From Helsinki To Vienna

The "Israel Yearbook on Human Rights" - an annual published under the auspices of the Faculty of Law of Tel Aviv University since 1971 - is devoted to publishing studies by distinguished scholars in Israel and other countries on human rights in peace and war, with particular emphasis on problems relevant to the State of Israel and the Jewish people. The "Yearbook" also incorporates documentary materials, relating to Israel and the Administered Areas, which are not otherwise available in English (including summaries of judicial decisions, compilations of legislative enactments and military proclamations).

This volume is a collection of essays dealing primarily with supervision by international organizations of, on the one hand, state behaviour and, on the other, the conduct of the organizations themselves. The first is termed external supervision, the second internal supervision. An extensive range of international organizations is covered, among them the ILO, the IMF, GATT and the United Nations.

The tension between national security and freedom of expression and information is both acute and multifaceted. Without national security, basic human rights are always at risk. On the other hand, the tendency of governing elites to confuse `the life of the nation' with their own survival has often resulted in excessive restrictions on expression and information, as well as other fundamental rights. A proper balance between secrecy and liberty requires a vigilant press and an independent judiciary. It also requires greater clarity than currently exists as to how competing rights and interests should be weighed. This book addresses that gap. Its centerpiece is a set of Principles drafted by a group of international and national law experts, many of whom contributed chapters, to guide governments, courts and international bodies in how to strike a proper balance. The Principles have been widely endorsed, among others by United Nations experts on freedom of expression and independence of judges and lawyers. Sixteen country studies - profiling, among other states, Albania, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Norway, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia - explore the tremendous diversity of national security doctrines and the penal and other measures aimed at suppressing allegedly secret information and speech claimed to be subversive, separatist or otherwise dangerous. Five chapters examine the cases considered and approaches taken by the UN Human Rights Committee, three regional human rights bodies, and the European Court of Justice. A Commentary draws on the other chapters to support and elucidate the Principles, noting where they reflect an existing consensus and the points at which they attempt to elicit a more rights-protective approach.

Debates on the role of Christian Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe too often remain strongly tied to national historiographies. With the edited collection the contributing authors aim to reconstruct Christian Democracy’s role in the fall of Communism from a bird's-eye perspective by covering the entire region and by taking “third-way” options in the broader political imaginary of late-Cold War Europe into account. The book’s twelve chapters present the most recent insights on this topic and connect scholarship on the Iron Curtain’s collapse with scholarship on political Catholicism. Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism offers the reader a two-fold perspective. The first approach examines the efforts undertaken by Western European actors who wanted to foster or support Christian Democratic initiatives in Central and Eastern Europe. The second approach is devoted to the (re-)emergence of homegrown Christian Democratic formations in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the volume’s seminal contributions lies in its documentation of the decisive role that Christian Democracy played in supporting the political and anti-political forces that engineered the collapse of Communism from within between 1989 and 1991.