Search Results for: International law

BY MARK ROWE
CAN the European Union’s single skies plan become a reality inside 30 months? It is a topical subject, with the recent crash over Germany underlining the arguments in favour and against the project, which should lead to planes flying above 28,000 feet being guided and controlled by unified units of air traffic controllers, replacing the current piecemeal system of national flight monitoring and guidance.…

BY MARK ROWE
INTERNATIONAL organisations are supposed to help business fight off sophisticated crime networks, but now the fraudsters are turning the tables and using the good name of these institutions as part of their scams. Mark Rowe reports.

IT STARTED with a fax from a Chinese businessman to the Vienna headquarters of the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP).…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed he creation of a new Euro 13 million per annum scheme to monitor the health of Europe’s forests. Assuming it is approved by European Union ministers, the programme would initially run from January 2003 until December 2008.…

Keith Nuthall
RUSSIA has been advised, in secret, by the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf about whether it can claim maritime territory in the Pacific and the Arctic, enabling it to control the North Pole.

The UN agency has been studying geological claims lodged by Moscow that wide swathes of the Arctic Ocean are part of Russia’s ‘continental shelf,’ areas of sea that are shallow enough or contain enough sedimentary rocks to be legally defined as national territory under international law.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL, ALAN OSBORN, MONICA DOBIE AND PHILIP FINE

IF there is one striking characteristic about Washington’s Bush Administration, it must be its almost unprecedented ability to infuriate the entire world with its unilateralism, especially its self-serving trade policies.

For years, the US government has actually played Mary Poppins on food production subsidies, claiming that its handouts do not encourage farmers to overproduce when prices are low.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A MOVE to liberalise the global trade in artificially propagated orchids has been made by the USA, which has formally proposed that six species are exempted from controls under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE RIGHTS and obligations flowing from international agreements entered into by the European Coal and Steel Community, which will cease to exist on July 23 when the ECSC treaty expires, are to be transferred to the main European Community, (usually known as the European Union).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has struck a fishing access deal with the west African island republic of Sao Tome and Principe, lasting from this summer until May 31, 2005. Assuming it is confirmed by EU ministers, access will be granted to Sao Tome waters for 36 freezer tuna seiners, (from France and Spain), two pole-and-line tuna vessels (from Portugal) and 25 surface longliners (from Spain and Portugal).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SWITZERLAND has complained to a key World Trade Organisation committee that its beef imports are being unfairly restricted by the USA because of concerns that they are contaminated with BSE. It has claimed at the WTO Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures Committee that the US should not, for example, be insisting on the onsite inspection of Swiss meat plants, because the Office International des Épizooties has classified Switzerland as having a low incidence the disease.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INTERNATIONAL Chamber of Commerce is appealing for help to help it track down the perpetrators of a fake share-offering that has left European businesses out of pocket. Its Commercial Crime Bureau wants to hear from victims of a scam, where investors have been offered bargain prices for stick of companies that were supposedly about to go public, but which actually did not exist.…