The European Convention on Human Rights after Enlargement

The Council of Europe has dramatically enlarged its membership over the past decade, encompassing the vast majority of the formerly Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. With this dramatic enlargement, the Council has sought to secure its place in the complex institutional architecture of post-Cold War Europe, building on its traditional strengths in the promotion of democratic governance and human rights. Yet, both inside and outside the organisation, voices have been raised to suggest that the Council has lowered its admission standards in a manner which risks compromising the legitimacy of the European Convention on Human Rights. Against the background of these ongoing controversies, this article assesses the impact of enlargement on the European human rights system. Focusing on the composition of the European Court of Human Rights and the initial pattern of cases from the Central and East European member states, it is demonstrated that the short-term impact of enlargement has been quite limited. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Court will face major new challenges over the coming years. In part, the Court will have to assume the role of an adjudicator of transition. More generally, there will also be mounting pressures for it to (re)cast itself more clearly as a European constitutional court.

The Changing Significance of European Borders

It is necessary to understand how state borders in Europe are changing in order to fully assess the factors which facilitate and encourage cross-border cooperation. This article considers the enduring social significance of borders, the need for a historical understanding of the nature and extent of border change in Europe, and the impact of recent European integration. Change in the structure, functions and meanings of European state borders has been the norm rather than the exception. Although much of this change has been associated with war, violence and coercion, a key contemporary issue facing the architects of European integration is how the ambiguity and contradictory nature border change can be regulated democratically and managed cooperatively.

Communal larval rearing of European lobster (Homarus gammarus): family identification by microsatellite DNA profiling an offspring fitness.

Stock enhancement experiments of European lobster (Homarus gammarus) have been carried out around the Kvitsoy Islands in south-western Norway since 1990. In addition to releases of coded wire tagged lobster juveniles (cultured) and subsequent monitoring of commercial fishery, a lobster hatchery was established in 1997. Several experiments were made on the communal-rearing approach where the performance of mixed larval groups (families) was evaluated under identical conditions. Berried females of wild and cultured origin and their respective fertilised eggs were screened by using microsatellite DNA profiling involving a multiplex set of six lobster specific primers, thereby allowing determination of both parental genotypes. Each female were kept separately during hatching, and the offspring were later mixed and raised in a communal rearing system. The early-larval survival was estimated at stage IV (bottom stage), and the survivors were identified to family and group by microsatellite profiling. Five different communal experiments were conducted, representing offspring from 65 berried females. Of the surviving larvae, 6.3% could not be assigned to family due to degraded DNA and no PCR amplification. Significant differences in early survival between offspring of wild and cultured origin were found in the experiments. No differences between the groups were found in stage IV larval size. Based on the pooled data on survival (as a measure of early larvae fitness) offspring of cultured females displayed a relative fitness of 60% in comparison to offspring from wild females. Large variation in survival was also observed among families within the wild and cultured groups, suggesting a genetic component for these traits and a potential for selective breeding.

“Islands” in Holocene forests: implications for forest openness, landscape clearance and “culture-steppe” species

Human activity has undoubtedly had a major impact on Holocene forested ecosystems, with the concurrent expansion of plants and animals associated with cleared landscapes and pasture, also known as 'culture-steppe'. However, this anthropogenic perspective may have underestimated the contribution of autogenic disturbance (e.g. wind-throw, fire), or a mixture of autogenic and anthropogenic processes, within early Holocene forests. Entomologists have long argued that the north European primary forest was probably similar in structure to pasture woodland. This idea has received support from the conservation biologist Frans Vera, who has recently strongly argued that the role of large herbivores in maintaining open forests in the primeval landscapes of Europe has been seriously underestimated. This paper reviews this debate from a fossil invertebrate perspective and looks at several early Holocene insect assemblages. Although wood taxa are indeed important during this period, species typical of open areas and grassland and dung beetles, usually associated with the dung of grazing animals, are persistent presences in many early woodland faunas. We also suggest that fire and other natural disturbance agents appear to have played an important ecological role in some of these forests, maintaining open areas and creating open vegetation islands within these systems. More work, however, is required to ascertain the role of grazing animals, but we conclude that fossil insects have a significant contribution to make to this debate. This evidence has fundamental implications in terms of how the palaeoecological record is interpreted, particularly by environmental archaeologists and palaeoecologists who may be more interested in identifying human-environment interactions rather than the ecological processes which may be preserved within palaeoecological records.