There have been particularly bitter disputes in India.
Since then the Union has stepped up efforts to diversify its gas supply, particularly after disputes between Gazprom and Ukraine, a transit point for European gas, led to severe winter shortages, notably in 2006 and in 2009.
Mandela's widow Graca Machel has for the most part stayed clear of these rows.Mandla and Makaziwe have been at the centre of particularly bitter disputes in the past few years, most notably over the exhumation of bodies, including that of one of Mandela's sons, from a family burial plot.
According to the government, many lawyers have turned the legal aid program into their only business, squeezing extra income from such work by sometimes appealing cases all the way to Spain's highest court without the support or even knowledge of the defendant, particularly in disputes involving immigrants.
The move is not part of the latest stimulus plan, but a fittingly tasteful settlement to a particularly European dispute.
One particularly nasty dispute is rumbling in Oxford, where British Waterways wants to sell a 160-year-old boatyard to developers keen to build flats there.
For months, Princess Usanga, a sales assistant at a television station, has been embroiled in a particularly heated dispute with her landlord.
In one recent session to debate a particularly thorny dispute over patent rules, a lone American delegate was swamped by representatives of Brazil, India, Kenya and Zimbabwe, who did not share the American perspective.
The determination to hold on to fragile gains in a world where more than half the people live on less than £1 a day is unlikely to prove a particularly dignified dispute.
But on Thursday, a new and particularly bitter dispute began playing out in a very different kind of judicial venue across the Canadian border: a provincial Supreme Court justice held a hearing into questions of whether a potentially lethal virus had been detected in wild Pacific salmon — and whether the Canadian government was responding adequately.
