the provisions of the Aarhus Convention relating to access to justice. Cases have dealt with the temporal scope of application of provisions on access to justice, projects implemented by specific acts of national legislation and their exclusion from the obligations under the Convention, interim relief and the effet utile of provisions on access to justice, the range of possible pleas for judicial review, the role of procedural errors, permissible costs of proceedings, access to justice for environmental associations under different provisions of the Convention and the annulment of a permit and its relationship with the right to property. As is also shown, this case law is at the same time relevant – though not binding – for Switzerland as a non-eu Member State, but party to the Convention.