Bücher von Sead S Fetahagic

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Politics - Topic: Public International Law and Human Rights, grade: 8/10, University of Sarajevo (Centre for Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies), course: European Studies, language: English, abstract: The paper offers a review of a parallel development of two distinct but increasingly overlapping systems of the protection of human rights, the one under the auspices of the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights and the other integrated within the Community Law of the European Communities and later the European Union. The former established the individual citizen as the subject of international law, who may seek protection for alleged violations of his/her rights directly from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. This system operates relatively efficiently since it is based on the largely universally accepted political principles of democracy and human rights by all member states of the Council of Europe. In contrast, the Community Law system is concerned more with economic and social rights of the European Union citizens. Given a specific supra-national legal system of the European Union some of its norms may collide with the European Convention on Human Rights as well as with national constitutions of EU member states. Under the doctrine of "surrendered sovereignty" the European Court of Justice is authorized to issue direct orders to national courts when applying the Community Law. This is not the case with the European Court of Human Rights, which can act only on an individual case-to-case basis without giving preliminary judgements on national laws in general. Moreover, the two courts gave different interpretations of certain provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights in the past and issued contradictory judgements. To avoid such problems, some have proposed an idea that, despite the fact that all EU member states have signed the European Convention on Human Rights, the European Union as an entity should do the same in order to ensure uniformity of legal interpretations and judicial practice, which again raises questions on the legal nature of the European Union.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 10,00, University of Sarajevo (Centre for Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies), course: European Politics and Society, language: English, abstract: In the eve of EU enlargement of 2004 to include eight East-European countries the paper problematized the clash between two historically different concepts of national identity and citizenship. The "culture-nations" of the East are being aligned with the "state-nations" of the West, while the inhabitants of both regions are offered a common perspective to enjoy rights of the EU citizenship. An assumption that newly admitted Eastern countries should somehow adopt the Western "civic" model of nationality is challenged by the fact that even the Western societies are increasingly uncertain about their national and cultural identities under the pressures of economic globalization, producing the phenomenon of "hybrid" or "kaleidoscopic" identities. Although at this time of enlargement extreme nationalist policies were not dominant, the paper presents the case of the former Yugoslavia whose collapse and ensuing wars showed what consequences might be expected when the concept of national citizenship is reserved exclusively for ethnic majorities. Under the rule of ethnocracy, which operates in the mode of conflict production towards "minorities" or "others", the idea of democratic citizenship is essentially endangered. To deal with this problem some have proposed the idea of "differentiated citizenship" recognizing collective rights of certain groups. Liberal critics however, warn that in such a case citizenship loses its integrative function and endangers the stability of a political community. The EU citizenship does not replace national citizenship of member states, upon which it is based, but adds a new layer of rights and obligations under the Community Law. Since any citizenship in principle represents a relation between an individual and a political community, the lack of "national" political institutions of the EU generates a "fragmented citizenship". Thereby a EU citizen is frequently in a position, due to proclaimed freedom of movement, to demand rights from a state she is not national of. Even more complex is a problem of third-country (non-EU) nationals legally residing in the Union who are denied Union citizenship. As this citizenship is predicated upon national citizenship, the member states retain sovereign right to impose restrictions on citizenship in order to protect their cultural or political homogeneity.