Rechtliche Grundlagen für die Ernährungssicherheit in der Schweiz

The Right to Food, as enshrined in international law, has found its way into national constitutions and practices. What matters from a national and international legal point of view is how this policy objective is implemented. In Switzerland, a number of policies and their instruments are relevant here, namely agricultural, supply/stockpile, trade and development policies. This paper (in German) asks whether the policy instruments are coherent and how implementation conflicts and negative spill-over effects could be minimised. It finds that the four policy objectives enshrined in the Federal Constitution are not in themselves incoherent. However, certain Swiss agricultural policy instruments, even where they are compatible with relevant rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), do have an avoidable negative impact on the Right to Food of developing country producers, because Swiss Food Security is overwhelmingly and increasingly defined by agricultural (self-reliance) policies (“Food Sovereignty”). This implies higher domestic food prices, commercial displacement and food dumping. The conclusions suggest a number of optimisations as a contribution to the presently on-going reform process for 1983 National Economic Supply Act 1983 (NESA), such as virtual stockpiles and taxpayer-financed stockpile costs.

Victims of War must be loyal to deserve protection: International law and national legislation on enemy aliens 1907-1918

In international law the internment of civilians has only been regulated in writing in the context of the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949. Nevertheless this did not mean that civilians were not protected by at least some rules of customary international law before that date and especially in World War I. Furthermore specialists of international law expected states – at least those considered to be part of the community of civilized nations – to continue to treat all men equal before the law even in wartime. As research already conducted (Bird, Panayi, Fischer) has shown, this was not the case during World War I. Based on these findings the presentation proposed here wants to look into the development of international law and into some national preparations for treating so called “enemy aliens” in the period before 1914 (Austria-Hungary, Australia, United Kingdom), in order to see to what extent principles of international law protecting civilians from the consequences of war can be detected in the pre-war preparations. As far as can be judged so far the issue of loyalty was central in this context. Looking at the war itself, the presentation proposed here will try to look at how far the principles of international law alluded to above continued to influence the policies on “enemy aliens” in the countries mentioned and to see, how the International Committee of the Red Cross tried to use them to legitimize and expand its protective policies in regard to civilians interned in belligerent as well as neutral countries throughout the war.

Flexibility Properties in Complex Analysis and Affine Algebraic Geometry

In the last decades affine algebraic varieties and Stein manifolds with big (infinite-dimensional) automorphism groups have been intensively studied. Several notions expressing that the automorphisms group is big have been proposed. All of them imply that the manifold in question is an Oka–Forstnerič manifold. This important notion has also recently merged from the intensive studies around the homotopy principle in Complex Analysis. This homotopy principle, which goes back to the 1930s, has had an enormous impact on the development of the area of Several Complex Variables and the number of its applications is constantly growing. In this overview chapter we present three classes of properties: (1) density property, (2) flexibility, and (3) Oka–Forstnerič. For each class we give the relevant definitions, its most significant features and explain the known implications between all these properties. Many difficult mathematical problems could be solved by applying the developed theory, we indicate some of the most spectacular ones.