Barcelona 2002: law, ethics, and human rights. Using the law to improve access to treatments

The XIII International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa in July 2000 focused worldwide attention on the problem of accessing treatments in developing countries. In the interim, thanks to the work of activists - from demonstrations to court cases, and from acts of public courage by people living with HIV/AIDS to ongoing lobbying of politicians and trade negotiators - some very significant developments have occurred. But the reality is that the vast majority of people living with HIV/AIDS still lack access to affordable, quality medicines. This article, a summary of a paper presented at "Putting Third First: Vaccines, Access to Treatments and the Law," a satellite meeting held at Barcelona on 5 July 2002 and organized by the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, the AIDS Law Project, South Africa, and the Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit, India, explores three approaches for improving access. In the first part, Richard Elliott provides an overview of the state of the right to health as embodied in international human rights law; comments on the experience to date in litigating claims to the right to health; and identifies potential strategies activists can adopt to advance recognition of the right to health. In the second part, Sharan Parmar and Vivek Divan describe price-control and drug-financing mechanisms used by industrialized countries to increase the affordability of medicines; and discuss how some of these mechanisms could be adapted for use in developing countries. Finally, Jonathan Berger describes the use of litigation in the courts by the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa.     

Adolescents Coping with Poverty-Related Family Stress: Prospective Predictors of Coping and Psychological Symptoms

Examined prospective associations among poverty-related family stress, coping, involuntary stress reactivity, and psychological symptoms in a sample of 79 rural, low-income adolescents. Poverty-related family stress predicted adolescents’ anxious/depressed and aggressive behavior 8 months later, controlling for prior symptoms. Coping interacted with initial symptoms and involuntary stress reactivity to predict changes in symptoms over time, showing that primary and secondary control coping were most strongly associated with changes in symptoms for adolescents with low initial symptoms and involuntary stress reactivity. The only significant predictor of coping over time was prior coping, suggesting that coping is not symptom-driven and may be somewhat trait-like. Implications for interventions and additional research are offered. Assistant Professor, University of Denver. Received PhD from University of Vermont. Research interests include the effects of poverty on family functioning, developmental issues in stress and coping, and developmental psychopathology Doctoral student in Clinical Psychology, University of Denver. Research interests include close relationship influences on adolescent development and psychopathology.     

Variation in state education policies and effects on student performance

There have been few systematic studies of the effects that education policies adopted at the state level have on the quality of schooling within the state. This article, building on a framework developed by Eric Hanushek and Lori Taylor, measures the effects of state policies—in particular, the effects of state teacher certification requirements on SAT performance across states. In an examination of SAT data from 1972 to 1990, the results suggest that students in states with a master's degree requirement for teacher certification had lower SAT scores than students in states without a master's requirement. The empirical model accounts for inputs such as family background and other school factors typically used in education production functions.     

New issues in child development

She has published widely on matters pertaining to the family and child care, including the care of the handicapped. Her books include The War Over the Familyand Child Care and Mediating Structures.     

Effect of the broadcast of a television documentary about a teenager's suicide in Israel on suicidal behavior and methods

Portrayals of suicide in the media are controversial because they may impact on suicide rates and methods. The aim of this study was to analyze the effect of the broadcast of a television documentary wherein an adolescent girl is interviewed about her suicide plan and subsequently dies by suicide. National suicide rates during the 8 weeks prior to the program and the 4 weeks following it were compared to the same periods in the previous year. There was no significant difference in the rates of completed and attempted suicides before and after the program. There was a shift toward the method used in the film after the broadcast, but it was found to be nonspecific to that year. A significant decrease was noted in the mean age of suicide attempters in the last promotional week prior to the broadcast compared to the previous year (p = .032). These preliminary findings suggest that the repeated televised promotion of a documentary on suicide may raise the risk of suicide in vulnerable populations. Further investigations in bigger populations are needed.     

