新、马、泰的检察和反贪

今年9月30日,根据上海市人民检察院安排,我随中国检察代表团出席国际反贪局联合会(IAACA)第六次年会暨会员代表大会,并顺访新加坡、马来西亚、泰国三国的检察机关或反贪机构。国际反贪局联合会(IAACA)是中国倡议并于1995年成立的国际性非政府组织,中国迄今一直担任会议主席,并负责联合会秘书处的工作,这也是极少的中国有较大话语权的非政府国际性组织。这次大会于10月     

冷战后东南亚与南亚两种地缘政治格局之比较分析

东南亚与南亚地缘政治格局的最大特点在于均势，均势通常是指国家间权力分配大体均等的一种态势，均势有两种，大国竞争型均势格局和直接对抗型均势格局，以东南亚与南亚分别为代表。形成原因在于两个地区在地理、历史、现实和各国自身政策选择这四点因素的不同。这两种均势格局在今后一段时间内仍会继续。中国在这两类均势格局中，应以和平共处五项原则为基础，结合自身的战略利益，分别扮演“参与”与“旁观”的角色。     

让法律对社会性别做出回应:东亚和东南亚面临的发展挑战

一　引　言(一)为什么法律需要具有性别敏感度?在促进妇女赋权与性别平等和促进实现人权这两个全球运动汇聚之际,让法律具有性别敏感度既是我们的迫切需要也是我们面临的挑战。联合国前秘书长B B 加里明确阐释了社会性别与人权的关系:“在里约、维也纳、开罗和哥本哈根,历次会议均强调与提升妇女地位相关的那些重要议题。每一次全球会议都明确承认妇女在可持续发展与保护环境中的重要角色;承认妇女的人权是普遍人权不可分割和不可剥夺的组成部分;承认对妇女的暴力是不能容忍的对这些权利的侵犯;承认健康、分娩保健、计划生育门诊设施、接受…     

Nobody Knows Best: Alternative Perspectives on Forest Management and Governance in Southeast Asia

In this paper we propose a framework for understanding how dominant perspectives, or worldviews, influence the crafting of institutions, and how these, in turn, constrain the functions and goals of knowledge systems. Alternative perspectives carry their own set of assumptions and beliefs about who should be making the rules, where the best knowledge lies to guide decisions, and about where more knowledge is needed. Initially, four contrasting perspectives are elaborated: state-, market-, greens-, and locals-know-best. We illustrate the framework by exploring the recent history of forest governance in Southeast Asia, finding several examples of battles of perspectives leading to a new dominant perspective. In each case the dominant perspective itself, old or new, is shown to be defective in some critical way and was, or should be, replaced. The problem is that each of the perspectives considers the world as knowable, manageable, and relatively constant, or at most changing only slowly. Ecological and socio-political crises, however, are recurrent. Management plans and regulations or policies that aim to establish the land-use allocation, the best crop, the best forest management system or the best price or system of incentives, are doomed to failure. If uncertainties are accepted as fundamental, solutions as temporary, and scientific knowledge as useful but limited, then Nobody Knows Best is a modest, but effective heuristic for forest governance.     

Globalization and regulatory change: The interplay of laws and technologies in E-commerce in Southeast Asia

Electronic commerce has brought about business and technological changes globally, and these global changes have given rise to major legal reforms across nations. In the fast-changing global digital economy, states need strategies to maintain competitiveness of their markets while simultaneously ensuring the secure and effective use of technologies involved in conducting electronic transactions. This paper examines how the use and recognition of electronic signatures are regulated in Southeast Asia – the region that has shown the most significant growth in global e-commerce in past few years. Based on a comparative analysis of the laws of four representative ASEAN member states – namely Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam, this paper argues that there is a regional trend towards adopting more liberal and technology-neutral standards for electronic signatures. Electronic signature regulation in Southeast Asia is now built upon limited technological neutrality (or the so-called “two-tiered” approach) as a shared regulatory understanding, but this approach is operationalized differently in each state due to distinctive national contexts. Within the common legal framework, each state has developed its own system of control and management with respect to higher-level signatures (using advanced technologies). The principle of technological neutrality, a concept originally developed for the regulation of technologies in response to the liberalization of telecommunications market, has been the central theme of discussions on the e-transactions policy-making scene. As the author shows, in the process through which states localize the global standards of technological neutrality, ASEAN as a vehicle of regulatory change has played an essential role in translating this principle to the national context.     

Making the World Health Organization work: a legal framework for universal access to the conditions for health.

Improving global health conditions has been one of the most important and difficult challenges for the world community. Despite concerted efforts by international organizations, like the World Health Organization, great disparities in health conditions remain between developed and developing countries, as well as within those countries. The World Health Organization has achieved some successes through its Health for All strategy; however, it can and should encourage member nations to enact national and international laws to protect and promote the health status of their populations. A comparison to the lawmaking efforts in other areas by international organizations indicates that WHO may have the authority and the means to institutionalize efforts to improve global health conditions.     

WHO initiatives to increase access to treatment in developing countries

In mid-2002, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that some six million people with HIV/AIDS in developing countries are currently in need of life-sustaining antiretroviral (ARV) therapy, but that only 230,000 have access to these medicines, half of whom live in one country, Brazil. The WHO believes that, with a concerted international effort to expand access to HIV treatment and care, three million people could have access to ARVs by the end of 2005. A number of recent initiatives provide some useful tools toward reaching this goal.     

