Christian Marxsen

Open Stakeholder Consultations at the European Level - Voice of the Citizens?

The European Commissions open consultations of stakeholders are a central mechanism of the attempt to practice participatory governance at the European level and to open the political process to contributions from the societal sphere. This paper analyses the current practice of open consultations as one important operationalisation of participatory governance and as an implementation of Article 11 of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU). It asks whether consultations can be a means to give voice to the citizens and to increase the legitimacy of European institutions. The paper presents an empirical analysis of the field of participants in the consultations. A main finding is that business and industry organisations dominate the consultative process while the participation of citizens and not-for-profit organisations is generally weak. The paper explores to which extent the consultations can, considering the empirical findings, be seen as a suitable way for direct or representative citizen participation.

Reparation for Victims of Armed Conflict: Impulses from the Max Planck Trialogues

The international law on reparation for victims of armed conflict is complex. Numerous subfields of international law are involved, among them international human rights law, international criminal law, international humanitarian law, and the law on State responsibility. In addition to this complexity, reparation-related questions are often highly politically charged. They are focal points of contestation about moral values, different conceptions of justice, and approaches to international law, including the status of the individual human being in this order. Against this backdrop, the collection of short essays explores whether and under which circumstances individuals have a right to reparation under international law. The introduction unpacks the legal dimensions and identifies the currently most controversial issues. One set of essays then analyses, from different angles, whether a right to reparation for individuals exists as a matter of law. Another set recounts experiences with the implementation of reparation mechanisms and discusses the challenges. A third group of essays addresses the role of domestic courts. The essays (‘impulses’) are one outcome of the Max Planck Trialogue workshop on reparation for victims of armed conflict, held in November 2017 in Berlin.

Violation and confirmation of the law: the intricate effects of the invocation of the law in armed conflict

ABSTRACT Within the jus contra bellum there is an apparent contradiction between states’ verbal commitments to the law and the prevalence of armed conflicts. Taking this contradiction as a starting point, this article aims to provide empirical insights into how states invoke international law to justify their participation in armed conflicts. It develops a typology of how law can be confirmed by its invocation, taking an inductive approach based on case analysis. Do recent military interventions indicate a decline of international law? This article argues that there are three dimensions of confirmation. Firstly, law can be confirmed as an instrument of communication between states. Secondly, in a set of uncontroversial cases, the specific substantive rules of international law are confirmed through what is described as coherent practice. Thirdly, the article explains why even in controversial cases substantive rules may be confirmed through their invocation, even where the action is in fact illegal.