Yesterday afternoon, Dave Lyons, the Maastricht Program Assistant announced after class that in order to get to Luxembourg on time the next day, we’d have to wake up at 4 am in order to catch the bus by 5 am. Oh My! But, I woke-up very early this morning, early enough for it to be solidly before bedtime at home. Talking to people getting ready to go to sleep as I struggled to adjust to the dark and the dim light of my laptop screen reminded me how far away Europe is from good ole America.
But pictures first:
The bus ride through the extreme south of the Netherlands, Belgium, and finally Luxembourg was uneventful, but the bus was extremely cold. If the air had been warmer, it would have felt like summer vacations when I woke up just long enough for my parents to transport me to the car! Maastricht and the surrounding area had a wariness to it that was very evident in the few hours before dawn. It looked old. Here’s a map
Our only task for Luxembourg was to visit the European Court of Justice. We had to wake up so early because we were scheduled to hear an iteration of the Court of First Instance hear an argument at 9:30 am. Originally founded in the 1950’s, The ECJ functions just like the Supreme Court. Founded in 1989, the Court of First Instance was created to lighten the burden of the ECJ. It focuses on factual matters (The Microsoft anti-trust case was heard by them). Factual decision by the CFI are binding, but legal decisions can be appealed to the ECJ.
When we arrived at the Court building (a modernist low-built building that wouldn’t be out of place in exurban St. Louis. It could pass for the headquarters of some medium-sized corporation. Not exactly inspiring architecture), and we learned that the case we were supposed to hear was unexpectedly canceled. This turned out to be good news because we got to see the actual Court of Justice. The case we heard concerned a private Belgium cable tv provider suing a municipality in Belgium over the awarding a contract to provide cable tv. The municipality gave the contract to a cooperative of a number of municipalities that were doing cable tv themselves. The private firm argued that the contract had to have open bidding because the cooperative firm was a standard market company. The coop (along with lawyers from Germany and Belgium) argued that the contract was “in-house” and didn’t require any bidding.
Sorry to bore you, but I wanted you to get a sense of how boring these proceedings were. These lawyers all repeated themselves over and over again, and I’ll blame the translators that their vocabularies were all very very limited. Speaking of the translators, they were the coolest part of the entire proceeding. Lining the sides of the courtroom was a strip of tinted glass semi-concealing individual rooms where two interpreters for each language took turns in translating. The translators were all very intense about their jobs. Some gesticulated, sometimes forcefully, sometimes wildly. Others spoke with great emphasis, their voices rising and falling in multiples of how the actual lawyers voice rose and fell. The official language of the court is French, and all the members spoke French except the German lawyer, who spoke German.
After the hearing, which lasted 2 hours (my god!), we met with an assistant of the Court of First Instance and then the head of the English Language Translation Office. The assistant was very very boring telling us information that we had already learned, but the English woman was a blast. She spoke with a crispness and definitiveness one would expect of the woman in charge of translating all EJC business into English. There are, she noted, 22 and a half official EU languages making 500 or so language dyads that must be translated (Gaelic is the half. It’s exact status will be up in the air until 2012 and maybe beyond). She employs 30 lawyer linguists to perform the translations, and because English is the ‘pivot’ language of a number of the minor official languages, it is the English language departments job to translate all the documents out of these lesser languages (like Hungarian and Lithuanian), so that the other translators can translate into their language.
Then we wandered about Luxembourg. Nothing really needs to be said about it. Luxembourg is built on a hill, and the gorge separating the city from it’s newer parts (and by newer I mean the seventeenth century on) is absolutely gorgeous. Besides that, it is a rich, boring city. It’s shades of gray and stucco, and gray stone. The car of choice is Mercedes and the poor people drive Toyotas or BMWs.
