Search Results for: International law

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE SECRETARIAT for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) has released a report advising nurseries and customs officers about the world’s illegal trade in wild rare plants.

Said the CITES report: “This illegal trade can involve trade without documents and documents issued for different specimens and, very frequently, can involve fraudulent claims of artificial propagation that can be difficult for the non-specialist to detect.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SWITZERLAND has failed to come up with an adequate proposal for supplying information about tax evasion through Swiss savings accounts held by EU residents and may face financial sanctions unless it complies, the EU Commissioner for the internal market Frits Bolkestein has told EU finance ministers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN AGREEMENT involving UK-based EDF Trading supplying gas to German wholesale company Wingas for 10 years, with a possible five-year extension, have been approved retrospectively by the European Commission’s competition directorate general. Brussels approved the deal for the supplies, (which began in 1998), after the companies agreed to amend their contracts, to block restrictions on other wholesalers being supplied by EdF Trading.…

BY MARK ROWE
A VERMONT maple syrup producer has joined forces with environmental groups to sue the American government for recklessly contributing to global warming, claiming it has damaged his business.

A lawsuit filed by Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace in San Francisco claims that two American export credit agencies illegally provided US$32billion in financing for oil fields, pipelines and coal-fired plants over the past 10 years without assessing their contribution to global warming, as required by national law.…

BY MATTHEW WELLS
A NEW survey of business leaders in the United States carried out by the security professionals’ organisation ASIS International, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the US Chamber of Commerce has indicated that around US$59 billion dollars-worth of intellectual property and information were stolen in America over the year to last June.…

Keith Nuthall
EUROPEAN Union ministers have pressed ahead with approving planned changes to Europe’s First Company Law Directive, which would ease the filing of company documents and registrations via electronic technology and also in any official EU language. The EU Council of Ministers wants the European Parliament to approve the proposed reforms without making any additional amendments, so that the regulations can pass into European law without further debates.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
INSTANCES of Phantom ship fraud may decrease in the future because of a law dating back to 1906 that was recently invoked in a Hong Kong court for the first time.

Section 44 of the Marine Insurance Act (MIA), a law replicated in many Commonwealth countries, was used to defeat the owner of missing palm oil cargo worth US$2.5 million aboard the ship the Pacifica that had gone missing in the high seas.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
SMART cards for health are not exactly a novelty but the Prevencard to be launched in the UK next year uses some particularly smart technology.

Prevencard, which is being marketed by the Spanish company Grupo Prevencard International, is a commercial application of security research carried out under the EU’s 5th Framework Programme for research.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN INTERNATIONAL convention improving the right of access by children to separated parents who live in different countries is expected to become European law, with the European Commission proposing that the European Union signs up to its terms.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
A NEW “smart card” for health and safety to be launched in the UK next year could have important implications for insurance companies in the occupational safety and health field. The so-called Prevencard is being marketed by the Spanish company Grupo Prevencard International using technology developed under the EU’s 5th Framework Programme for research.…