Amnesties in International Law: The Experience of the Special Court for Sierra Leone

The Special Court for Sierra Leone, a hybrid criminal tribunalestablished to try persons accused of serious crimes duringthe conflict in Sierra Leone, has recently commenced its judicialoperations. Several of the preliminary issues raised by variousdefendants have required the Court to examine the validity ofthe amnesty granted to combatants by the Lomé Peace Agreementand the amnesty's impact upon the Court's jurisdiction to trythe defendants. This article examines the decisions of the Courton the amnesty issue and evaluates the jurisprudence of theCourt with reference to the current status of amnesties in internationallaw.     

社会利益格局调整中的工会利益表达

当前利益格局调整过程中的关键问题是建立和完善相应的利益表达机制以化解严重的利益协调危机。强化中国工会利益表达功能,使其能够真正成为工人利益表达和实现的组织,不仅是形成有效的利益协调机制的重要内容,而且是化解社会矛盾与冲突,促进社会和谐的有效方式。但由于工会的定位导致其利益表达角色冲突、工会组织的行政化导致其利益表达缺乏独立性、工会利益表达手段和方式的简单化导致其利益表达效能不足,应从结构体制和功能机制的更新入手推进中国工会改革。     

Transitional Justice in Transit: Why Transferring a Special Court for Sierra Leone Trial to the Hague Defeats the Purposes of Hybrid Tribunals

Netherlands International Law Review -     

婚姻家庭立法理念的审思

1950年《婚姻法》曾经是新中国成立后颁布的第一部法律。其立法理念不仅在现行《婚姻法》中得到继承和发展,而且在现行《婚姻法》修正草案中也得到发扬与延伸。探寻婚姻家庭立法理念的继承性、扬弃性、时代性,既是理解婚姻家庭领域诸制度发展变化规律的需要,也是掌握婚姻家庭立法技术的需要,并将为婚姻家庭制度的完善提供切实可行的立法建议。     

Patriarchy and changing family strategies: Class and gender in the Dominican Republic

This article explores the issue of ideologies of family formation and their influence on the concept of family strategies. It assesses the influence of patriarchal ideas using a historical case study of a rural village in the Dominican Republic as point of departure. The principal focus is the importance of patriarchal ideologies for class and gender relations. The article argues that the analysis of family strategies should take into account the context of class relations in the countryside and the influence of hegemonic ideologies on the gender relations within rural families. These factors led to specific strategies of rural families, but at the same time for diverging and often contradictory attitudes between individual family members.     

中国共产党与中国的社会保障法制建设

社会保障法是保障每个社会成员基本生活需要的法律制度.它以该社会的全体社会成员,尤其是那些因各种原因陷入生活困难需要特殊帮助者为保障对象.当社会成员在年老、疾病、伤残、失业、生育、死亡、遭遇灾害、面临生活困难时,依法给予物质帮助,以保障其基本生活需要.从而减少社会成员之间的贫富差距,促进社会公平,消除他们的不安全感,实现社会的进步和发展.……     

From social netizens to data citizens: Variations of GDPR awareness in 28 European countries

We study variability in General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) awareness in relation to digital experience in the 28 European countries of EU27-UK, through secondary analysis of the Eurobarometer 91.2 survey conducted in March 2019 (N = 27,524). Education, occupation, and age are the strongest sociodemographic predictors of GDPR awareness, with little influence of gender, subjective economic well-being, or locality size. Digital experience is significantly and positively correlated with GDPR awareness in a linear model, but this relationship proves to be more complex when we examine it through a typological analysis. Using an exploratory k-means cluster analysis we identify four clusters of digital citizenship, across both dimensions of digital experience and GDPR awareness: the off-line citizens (22%), the social netizens (32%), the web citizens (17%), and the data citizens (29%). The off-line citizens rank lowest in internet use and GDPR awareness; the web citizens rank at about average values, while the data citizens rank highest in both digital experience and GDPR knowledge and use. The fourth identified cluster, the social netizens, have a discordant profile, with remarkably high social network use, below average online shopping experiences, and low GDPR awareness. Digitalization in human capital and general internet use is a strong country-level correlate of the national frequency of the data citizen type. Our results confirm previous studies of the low privacy awareness and skills associated with intense social media consumption, but we find that young generations are evenly divided between the rather carefree social netizens and the strongly invested data citizens. In order to achieve the full potential of the GDPR in changing surveillance practices while fostering consumer trust and responsible use of Big Data, policymakers should more effectively engage the digitally connected social netizens in the public debate over data use and protection. Moreover, they should enable all types of digital citizens to exercise their GDPR rights and to support the creation of value from data, while defending the right to protection of personal data.     

