Law, Regional

Regional law may be considered a kind of transnational law that is not universal in character. This assertion holds regardless of whether regional law is defined narrowly—to designate a certain set of rules that a regional body has enacted due to distinctive sociocultural bonds, economic interests, values, or, more generally speaking, policy preferences shared by its members—or defined more broadly, as encompassing any rule having, regardless of its source, a regional scope of application.

Regional law is often linked to a variety of institutionalized mechanisms facilitating regional cooperation primarily but, especially given the ever-increasing importance of non-state actors, not exclusively between nation-states. Cooperation in that regard has to be understood in a descriptive as well as a normative way. Basic normative element is the precise assignment of competences to either the national or regional political entity, depending on which of the two might be most capable of fulfilling the relevant tasks (ideal of subsidiarity). Even though the geographical criterion remains a decisive one, the (normative) concept of regional cooperation has been stretched far beyond spatial proximity. Nowadays it refers to cultural, political, and socioeconomic contiguousness allowing for step-by-step processes of political integration. For the individual, the globalized world beyond the state is bearable only if he or she can feel “at home” in the well-known surroundings of small-scale political entities. Understood in such a way, regional law becomes an indispensible prerequisite for political unity beyond the nation-state and below the international community.

Historically, the origin of regional law is closely linked to the development of public international law in 19th-century Europe. The very idea of establishing a balance-of-powers architecture between the “civilized” European nations gave rise [Page 1034]to early regional legal structures. International trade in the age of industrialization was made easier by regional administrative organizations such as the Rhine Commission (1831) or the Danube Commission (1856). The Eurocentric beginnings are still reflected in Article 38, section 1, lit. c of the ICJ (International Court of Justice) Statute. The article furthermore refers to the early interdependence between regional European conceptions and their claim of universal validity. However, regional cooperation based on regional law also has a long-standing tradition in China, India, Africa, and the Islamic world. This, today, is reflected by manifold regional law schemes in all parts of the world. For example, the Covenant of the League of Nations encouraged such “regional understandings” in Article 21. Later on, Chapter VIII of the UN Charter followed that model.

Examples of regional legal instruments in Africa are given by the African Union and the African Court of Justice. For the Americas and the Inter-American System, reference has to be made to the Organization of American States, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or MERCOSUR. In Asia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation, or the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation are to be mentioned. In Europe, the supranational European Union gives the most advanced example of regional law overcoming the barriers of national sovereignty and having direct effect within the member-states. As early as 1950, the Council of Europe enacted the European Convention of Human Rights as the first regional human rights instrument, which was influential on later developments in the Americas and Africa. As far as economic integration is concerned, not only the European Union but also the European Economic Area or the European Free Trade Association provide for effective mechanisms.

...