Igniting the Spirits

‘The Cypriot Minister for Foreign Affairs, George Iacavou, asked in Luxembourg to maintain in the European Constitution project the quotation of the Greek historian Thucydides which had been crossed out in the last document of the Irish Presidency. According to AFP, Hellenists affirmed that the sentence (“our Constitution... is called a democracy because the power is in the hands not of a minority, but of the greatest number”) was badly translated and also that Thucydides was a disputed personality’.Let us note that the translation was already modified by the Convention. The first version evoked ‘the whole people’, the ‘ultimate’, ‘the greatest number’. Until the last minute, the Preamble had been discussed. In the Convention, Robert Badinter, former president of the French constitutional Council, had already co-signed, on 3 June 2003, with the author of these lines and Pervenche Berès, a proposal for an amendment to the Preamble to remove the quotation of Thucydides. It did not seem suitable to us to place the Union under the auspices of the founder of realistic geopolitics, a kind of Kissinger of ancient Greece. Others say that they oppose this quotation because it refers to the power of the people, not that of States. The quotation finally disappeared during the Brussels summit on 17 and 18 June 2004. As we see, no word of the Preamble is left aside.

The Badinter Arbitration Commission and the Partition of Yugoslavia

On 27 August 1991 the European Community (EC) resolved to establish a peace conference on Yugoslavia (the Brussels Declaration). Within the framework of the peace conference an Arbitration Commission was established for the purpose of resolving differences between “the relevant authorities” (not specifically identified). The Arbitration Commission consisted of five members, all being presidents of constitutional courts of EC members states and was headed by the French lawyer, Robert Badinter. The Arbitration Commission was subsequently endorsed by the United States (U.S.) and the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Acción humanitaria y operaciones de mantenimiento de la paz

El presidente del CICR, señor Cornelio Sommaruga, acompañado por el señor André Pasquier, asesor especial, participó los días 5 y 6 de marzo de 1993, en Mónaco, en la XXV reunión de la Academia de la Paz y de la Seguridad Internacional, presidida por el profesor René-Jean Dupuy.El tema de la reunión era «La ONU y las organizaciones zonales: ¿qué tipo de cooperación ante el reto de la seguridad internacional? ¿Qué cometido específico para Europa?». Unas cien personalidades, de organizaciones internacionales, de los círculos diplomático, politíco y de los medios de comunicación, entre las que cabe destacar los señores Robert Badinter, presidente del Comité Constitucional francés y ex ministro de Justicia, Peter Schmidhuber, miembro de la Comisión de las Comunidades Europeas, y Manfred Wörner, secretario general de la OTAN, siguieron los debates y sus intervenciones versaron sobre «Europa ante la seguridad» y «La ONU y las organizaciones zonales: los límites de la cooperación».