Link of the Month - Eurostat

With this month downgrading by Standard & Poor of Greece and Spain I was looking for an authoritative tool to research the economy of European Countries (and to figure out who might be next). The tool I found was Eurostat. Eurostat is the statistics office by the European Union located in Luxembourg. According to the website, “its task is to provide the European Union with statistics at European level that enable comparisons between countries and regions”.
Take a look for yourself.
(Btw, I think Italy is a “good” candidate)

Lisbon Treaty now in effect

After 8 years in the making, December 1st 2009 marked the date when the Lisbon Treaty (finally) came into force and with it the attempt to streamline the EU institutions and strengthen democracy within the Union. Some of the most important changes are:
• A politician chosen to be president of the European Council for two-and-a-half years, replacing the current system where countries take turns at being president for six months.
• A smaller European Commission, with fewer commissioners than there are member states, from 2014.
• A redistribution of voting weights between the member states, phased in between 2014 and 2017 - qualified majority voting based on a "double majority" of 55% of member states, accounting for 65% of the EU's population.
• New powers for the European Commission, European Parliament and European Court of Justice, for example in the field of justice and home affairs.
• Removal of national vetoes in a number of areas, including fighting climate change, energy security and emergency aid. Unanimity will still be required in the areas of tax, foreign policy, defense and social security.
While critics say that the Lisbon Treaty threatens national sovereignty the overall response has been positive and deemed a necessary step in the unification of Europe.
For more information on the Lisbon Treaty check out the Treaty web site on Europa.eu

Link of the month - European Supreme Courts

The meta-search engine of National Case Law was created by the Network of the Presidents of the European Supreme Courts. It has been released in April 2007 and allows to simultaneously query several search engines.

Link of the month - EJIL: Talk!

This month the European Journal of International Law entered the blogosphere with its own blog, and (so far) it is as well thought through as its journal articles.
Under the title "EJIL:Talk!" Dapo Akande, a well known scholar in the field of international criminal law and international dispute settlement, posts a few articles about the 60th anniversary about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and an impressive (and sad) human rights recapture of the year 2008.

Link of the month - Juristisches Internetprojekt Saarbruecken

This link is not new but still good, it is actually one of the oldest and most reliable web sites in the German legal research arena - the Juristisches Internetprojekt Saarbruecken. It started out in 1993 as a project in Professor Herberger's Legal Information Science class, and has since developed to a platform with a variety of tabs to different international and European legal sources. Especially to have links to decisions from the European Courts, the French and the German courts all on one site makes it very handy. Only disadvantage, the web site is mainly in German with some content in French and English.