Barriers to marriage and motherhood: the experiences of disabled women in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

The conceptualisation of disability is contested globally and issues in gender studies further complicate the movement towards the development of an inclusive and equal society. However, most disability and gender research studies are based on the data collected in the Global North, and little is known about disabled women in the Global South. The data presented here is from a bigger study focusing on the lived experiences of women with disabilities. This paper sets to explore how disabled women in Malaysia experience their lives in terms of marriage and motherhood prospects. The data of this qualitative study was collected from a set of in-depth interviews involving 32 women in Malaysia with physical (mobility) impairment. Over a period of 6 months, 16 Malays, 8 Chinese and 8 Indian women were interviewed twice. The analysis proposes both retrospective and introspective accounts on marriage and motherhood. The data gathered from the in-depth interviews was transcribed and analysed thematically with the help of NVivo software. The findings indicated that most participants have experienced significant barriers concerning individual constraints, familial control, and societal barriers. These were discussed with the intrinsic aspects and contextual factors of living in a patriarchal and traditional society that significantly undermined the wellbeing of disabled women in this study. Nevertheless, many of those interviewed refused to give up their hope of having a family life despite the constant struggles they encountered in their pursuit of happiness. However, their aspirations to experience family life were restricted and this caused them to experience significant psycho-emotional problems. They were constantly reminded that they were ‘disabled’ and not worthy of experiencing life like other women. The paper will discuss these challenges and negative societal attitudes towards the issue.     

The European marriage pattern as solution and problem: households of the elderly in Verviers, Belgium, 1831.

"The essay considers the effects of marriage patterns on the support of the elderly with empirical evidence from Verviers, a small industrial city in nineteenth-century Belgium. The (Northwest) European Marriage Pattern offered a solution for those elderly who had children, especially those with large families, because coresidence with children was the main source of support. The larger community experienced a problem...in the form of large numbers of persons who never married or reached old age with no surviving children. Moreover, while those who had married were able to maintain their economic status, those who never married liquidated their property holdings and became boarders and lodgers in the households of nonkin."     

Doing family: Responses to the constructions of ‘the migrant family’ across Europe

This paper draws on how constructions of ‘the migrant family’ in political discourse influence migrants' and their families' lives. In specific national contexts, ‘the migrant family’ is determined according to the national and European debates and expressed by their respective rules and regulations. By ‘doing family’, migrants and their families develop strategies in order to fit these requirements of living a certain family life. Fulfilling specific norms and perceptions which are not necessarily required for the majority of society is a precondition to succeed. Who is and who is not part of the family, who holds responsibility — such aspects have to be proved and repeatedly reproduced by migrants and their families. This not only affects their position in society, but also has strong implications on their lives as a couple and family, since it requires the continuous adaptation and reconstructions of their everyday reality.     

Perception of family social climate and physical aggression in the home

Physical aggression between spouses is a serious social problem. This study was designed to determine if social climate is different in the homes where aggression occurs than in nonviolent homes. Students were asked to report whether physical aggression between spouses occurred in their homes during their last 2 years of high school. They were also asked to complete the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MC-SDS) and the Family Environment Scale (FES). Each student protocol with reported conjugal violence was matched with another protocol with an identical score on the MC-SDS and on which physical aggression was not reported. A multivariate analysis of variance indicated that these two groups differed in their scores on the FES. A dominance hierarchy, openly expressed anger, conflict, and lack of organization were salient characteristics of homes where physical aggression occurred. Nonviolent families were characterized by spontaneous expression of feelings and problems, shared pleasurable activities and goals, and an emphasis on personal rights and freedoms.     

