Women’s Rights to Property in Marriage,Divorce, and Widowhood in Uganda: The Problematic Aspects

This article examines women’s rights to property in marriage, upon divorce, and upon the death of a spouse in Uganda, highlighting the problematic aspects in both the state-made (statutory) and non-state-made (customary and religious) laws. It argues that, with the exception of the 1995 Constitution, the subordinate laws that regulate the distribution, management, and ownership of property during marriage, upon divorce, and death of a spouse are discriminatory of women. It is shown that even where the relevant statutory laws are protective of women’s rights to property, their implementation is hindered by customary law practices, socialization, and the generally weak economic capacity of many women in the country. The article delves into the even weaker position of women’s rights to matrimonial property at customary and religious laws. In many homes, wives provide labor to support their husbands without having a stake in the use or monetary benefit from it. Under Islamic law regulating intestate succession to property, the entitlements for widows fall short of the constitutional standards on equality and non-discrimination. Polygyny is widely practiced by Muslims implying that the widows share the one eighth whenever there are children or one fourth in cases when there are no children. Radical reforms such as adopting an immediate community property regime instead of the present separate property regime are inevitable if women’s rights to property are to advance.     

Access to justice: Widows and the institutions regulating succession to property in Uganda

The 1995 Constitution of the Republic of Uganda in terms of article 31 (2) thereof, establishes rights under which widows and widowers can inherit property from their spouses and enjoy parental rights over their children. A duty is placed on the government to make appropriate laws to this end. More important though, the state has a duty to facilitate the administration of estates in general by making, through decentralization, the institutional and legal framework on succession more accessible to ordinary people. An issue that deserves fresh consideration is whether this obligation to make the legal and institutional framework on succession accessible to ordinary people and especially widows, the years fater the Constitution was promulgated has been realized, and if so, whether it has advanced the property rights of these surviving female spouses in the estates of their deceased spouses.     

Minority rights and the dialectics of the nation: Otto Bauer’s theory of the nation and its contributions to multicultural theory and globalization

Conclusion This article analyzed Otto’s Bauer idea of the nation and assessed its meaning and significance qua liberal nationalism and the expansion of national minority rights in Europe. It argued that Bauer's formulation of the same rights for all minorities exposed certain limitations of multicultural theory, namely the failure of liberal multicultural theorists to adequately address the consequences of special minority rights and the potentially transformative role of labor in liberal societies that necessarily seek to be inclusive. Further, Bauer's idea of cultural autonomy raised important and relevant implications for advancing national minority rights in Europe. In particular, his initiative exposed possible ways to promote the social of cultural rights of EU Charter on Fundamental Rights. Given this and the EU's commitment to labor rights, it is curious that Bauer’s theory has not received the attention it deserves. Indeed, even if Bauer's ideas prove somewhat non-conventional by liberal standards, it is still important that we see his ideas as serving some elemental purpose in linking the advancement of national values and sentiment with the EU goal of integration.     

‘Domestic transnationalism’: legal advocacy for Mexican migrant workers' rights in Canada

Every year thousands of Mexicans travel to Canada to work in Canadian fields and greenhouses under the Mexico-Canada Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. While the programme is often praised, it has also been the subject of persistent criticism about its failure to meet certain human rights standards. In this article, we examine the legal strategies civil society advocates of migrant workers have adopted to promote migrant workers' rights in Canada. Specifically, we examine legal struggles undertaken by the United Food and Commercial Workers union to challenge Ontario government legislation that does not permit collective bargaining by farmworkers in the province. We argue that this case demonstrates that despite the fact that many of the workers involved are transnationalized, appeals to international bodies or to international human rights standards have been of limited utility in promoting their rights. Despite frequent arguments about the increased relevance of international human rights and citizenship norms and transnational human rights advocacy, in this case the national and sub-national scales remain predominant. The result, we argue, is a form of ‘domestic transnationalism’, in which domestic political actors engage in advocacy within domestic legal institutions to promote the rights of a transnational mobile labour force.     

