Employment law
Please get some way to contact you up on your site. Having to reply through Planet isn't ideal.
Anyway.
I'm not familiar with employment law across all of Europe, but the claim that you have to employ them for a certain period after you actually fired them, or even that you can't fire someone without due process, is simply false—at least in Belgium, though I expect the same is true for most other member states of the European union.
First, there's the fact that every employment contract starts off with a "test period" which can take up to six months, depending on the type of employment (it is longer for hotshot management than it is for hand labour) and the length of the contract, if appropriate. During this period, an employer can fire someone without further explanation and without any process. This is to make sure that you can get rid of people who managed to sell skills on themselves they don't end up having.
Second, an employer can fire anyone right away for what is called 'urgent reasons'—things like employees stealing from the employer; basically anything that makes the employer lose trust in the employee (though this is strictly regulated, for obvious reasons).
Third, if you fire someone not during their testing period and not for urgent reasons, you do not have to keep them at your place; it is legal to tell someone that as of tomorrow, they no longer have to come to work -- you just have to give them a pay check for those three months (or whatever) you would have to employ them otherwise.
Finally, the thing also works in the other direction; if some important employee (say, the only guy with the root password) decides to quit, an employer can require that they stay at work for up to (IIRC) two weeks, so as to ensure continuity. But I understand you knew that part already...