Identity, genealogy, and the social family: the case of donor insemination

In this paper I discuss whether or not biographical information concerning the sperm donor should be disclosed to children conceived through donor insemination. Policies of disclosure for example in the context of adoption, have been justified on the basis of a notion of identity which emphasizes genetic ties. This notion of identity and the policies of disclosure of information concerning biological parents based on it, have been criticized by many writers, including feminists, as reinforcing explanations of human organization and development based on biological determinism rather than on ideas such as social construction. Further, this notion of identity is seen to emphasize the importance of genetic parenthood over the commitment involved in bringing up a child as a social parent. While agreeing with these criticisms of that particular notion of identity, I argue that the notion of identity as a whole should not be summarily rejected. Rather, it should be re-interpreted using a sociological approach incorporating the notion of narrative. This second narrative notion of identity is developed with reference to the situation of some groups of children, who like those born from donor insemination, generally do not have any knowledge of their biological parent[s], for example adoptees, the children of the disappeared in Argentina and child migrants. In this paper, policies of disclosure which allow these children to gain some knowledge of their biological parents are discussed in light of the two notions of identity. It is argued that disclosure may be justified on the basis of a narrative notion of identity. This allows for the rigid dichotomy created between biological determinism and social construction: the importance of social parents to the child is emphasized, however the desire a child may have to know something about her or his biological parent is not denied or dismissed.     

Minors,gender, and family: The discourses in the court system of traditional Buenos Aires

The article deals with public attitudes toward family responsibility in early-nineteenth-century Bienos Aires, particularly as revealed in lawsuits occasioned by disputes over the custody of minors. The care and education of minors was ordinarily entrusted to parents, but death, incapacity, licentious conduct, poverty or abandonment often resulted in the minor being removed from parents and taken by others into custody of guardians or institutions of public welfare. The majority of the analyzed lawsuits resulted from an attempt by parents to recover their authority over their children. The lawsuits indicate that the racial, gender, social, and generational “disadvantages” of plaintiffs did not a priori determine the judgement, but rather that arguments for family stability frequently were decisive when heard by sympathetic judges. Disadvantages persons thus frequently argued sucessfully about the meaning of the family, as protagonists in the legal system that otherwise often marginalized them.     

The protection of marriage and family: a constitutional responsibility to enable all-embracing interaction as a means without an (objective) end

China-EU Law Journal - The constitutional duty to protect marriage and family is a rather recent task for public authorities. While these particularly personal forms of social interaction have...     

Back for the future: a client centred analysis of social welfare and family law provision

The landscape of legal advice provision is entering a period of significant change in England and Wales. Whilst there is a great deal of uncertainty about how the future landscape of advice service provision will evolve, there are lessons to be drawn from past delivery models.

This article first looks back at the period following the Access to Justice Act 1999, setting out a range of delivery models initiated following the Act, as well as research and evaluation conducted in the millennium decade. Findings are then presented from a comprehensive qualitative study on how people experience and deal with social welfare and family problems, and on facilitators and barriers to integrated advice provision, including inter-organisational working. This is explored through the lens of a delivery model which emphasised partnership and the pooling of resources and specialisms to meet client needs: the Community Legal Advice Centre model.     

The use of the family: Property devolution and well-to-do social groups in Catalonia (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries)

The perpetuation through time of social position is one of the aims of individuals, and in order to achieve this they makes use of the economic, social, and political mechanisms at their disposal. The institution of the family constitutes an important aspect of the life of a person and provides instruments (marriage, systems of property devolution, celibacy, etc.) that permit the creation of a strategy by which social reproduction is assured. Nonetheless, in any given society, there exist groups of individuals that gain access to economic resources in similar ways, thus constituting more or less homogeneous social groups. The way in which this is done is conditioned by the way in which they make use of the family and the instruments that are governed by it. This article analyzes the predominant family system in Catalonia (in Northeastern Spain) and its implicit contradictions. It also evaluates the strategies developed by well-to-do social groups to confront these contradictions and facilitate access to resources.     

From coercion to deception: the changing nature of police interrogation in America

Our police, with no legal sanction whatever, employ duress, threat, bullying, a vast amount of moderate physical abuse and a certain degree of outright torture; and their inquisitions customarily begin with the demand: If you know what's good for you, you'll confess. (Ernest Jerome Hopkins, 1931)¹ Today, Ness Said, interrogation is not a matter of forcing suspects to confess but of conning them. Really, what we do is just to bullshit them (William Hart, 1981)² There is an interesting irony at work here: restrict police use of coercion, and the use of deception increases. (Gary Marx, 1988)³ In both popular discourse and academic scholarship one continually encounters references to the tradition-bound police who are resistant to change. Nothing could be further from the truth. The history of the American police over the past 100 years is the history of drastic, if not radical, change. (Samuel Walker, 1977)⁴ A longer version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology in November, 1991.