Solomon Islands: blending traditional power and modern structures in the state

By mid‐2001, the Solomon Islands government was on the edge of bankruptcy after two years of unrest on Guadalcanal. Solomon Islanders' hopes that the national government can improve their living standards have been dashed, only 23 years after British colonial rule ended on these South‐West Pacific islands. The reasons for the state's limited capacity to facilitate development extend much further than the financial crisis, as a comparison between power relations typically institutionalized in Western liberal democratic states and those institutionalized in the Solomons state shows. The Solomons state is a syncretism of traditional political practices and modern structures. Many of these traditional practices are impeding development. Recent neo‐liberal reforms championed by the previous government, the Asian Development Bank and other aid agencies did little to address these practices and were terminated in the unrest in 2000. If the state is to improve the living standards of ordinary Solomon Islanders, changes in structure, such as the state governments being established following the Townsville Peace Agreement, are not the sole answer. There also need to be changes in the political practices of both officials and politicians at national and local level. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Post‐national citizenship,social exclusion and migrants rights: Mexican seasonal workers in Canada

In the past few decades, migrants residing in many European and North American countries have benefited from nation‐states' extension of legal rights to non‐citizens. This development has prompted many scholars to reflect on the shift from a state‐based to a more individual‐based universal conception of rights and to suggest that national citizenship has been replaced by post‐national citizenship. However, in practice migrants are often deprived of some rights. The article suggests that the ability to claim rights denied to some groups of people depends on their knowledge of the legal framework, communications skills, and support from others. Some groups of migrants are deprived of the knowledge, skills, and support required to negotiate their rights effectively because of their social exclusion from local communities of citizens. The article draws attention to the contradiction in two citizenship principles—one linked to legal rights prescribed by international conventions and inscribed through international agreements and national laws and policies, and the other to membership in a community. Commitment to the second set of principles may negate any achievements made with respect to the first. The article uses Mexican migrants working in Canada as an illustration, arguing that even though certain legal rights have been granted to them, until recently they had been unable to claim them because they were denied social membership in local and national communities. Recent initiatives among local residents and union and human rights activists to include Mexican workers in their communities of citizens in Leamington, Ontario, Canada, are likely to enhance the Mexican workers' ability to claim their rights.     

Taxation and local government accountability in a clientelist context: Colombia

Increasing the accountability of local government is an important objective of decentralisation. One way to achieve greater accountability is to enhance the reliance of local governments on locally raised taxes. Property taxes are a prime source of increased revenue for local governments. However, it is difficult to levy them effectively in clientelist political systems, like that of Colombia. Recent reforms there have increased the capacity of municipal governments to raise revenue through property taxation. Giving responsibility for assessments of property values to an independent national agency has been especially useful. Municipal government finances are now to some degree independent and protected from the influence of clientelistic political parties. However continuing problems include: the reluctance of mayors to enforce taxation liabilities; the obstacles to opening local political debates on taxation; and the problems faced by national governments in trying to monitor municipal revenues and expenditures. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Constructions of migrant rights in Canada: is subnational citizenship possible?

Devolutionary trends in immigration and social welfare policy have enabled different levels of government to define membership and confer rights to people residing within the political boundary of a province or municipality in ways that may contradict federal legal status. Drawing upon theories of postnational and deterritorialized citizenship, we examined the legal construction of social rights within federal, provincial, and municipal law in Toronto, Ontario. The study of these different policy arenas focuses on rights related to education, access to safety and police protection, and income assistance. Our analysis suggests that the interplay of intra-governmental laws produces an uneven terrain of social rights for people with precarious status. We argue that while provincial and municipal governments may rhetorically seek to advance the social rights of all people living within their territorial boundaries, program and funding guidelines ensure that national practices of market citizenship and the policing of non-citizen subjects are reproduced at local levels.     

Taiwan’s political ecology after the November 1997 local election

From the late 1940’s to the late 1980’s, the political system in Taiwan can be best characterized as one-party system, with the Kuomintang (KMT) as the dominant ruling party. In the November 1997 local election, the KMT was defeated by the opposition party, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), for the first time. The DPP not only gained more county and city posts at the provincial level but also grabbed more votes than the ruling party, resulting in a new political order. At the local level, a two-party system has emerged. The general population prefers a cleaner and more efficient government. Many voters in the November 1997 election voted for the candidates—not the party—of their choice. Unless the KMT can welcome back the New Party (NP), its ruling party status at the national (as opposed to central) level may be called into serious question. Before the legislative election of December 1998 and the direct, presidential election of March 2000, it seems that the KMT will try to co-opt members of the NP. There could be tension between the central and local governments in Taiwan on many issues in the foreseeable future, such as whether or not the Republic of China (ROC) flag should be hoisted in schools and how much financial support the local governments can get from the central government. It is highly doubtful that the DPP can grab the presidency in the year 2000. Most voters are not ready for such a new order at the presidential or central (as opposed to national) level.     

