英国:纠结的监管媒体话题

监管媒体?眼下,这在英国可真是令人纠结的话题。2013年3月18日,英国议会就如何监管媒体举行听证会。最终,首相卡梅伦宣布:保守党、自由民主党和工党达成妥协。卡梅伦力促采取自我管理的方式,希望直接通过修改皇家宪章的捷径建立一个媒体监督机构。反对党工党和保守党盟友自由民主党则希望通过立法确立新的管理框架,并同意建立新机构来监管媒体。新监管机构可以采取以下措施:责成媒体在头版对虚     

Coroners' autopsies: quality concerns in the United Kingdom

Safety in health care has increasingly become a key focus of health care providers. Data on "patient outcomes" and evidence-based clinical decision-making have led to real changes in health care policy and care provision. Specialist groups such as the National Patient Safety Agency which operates the National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD) in the United Kingdom are reliant on good information in order to identify factors that lead to poor patient care. In a recent study the NCEPOD reviewed the quality of coroners' autopsy reports on which they rely for much of their core data. The study found that just over half of the reports (52%) were considered satisfactory by the reviewers, 19% were good and 4% were excellent. However, over a quarter of autopsies were marked as poor or of an unacceptable standard. While analysing the factors associated with poor-quality autopsies, comments and recommendations were made with regard to the processes of death investigation and the degree to which the coroner's death investigation meets the needs of health care services.     

Religion in the Workplace: Eweida and Others v United Kingdom

The European Court of Human Rights judgment in Eweida and Others v United Kingdom dealt with the increasingly controversial questions of religious symbols at work and the clash between free conscience and anti‐discrimination norms. In a change of approach, it held that the right to resign could no longer be seen as adequate protection for religious freedom and that workplace norms that restrict religious liberty must satisfy a proportionality test. However, it accorded a wide margin of appreciation to States in reconciling freedom of conscience and freedom from discrimination, ruling that the importance of non‐discrimination could justify a failure to exempt a religious individual from complying with a policy forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.     

OxyContin and a Regulation Deficiency of the Pharmaceutical Industry: Rethinking State-Corporate Crime

On May 10, 2007, three executives of the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma pled guilty in federal court to misleading doctors and patients about the risk of addiction and potential for abuse of OxyContin. Additionally, Purdue Pharma paid over $600 million in fines and other payments to the United States government and the Commonwealth of Virginia. The drug OxyContin was first introduced to the market in December of 1995. Warning signs of the drug’s potential for abuse were almost immediate, and there were reports of copious amounts of the drug being diverted into the black market for recreational use. In some cases, criminologists have argued that if the government fails to protect its citizens from the harm of a corporation then such behavior should be considered state-corporate crime. We critically evaluate the case of OxyContin to see if it falls under the state-corporate crime paradigm. Further, we argue the state-corporate crime paradigm can benefit from an increased focus on the organizational structures of regulation agencies.     

State Aid and Taxation of Transnational Companies: A Study of State-Corporate Crime

This study examines the taxation of transnational companies from the perspective of state-corporate crime. As in Sutherland’s pioneering study on white-collar crime, the author relies, in this case, on administrative decisions issued by the European Commissioner for Competition regarding Fiat and Starbucks. According to the Commissioner, the tax advisors of these organizations prepared and submitted special tax rulings on behalf of their clients that were granted by the Luxembourg and Dutch tax authorities, respectively. However, these tax rulings were considered illegal under European law, as they constitute state aid. Therefore, the Commissioner fined Fiat and Starbucks. In this inquiry, state aid from tax rulings is conceived as a process of capital accumulation that arises from states’ regimes of permission based on the interactions between public sector and private sector actors. Thus, an observable symbiosis between tax authorities and transnational companies allowed the latter to use tax regulations in a manipulative way, while the former exercised weak/undue control. This study also unveiled the criminogenic role of tax advisors, an industry that is rarely held accountable for their actions.     

