This chapter develops the theoretical explanation of why transitional justice processes and the reckoning of a repressive history can prevent the outbreak of large-scale criminal violence in new democracies. It first discusses a new conception of organized crime where complicit state specialists in violence are central players in illicit economies and in the production of large-scale criminal violence. It suggests that these engagements often emerge in autocracies, where autocrats allow military and police forces to capitalize on their repressive power to kill political dissidents and on their de facto impunity to control the criminal underworld. If left unaccountable, authoritarian specialists in violence can become leading actors in the production of criminal violence in democracy by defecting to fight turf wars or defending organized criminal groups from positions of power or spearheading Wars on Drugs, Gangs, or Crime. It claims that when new democratic elites expose and sanction authoritarian specialists in violence through robust truth commissions and criminal trials, they unleash a powerful accountability shock that breaks state impunity and deters security forces from using state coercive power to control illicit economies through lethal force. Failure to reckon with a repressive history, and the survival of the violent state, sets new democracies on trajectories of power abuse and criminal wars.

Britain’s constitutional evolution falls within the mainstream of European constitutional traditions, but the gulf between its governing practices and those adopted in the European mainstream has grown progressively wider. While most European nation-states have adopted written constitutions at critical moments of modern history, Britain continues to adhere to the traditional conception of a constitution as a set of laws, customs and practices that continuously evolve in response to social, economic and political change. This is one reason why Britain’s involvement in the venture of creating a European Union has always been rather awkward. In this chapter, I sketch the main constitutional tropes that have emerged in British thought and show how they express a constitutional identity antithetical to the assumptions driving the project of continuing European integration. I first introduce a series of constitutional stories through which the English have sought to explain themselves as a nation and a state and then consider how these accounts have evolved with the expansion of the English state into a British imperial state. Finally, I will indicate how these legacies ensured that Britain could never become an active participant in the European federal project.

This book focused on the concept and contours of Non-International Armed Conflict under international law. Its primary purpose was to provide normative and doctrinal guidance for identifying NIACs in real-time in order to determine the applicable frameworks of international law. The concept of NIAC emerged from the adoption of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 as an inverse formulation (not of an international character) of an indeterminate concept (armed conflict) foreign to the lexicon of IHL. This lack of clarity provided states with decades of broad discretion to either deny or assert the existence of a NIAC, regardless of the prevailing facts on the ground. Some 70 years later, the concept of NIAC has evolved considerably through various developments in international law and practice, although has not been stretched beyond its normative or legal foundations. At its most basic, a NIAC is an armed conflict between a state and a non-state actor, or between two or more non-state actors absent the involvement of a state. Accordingly, a NIAC is defined on the basis of the legal status of the opposing Parties as opposed to its territorial delineations, and therefore should not viewed as an internal armed conflict. This book provided a comprehensive and critical analysis of six elements of NIAC, which formed into six distinct Chapters.

The Epilogue assesses the aftermath of Britain’s decision to abolish the death penalty in the Caribbean Dependent Territories. It examines the mostly critical reactions of political leaders in the Caribbean and the events that led to abolition through local action in Hong Kong in 1993 and Bermuda in 1999. In the case of Hong Kong, Britain was ambivalent about the decision, which was influenced by the pending handover to China in 1997. By contrast, Britain’s new Labour government claimed it would impose abolition on Bermuda through Westminster legislation if local authorities did not act. Even so, abolition was a local initiative led by the Progressive Labour Party, which had opposed the death penalty since the 1970s. The Epilogue also considers the fate of the last condemned prisoners in British Dependent Territories, who were reprieved in the early 1990s and eventually released in the 2010s, and the legacy of colonial capital punishment on British death penalty policy.

Chapter 7 presents the first analysis of the abolition of the death penalty in Britain’s Caribbean Dependent Territories in 1991 based on recently declassified government records. The decision to impose abolition reflected the broad changes in crime and governance in the Caribbean over the preceding decade and the new diplomatic significance of British death penalty policy, but in the short term it was entangled with a scheduled execution in Anguilla and a dozen more capital cases that were pending in other Caribbean Dependent Territories and Bermuda. Britain was forced to abolish the death penalty in part because the likelihood of an execution seemed higher than in many years. The appointment of Douglas Hurd, an abolitionist, as Foreign Secretary was also important, but even so the change of policy was motivated by politics rather than principle. Abolition had been forced on the government as the only sure way to prevent executions that – it had become clear – posed intolerable risks to British interests, but Britain was still far from adopting a consistent abolitionist foreign policy.