Economic issues in access to medications: schizophrenia treatment in England

Mental health problems and the services to address them are currently receiving more attention in the UK than ever. Mental health care in England--indeed, across the UK--is experiencing a much needed transformation. It is therefore highly pertinent to examine the patterns of psychotropic medication use, given their intended links to recovery, rehabilitation, and reintegration, as well as to explore the economic and other factors that appear to influence those patterns. These are the aims of this paper. Our attention will be primarily focused on England. What this analysis shows is that given a higher profile by government, including additional funding (although not really benefiting differentially compared to other parts of the health service) and the first national service framework, it is possible to see changes in service patterns, access and (to a degree) outcomes. These changes are occurring at a time when new classes of psychotropic medication are being introduced in a range of therapeutic areas, contributing to the relatively rapid growth of take-up but also raising questions about appropriateness, effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and equity.     

Medicaid and access to child health care in Chicago.

In this article we examine how increasing the reimbursement of physicians and expanding Medicaid eligibility affect access to care for children in Cook County, Illinois, which overlies Chicago. Using Medicaid claims and other data at the zip-code level, we compare the places where Medicaid children live with the places where all the physicians who treat children and those who accept Medicaid patients have their practices. Our findings suggest that the recent changes in legislation are unlikely to benefit extremely poor children, who are more likely to live in depressed inner-city areas, where there are few physicians. "Near-poor" children whose homes are dispersed throughout the county, who are now eligible for Medicaid as a result of the recent changes, are likely to see improvements in their access to care. Further changes in policy, aimed at enhancing the capacity of institutions providing care, could improve access for the children of the inner city.     

建立亚太地区自由贸易区构想和法律框架初探

本文从组建亚太自由贸易区缘由出发,较客观地对亚太自由贸易区组建及其法律框架予以初步探讨.笔者认为亚太自由贸易区模式应是阶段性、循序渐进的,同时提出了亚太自由贸易区组建的法律依据和初步框架.     

The violence of silence: some reflections on access to information, public participation in decision-making, and access to justice in matters concerning the environment

The proposition put forth in this paper is that whether—and the extent to which—harm or potential harm to the environment (its natural resources, living beings, and their ecosystems) is identified, resisted, mitigated, or prevented is linked to the nature and scope of public access to information, participation in governmental decision-making, and access to justice—which are often referred to as “environmental due process” or “procedural environmental rights.” Using examples in the United States of attacks on law school clinics and denial of standing in court, this paper argues that restrictions on public access to information, participation in decision-making, and access to justice create legacies and “cultures of silence” that reduce the likelihood that future generations will be willing and able to contest environmental harm.     

针对矛盾对象开展法制宣讲的路径探寻

社会转型关键期，诸多矛盾对象的非理性行为集中表现出对社会的强烈积怨和对政府的信任缺失，对这类矛盾对象及时开展疏引、疏导，在疏通中讲理，在引导中讲法，有利于构建信任，赢得合作，消弥对抗，化解矛盾。对目前稳控工作中存在的重“管”轻“教”、重“控”轻“疏”难题，上海市闸北区司法局牵头组建了闸北区维稳法制宣讲团，专门针对特定矛盾对象开展法制宣讲，探求新方法，谋求新路径，力求新效果。     

当下中国宪法司法化的路径与方法

法院适用法律必须解释法律,而解释法律又必须进行合宪解释,合宪解释是目前我国宪法在司法中适用的最好方式,是现行体制下我国宪法司法化的最佳路径。各级人民法院在民事、刑事和行政诉讼中审理每一起案件适用法律时都应当考虑到宪法,进行合宪解释。每一位法官都是合宪解释的主体,都享有法律解释权和宪法解释权,但这并不否定最高人民法院的最高司法解释权以及全国人大常委会对法律和宪法的最终解释权。法院通过合宪解释方式间接适用宪法,不必将宪法作为裁判依据而引用,但应当在裁判说理部分引用宪法条款。法院在合宪解释过程中发现法律明显违宪时,应当中止诉讼,逐级上报,由最高人民法院报送全国人大常委会处理。     

Geographical access to treatment for sex offenders under community supervision in Kentucky

Abstract

As sex offenders are probated or paroled into the community, sex offender treatment and monitoring is often a condition of their release. In Kentucky, sex offenders are required to participate in community-based treatment for two years or more. However, some sex offenders are disadvantaged in accessing mandated treatment. This is a result of decisions concerning the placement of treatment programmes, the sex offenders' preference to return to communities where they can rely on family and other indigenous support networks, and some statutes (e.g. sex offender registration and residency restriction laws). This study utilises spatial methodologies, including an origin–destination (OD) matrix, to determine the time, in minutes, that sex offenders travel to sex offender treatment providers and non-spatial ordinary least squares (OLS) regression techniques to determine the association between family, neighbourhood and community characteristics on sex offenders’ travel time to treatment. Findings suggest that there is substantial disadvantage in treatment access, measured by travel time, for sex offenders who live in impoverished rural communities.