Mass Salmonella Poisoning by the Peanut Corporation of America: State-Corporate Crime Involving Food Safety

Animal feces in food causes outbreaks of salmonella poisoning, whose assault on the body results in several days of diarrhea, vomiting and even death. This paper looks at the massive distribution of salmonella-contaminated peanuts in 2008–2009 that caused nine deaths, 11,000–20,000 illnesses and the recall of 4000 products in the US. The Peanut Corporation of America operated filthy, sometimes unregistered, plants and shipped products to major food manufacturers and schools after receiving test results positive for salmonella. This corporate crime was facilitated by substantial weaknesses in regulation, and is thus a state-facilitated corporate crime. This case study is developed by looking at the peanut plant conditions, decisions of executives, regulatory failure, and overall response. The conclusion asks about the puzzle of the state responding to a crime it facilitated, and how to understand the role a corporation victimizing another corporation plays into the response.     

Power(ful) Connections: Exploring the Revolving Doors Phenomenon as a Form of State-Corporate Crime

Critical Criminology - The ‘revolving doors’ phenomenon is the name given to the movement of individuals from public office to private companies and vice versa. It is believed that this...     

Priority-setting processes for medicines: the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand

The agencies involved in the assessment and prioritisation of medicines for public subsidy purposes in Australia, England and Wales, and New Zealand are compared in terms of their processes; ultimate decision-maker and political involvement in decisions; price-setting processes; decision criteria and inclusion of economic assessment of cost-effectiveness; provision for the rule of rescue and separate treatment of potentially life-saving medicines and cancer drugs; levels of access; extent of consumer participation in processes and decisions; and provision for appeal from decisions. All countries face the key challenge of expanding access to important new treatments, while maintaining cost-effectiveness as a key criterion for public funding and safeguarding the affordability and sustainability of their programs into the future. New Zealand's model may have led to a greater focus on cost-containment and overall affordability than those of the other two agencies. Despite controversial decisions that have led on occasion to disappointment and challenge, the Australian and New Zealand agencies have survived and appear to have managed to date to maintain public and political support. By contrast, the United Kingdom's National Institute for Healthcare and Clinical Excellence is facing major changes to its role that could see it become more of an advisory organisation.     

United Kingdom: Sisters and inheritance tax

Joyce and Sybil Burden are two sisters who have lived togethersince birth and currently occupy a UK farmhouse. When one ofthem dies the other will face a large inheritance tax bill andwill have to sell the     

The Parliamentary Enquiry on Fraud in the Dutch Construction Industry Collusion as Concept Between Corruption and State-Corporate Crime

In December 2002 the final report of the Royal Commission concerning Irregularities in the Dutch Construction Industry was published. The broadcasting of the public hearings in the months before was breaking news. It proved the whole sector participated in illegal practices, ranging from fraud, unjustified subsidies and license issuance to real bribery and money or favours to individual politicians or higher-ranking public servants; from undercutting the market, monopolisation and forcing up prices, to selective control by partial inspectorates. In his article the author, an advisor to the Commission, summarises the mayor types of irregularities the report reveals with special interest in the network dimension they had in common. The Commission spoke about collusion as the key problem. Collusion can be described as secret agreement for a fraudulent or deceitful purpose, especially to defeat the course of law. Theoretically this concept can have many faces. In this parliamentary enquiry it was illustrated in three ways: as anti-trust illegalities, as a kind of governmental crime, and as kind of corruption. The report showed a long-lasting structural interrelation between these three types with a special role for the twining between collusion and corruption. Corruption research often mentions collusion as a cause, condition or explanation of corruption. But rarely is that argument illustrated in detail. This article seeks to do so. Especially when corruption is hard to grasp in modern society, a solution could be to take collusion as ‘a network offence’ more seriously. The collusion subsystems revealed hereare relatively stable networks, invulnerable to individualised anti-corruption legislation. The author pleads for stricter rules governing state-corporate interrelationships, more severe control on network abuses, and the introduction of minimum standards for public contracting as proposed by Transparency International.