Compliance and Non-compliance with International Human Rights Standards: Overplaying the Cultural

This paper interrogates a ‘positive’ view of culture’s (potential) role in widening compliance with international human rights standards, which (1) concentrates on the ‘cultural’ bases of conflict over rights and, in consequence, (2) focuses primarily on cultural interpretation as a means of achieving greater respect for rights norms. The thrust of the paper is that the relationship between culture and human rights norms is much more complex than this positive perspective implies and, this being so, that some of its claims about the potential benefits of cultural interpretation for widening rights compliance are hard to sustain. I substantiate this argument by exploring five challenges to this approach.     

Politicization as a strategy for recognition and enforcement of human rights in Kenya

Drawing from recent advocacy efforts on the right to education in Kenya, this article argues that linking human rights to local political struggles is a useful way of ensuring their realization. Human rights are legal and moral but their realization is a political project. The form that this project takes will differ from context to context. While paying due regard to the remarkable contribution of international human rights regimes and transnational advocacy of the last fifty years in providing the world with a powerful legal and moral vocabulary of rights, this article suggests that this vocabulary risks losing its edge unless those working in the field of human rights recognize the necessity of local politics. The article examines the activities of the Kenyan human rights movement and its strategic linking of access to basic education with repression of political freedoms. I would like to thank participants at the May 9–10, 2003 “Rights in Africa” conference at North-wester University, Illinois, for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Are There Universal Collective Rights?

The first part of the paper focuses on the current debate over the universality of human rights. After conceptually distinguishing between different types of universality, it employs Sen’s definition that the claim of a universal value is the one that people anywhere may have reason to see as valuable. When applied to human rights, this standard implies “thin” (relative, contingent) universality, which might be operationally worked-out as in Donnelly’s three-tiered scheme of concepts–conceptions–implementations. The second part is devoted to collective rights, which have recently become a new topic of the human rights debate. This part provides the basis of political–philosophical justification and legal–theoretical conceptualization of collective rights, as rights directly vested in collective entities. The third part dwells on the problem of universality of collective rights. It differentiates between the three main collective entities in international law—peoples, minorities, and indigenous peoples—and investigates whether certain rights vested in these collectives might, according to Sen’s standard, acquire the status of the universal ones. After determining that some rights are, in principle, plausible candidates for such a status in international law, this paper concludes by taking notice of a number of the open issues that still need to be settled, primarily by the cooperative endeavor of international legal scholars and legal theorists.     

Analyzing decentralized resource regimes from a polycentric perspective

This article seeks to shed new light on the study of decentralized natural resource governance by applying institutional theories of polycentricity—the relationships among multiple authorities with overlapping jurisdictions. The emphasis on multi-level dynamics has not penetrated empirical studies of environmental policy reforms in non-industrial countries. On the contrary, many of today’s decentralization proponents seem to be infatuated with the local sphere, expecting that local actors are always able and willing to govern their natural resources effectively. Existing studies in this area often focus exclusively on characteristics and performance of local institutions. While we certainly do not deny the importance of local institutions, we argue that institutional arrangements operating at other governance scales—such as national government agencies, international organizations, NGOs at multiple scales, and private associations—also often have critical roles to play in natural resource governance regimes, including self-organized regimes.

Sharing natural resource management responsibility: Examining the New Zealand rock lobster co-management experience

Co-management, in which government and resource users share responsibility for managing a natural resource, is attracting considerable attention in both public policy and common pool resource research. However, little is understood about how this approach arises in a mature regulatory setting, or about its strengths and weaknesses. This study uses the experience of the New Zealand rock lobster (Jasus edwardsii and Sagmariasus verreauxi) industry to illustrate what co-management is and how it develops. This is followed by an assessment of co-management in this regime. Development of co-management is an evolutionary process that requires commitment from both government and industry. Strengthened property rights and management expertise provide the incentives and tools to develop a robust co-management regime. However the characteristics of the property rights bundle must be carefully matched to the regime’s biological, social, and regulatory setting.     

