The European Court of Justice (ECJ) decided, in the case Tanja Kreil v. Germany, that Council Directive 76/207/EEC of 9 February 1976 (equal treatment directive) precludes the application of national provisions, such as those of German law, which impose a general exclusion of women from military posts involving the use of arms. The ECJ found that such policies violated the principle of equal treatment for men and women as regards access to employment, vocational training and promotion, and working conditions. Since this ruling both the Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG – Federal Constitutional Court) and the ECJ have had to confront the question whether the German system of compulsory military service for men is compatible with Article 3.2 and 3.3 of the Grundgesetz (GG – German Basic Law) and the equal treatment directive.

The European Company – or Societas Europaea (SE) – has been referred to as the “flagship of European Company Law”. This is certainly true if one considers the ambitious origins of the project. In 1970, the European Commission presented the first draft of the Statute for a European Company. A completely autonomous European legal form was intended, freely floating above the national legal forms and based solely on the sturdy branch of a purely European corporate law. The text of 1970 was, in substance, a complete code of corporate law. From the management structure to shareholders’ actions, from the law of corporate groups (Konzernrecht) to accounting law, from tax law to co-determination – every regulation required in a modern corporate law was provided for.

“Certainty is so essential, that law cannot even be just without it”, Francis Bacon once observed in the good old times. In the context of the general 20th century's trend from formal to substantive justice, however, policy objectives such as distributive justice, democratic political governance, or effective transnational regulation increasingly came to the focus of private law legislation. The rise of “consumerism” in contract law is the paradigmatic example of this development, which – at least from a German perspective – was triggered mainly by European measures on the harmonisation of private laws. While all intellectual capacities were absorbed by “regulating contracts” in the light of the new principle of “contractual solidarity”, the basic need of a legal system for overall consistency as a prerequisite for the administration of justice (“treating like cases alike”) obviously got out of sight. The critique with regard to pointillism and eclecticism in the European approach to private law harmonisation (“piecemeal legislation”), which lead to the patchwork character of the acquis communautaire, is a common place today, even within the European Commission. However, the conclusion, that has to be drawn, is not formulated straight forward: As consistency goes, arbitrariness comes, an inconsistent law is a contradictio in adjecto.

Addressing Human Rights requires that we consider both reality and imagination. What forces are shaping the world in which we live? What space is available for change? What role is played, and can be played by individuals? At a meeting of relatively young leaders of this hemisphere, organized by the Inter-American Development Bank at the end of the Twentieth Century, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was asked what we might expect from the Twenty-First Century as we emerge from the Twentieth Century, which distinguished itself with two world wars and with genocide. Gabriel Garcia Marquez responded by saying that we should not expect anything from the Twenty-First Century. He explained that everything relevant was the result of imagination, from the Ninth Symphony to heart transplants; they were in the heads of their inventors before taking place in reality.

Each of us was asked to approach the theme of globalization and human rights from a distinct perspective. I chose democracy, which is both an enumerated right and a means to the realization of other rights, because it leads ineluctably to some of the thorniest ethical and conceptual issues that engage or ought to engage morally alert people.

I am going to discuss three aspects of globalization that have an impact on human rights. The first is the greater knowledge around the world about what is happening in far away places that has resulted from the advances in communications technology and in the mobility, if not of masses of people, of influential people, including journalists.

There are various ways in which globalization can and does promote human rights. I want to focus on one of the ways in which globalization, because of the way it is managed by the most highly developed countries, has a very deleterious impact on human rights. Highly developed countries have managed globalization in a number of ways such that it has increased wealth disparities between the center and the periphery and the effect has been to heighten resentment for the center from the periphery. Unfortunately, that resentment sometimes manifests itself in the rejection of what are seen as Western values, including human rights. In fact, a number of leaders of countries on the periphery find it convenient to manipulate public opinion in order to foster hostility towards the West and in the process, hostility towards efforts to improve their human rights practices.

To be both a dean and an international lawyer requires perpetual optimism and great tolerance for dealing with uncertainty. Drawing on those characteristics, I will try to offer one positive account of how globalization can be used to improve human rights. I will say at the outset that there is no panacea here. This is at best a very partial solution, but at least a constructive one.

At the Nice summit in December 2000, we witnessed the solemn proclamation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which can be seen as the remarkable product of a revolutionary process. The Convention that drafted the Charter had adopted the approach ‘as if’ it were to be incorporated into the European Treaties. However, the question as to the final status of the Charter had not yet been decided when it was proclaimed. Instead, the issue was placed on the post-Nice and post-Laeken agenda and is currently being discussed in the Convention on the future of Europe.