APEC and its enemies: The failure of the new regionalism in the Asia-Pacific

This article looks at the rise of APEC as a vehicle for the promotion of free trade in the Asia-Pacific. It argues that, although the Japanese government was more interested in trade cooperation than free trade, it played a key role, along with the Australian government, in the establishment of APEC, while the main challenge to APEC came from the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamed. During the 1990s, however, Mahathir's proposal for an East Asian Economic Bloc which excluded the USA, Australia, New Zealand and all other 'non-Asian' nation-states, was incorporated into APEC and took the name of the East Asian Economic Caucus. The accommodation of Mahathir's proposal to the APEC process, and his inability to get Japanese support for his pan-Asian initiative, symbolised the limits on any and all regional challenges to US hegemony in the Asia-Pacific. The article also emphasises that, with the coming of the East Asian crisis, the prospects of a successful regional challenge to US hegemony have become even more remote. In particular, the growing influence of the IMF in the region since the crisis has made APEC irrelevant, while the inability of regional elites to deal with the crisis in a unified fashion has thrown into sharp relief the serious obstacles which exist to any pan-Asian effort to challenge neoliberalism. At the same time, although the East Asian crisis has precipitated a reassertion of US hegemony and a consolidation of neoliberalism, the present juncture may also herald the start of a crisis of neoliberalism, with regional and international implications.     

Historical Blocs and Democratic Impasse in the Philippines: 20 years after ‘people power’

One noteworthy feature of the political crisis in Indonesia, which followed the Asian financial crisis of 1997 was the speed with which the collapse of the Suharto government was subsumed by a wider crisis of the Indonesian nation-state. One aspect of this crisis is the strengthening of secessionist movements in several regions of Indonesia, calling into question the country's national boundaries, themselves a legacy of the Dutch colonial era. This article examines the tensions in the nation-building efforts of the Indonesian state by focusing on the three territories where secessionist movements have been strongest: East Timor, which has already successfully broken away from Indonesia, and Irian Jaya and Aceh, where long-standing secessionist movements experienced significant growth in the aftermath of the resignation of President Suharto on 21 May 1998. Our analysis emphasises that these secessionist movements arose in direct response to the ways in which the Indonesian state, especially during the Suharto period, went about the tasks of nation-building. In particular, each movement was to a large degree fuelled by brutal and indiscriminate state violence. At the same time, each has been greatly affected by global trends of decolonisation, the Cold War and its aftermath. The distinct timing and manner of each territory's incorporation into the Indonesian nation-state has had a profound influence on the character of, and appeals made by, each movement, as well as on their prospects for gaining support from the wider international system.     

The creative use of the ADHD diagnosis in probationers' self-narratives

Drawing upon a narrative criminological theoretical framework, this article explores how probationers use the ADHD diagnosis in self-narratives. Eleven in-depth interviews with probationers diagnosed with ADHD were carried out, while the interviewees were under the supervision of the Danish Probation Service. The analysis of the empirical material shows that the ADHD diagnosis provides a context for their life that helps make sense of and explain their past. Although their self-narratives are in a sense personal stories, they relate ADHD as a neurobiological disorder to their criminal past, using the available cultural narratives (Loseke, D. R. (2007). The study of identity as cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives: Theoretical and empirical integrations. The Sociological Quarterly, 48, 661–688). Three types of co-existing self-narratives were identified: (1) ‘ADHD as my biological destiny’, (2) ‘It should have been discovered earlier in my life’ and (3) ‘I would not have been without ADHD’. As the probationers articulated all three narratives, the particular role of ADHD in the individual self-narratives was ambiguous. The probationers stated that they would not have missed the wild experiences of ‘living on the edge’, while at the same time describing ADHD as a determining factor for their life paths as criminals. Accordingly the probationers tended to explain not the individual offences, but their lives as criminals. Following this, the final section discusses whether their use of ADHD leads to crime-reducing ‘narratives of desistance’ or whether they instead represent crime-increasing ‘neutralization narratives’ (Maruna, S. (2001). Making good: How ex-convicts reform and reclaim their lives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association; Maruna, S., & Copes, H. (2005). What have we learned from five decades of neutralization research? Crime and Justice, 32, 221–320).