The Public/Private Cleavage in a Welfare State: Attitudes Toward Public Management Reform

This study contributes to the growing literature on differences in attitudes between public and private sector employees, particularly with respect to their receptivity or resistance to public management reforms. We begin by asking the question: to what degree does perceived self-interest play a role in accounting for attitudes toward public management reforms such as downsizing, privatization, and public spending? Using attitudinal data from Sweden, a social welfare state with a large public bureaucracy, a tension is observed both among public employees in different levels of government and between public and private sector employees. In the context of public management reforms, national government employees emerge as more right-leaning politically and more supportive of public management reforms than those working in local government. The analysis finds, particularly among national government employees, that while interest as measured here is strongly related to attitudes toward reform, status as a public employee and status as a public bureaucrat are not as significant as other components of interest in accounting for attitudes toward public management reform.     

The Promise of Progressivism: Herbert Croly and the Progressive Rejection of Individual Rights

Herbert Croly's Promise of American Life provides the theoreticalfoundations for many of America's twentieth-century politicalreform movements. Croly called for the adoption of Hamiltonianmeans to achieve Jeffersonian ends. To achieve this synthesis,however, Croly rejected Hamilton's arguments for institutionalchecks on a pure national democracy, and Jefferson's argumentsfor limited government. Croly rejected these elements in Hamilton'sand Jefferson's thought because they are tied to the liberaldoctrine of individual rights. Croly wanted to transcend thedoctrine of individual rights in order to create a nationalpolitical community—one that would be forged by a strongbut democratic national government. However, Croly failed tosee the connection between Jefferson's belief in democracy andhis belief in limited government, and he failed to see the connectionbetween Hamilton's belief in a strong national government andhis call for institutional checks on democracy. Thus, althoughmany American reform movements have their roots in the rhetoricof Croly's progressivism, to be effective they have had to accommodatethe principles of liberal individualism that Croly wished toeradicate.     

Sovereignty,Human Rights,and Responsibility: Changes in China’s Response to International Humanitarian Crises

The question of whether human rights are above sovereignty has dominated China’s human rights discourse. Relying on a sovereignty-human rights spectrum, this article reviews China’s behaviors, particularly its participation in the UN Security Council, in managing the three major international humanitarian crises in the post-Cold War era—Rwanda, Kosovo, and Darfur, and finds that there have been impressive changes in China’s response to the crises. Yet, a content analysis of China’s official discourse on human rights finds that China’s attitudes towards sovereignty and human rights have not changed much. Drawing on constructivist international relations theory, this article attempts to explain the paradox. It is argued that the international discourse on the “responsibility to protect” has brought about changes in international norms regarding violations of human rights and humanitarian law, and that, having undergone in recent years an identity change from a defensive power of bitterness and insecurity to a rising power aspiring to take more responsibility, China is more concerned about its national image and more receptive to international norms, which has led to the changes in its response to international humanitarian crises.     

Constitutional Change: A Note by the Bedside

The British constitution is undergoing major change although it tends to be carried out piecemeal and is often ignored. There are contradictory trends in what is happening. Some changes are deliberate major reforms which tend to disperse power and strengthen the rights of the individual against the State. Other changes are incidental by-products of other government policies, and tend in the other direction, towards the greater concentration of power in, and within, central government, for instance by the weakening of local government and the treatment of individual rights in legislation against terrorism. This second trend makes it all the more important that the checks and balances on the exercise of power by central government are effective. The main responsibility for ensuring this must rest with Parliament, backed up by the courts. A Civil Service Bill and perhaps a code of governance for central government would in their different ways be useful.     

预算标准法与儿童抚养成本研究——以夏县农村儿童抚养成本为例

本研究采用预算标准法,以夏县农村地区儿童抚养成本为研究内容,详细测算了在可接受的最低生活水平下,生活在不同家庭类型,不同年龄段、不同性别的儿童抚养成本。本研究还就所测算的儿童抚养成本与夏县农村地区主要社会救助项目进行了比较,发现农村最低生活保障线相当于温饱线,五保救助标准比低保标准略高,但是也仅仅覆盖了衣食成本。     

The International Legal Framework and Armed Groups

This article explores the contribution of the international legal framework to strategies for exercising leverage over and engaging with non-state armed groups. In addressing the framework’s relevance in meeting these challenges, it examines the tensions between hierarchy and reciprocity in international law; key normative developments in international human rights and international humanitarian laws, the issue of existing gaps in the protective framework envisaged by these two bodies of law, and the impact of their growing intersections; recent trends in the international arena that point toward the expansion, as well as restriction, of the normative space and their implications; and, in light of the opportunities/challenges identified, the international legal framework’s prospects for articulating credible engagement strategies with non-state armed groups.