Justice between private individuals has commonly been viewed as a matter for civil courts. In recent years, however, regulatory agencies have played a role in providing redress to aggrieved individuals in mass damage cases. This chapter examines how regulatory enforcement deals with and should deal with the issue of private law remedies for regulatory violations. It focuses on the actual and desirable role of national and European regulatory agencies, which typically use administrative law means to deter regulatory breaches, in providing compensation to victims of mass violations of EU private law. The chapter presents three models of the relationship between regulatory enforcement powers and private law remedies within the operation of administrative agencies – separation, complementarity, and substitution – and discusses their main characteristics, manifestations, and implications. Each model is analysed in terms of its potential to reconcile the pursuit of the public interest in deterring regulatory violations with a traditional private law concern to ensure interpersonal justice by compensating their victims. The models also reflect and address the tension between uniformity and diversity in the remedial domain. The chapter concludes by elucidating the practical relevance of its findings in the broader context in which regulatory agencies operate in different jurisdictions.

The development of democratic constitutionalism in Portugal in the last (almost) fifty years has been marked by some important debates, which still influence different views and interpretations of the Constitution. I would like to highlight two of them: first, a discussion of the nature and limits of the ‘constitutional project’ enshrined in the CP, the normative strength of the constitution and the margin of appreciation given to the democratic legislator. Second, the debate about constitutional openness, European integration and the constitutional consequences of the overwhelmingly desired ‘European path’ of the country, which evolved more recently to be a reflexion on the contradictions between such a path and national constitutional characteristics, especially during and after the euro crisis. The objective of this work will be to reflect on the constitutional imaginary of democratic Portugal, in particular on the discrepancies between national constitutional aspirations and European integration, which are particularly acute in what regards the so-called social question (i.e., the social project, including social rights as limits to the legislator, and views of the political economy that are strikingly different at the national and EU levels).

This chapter starts by generally providing an overview of the problem, i.e. the cross-border situation, and the solutions that are given by conflict of laws through its typical methods. It then proceeds with an analysis of how choice of law intersects takeover law. Even though the Takeover Directive addresses the problem, spaces are inexorably left for the typical choice-of-law characterization issues, at the frontiers between matters relating to the bid procedure and matters relating to company law, each potentially subject to the laws of different Member States (see Article 4(2)(e) of the Directive). Keeping in mind the different connecting factors for the lex mercatus and the lex societatis, this chapter addresses particular questions raised by cross-border takeovers, trying to find legal strategies to solve them. These include rules on information, on corporate governance and on defensive measures. Also recent developments concerning corporate sustainability are mentioned, taking them into consideration while pondering whether current societal and ecological concerns should operate as a justification for allowing boards of companies to defend against cross-border takeover bids.

Chapter 1 examines connections between abolition debates and legislation in Britain and the decisions of colonial administrations to amend, retain or abolish the death penalty in the 1950s and 1960s. The British government made only limited efforts to promote abolition across the Empire and readily accepted arguments made by governors, political and judicial appointees and elected lawmakers for retaining executions. The course of imperial abolition was consequently uneven in ways that reflected the diversity of colonial legal and penal cultures, crime control concerns, constitutional arrangements and political dynamics, and which saw racialized systems of colonial penal violence persist into the abolition era. Yet even in colonies where the death penalty was retained into the 1970s and beyond, death sentences were upheld in an increasingly narrow range of murder cases. In some jurisdictions, this shift predated British abolition and indicates a more pervasive and dispersed turn against capital punishment across the Empire than is captured in statute laws alone.

The Hungarian political system after the regime change has become extremely polarised and deep political fault lines have developed between the domestic political communities. It has been investigated in this chapter how hatred and the resulting violence (verbal and non-verbal) and its post-2010 constitutional representation have become one of the main structuring factors of the domestic political and social space in such a way that asymmetric counter concepts have become dominant in the identification war between opposing political sides: this means that almost all possibilities for dialogue between opposing positions have been lost, because the definition and domination of the identity of the other has become the main aspect. This paper argues that similar processes of attribution and identification have been taking place in the refugee crisis since 2015, and this time the hatred has been directed towards the ‘political other’, only to return to the domestic political scene and further deepen the dichotomies that have become familiar since the regime change. The post-2010 constitution-making process elevated this hostility to the level of the Fundamental Law and created a system of Constitutionalised Image of Enemy (CIE), the analysis of CIE is the main undertaking of this chapter.

It is a rare thing for an historian to have access to sources which chart the entire history of a state, from planned creation to pre-meditated extinction. Nor is every state’s constitutional and political history as varied as that of Czechoslovakia, which was founded on 28 October 1918 and ceased to exist at midnight on 31 December 1992. Czechoslovakia’s experience can be seen as a compressed history of twentieth-century Europe and the many ways the modern state has been imagined. During its relatively brief existence, Czechoslovakia was federalized, centralized, dissolved, reconstituted, re-centralized and re-federalized; it also went from military dictatorship to parliamentary democracy; from authoritarian democracy to Nazi colony; from people’s democracy to Soviet satellite; and from Communist dictatorship and command economy to democracy and the free market. In 2009, Yale University Press brought out a comprehensively revisionist history, Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed, the first full account of the state to be written by an outsider. This chapter tells the story of how the book first came to be researched and written by the present author, why its publication in 2009 caused such a furore and why former dissidents insisted, ten years later, in bringing out a Czech-language edition.