论植物人的法律人格及权利行使和保护

Although human vegetables lose their capacities of will and do not have the intrinsic attribute of civil subjects, they still have legal personalities and the status of civil subjects. The law has not provided for defects of their legal personalities, and thus civil law shall include human vegetables as objects of guardianship. The system of adult guardianship shall be constructed to supplement and correct the legal personalities of human vegetables. When human vegetables enter into a permanent vegetative state or state of brain death, law may declare the termination of legal personalities of the human vegetable. Due to the unique life state and capacity of act of human vegetables, the exercise of their civil rights faces a series of legal difficulties and challenges, mainly involving important issues such as the right of treatment for life rescue, marital right and reproductive right. The civil law shall ensure that the civil right of human vegetables can be fully enjoyed and effectively protected. Zhang Li, associate professor in civil and business law at Fujian Normal University, and also an invited researcher on civil law, international economic law and international private law, co-operated with Law School of Renmin University of China. Till now, she’s already released 23 theses in law journals and a monograph of the Survey of International Private Law. In addition, she was a member in doing studies (2006) on the legislation of Chinese tort law and presides over the researching (2007) of the legal personality and rights of disabled persons.     

The European Court of Justice and the Rhetoric of Affirmative Action

The recent Marschall decision by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to uphold a principle giving precedence to women for promotions in the workplace seems promising for the future of affirmative action. At first glance, this decision seems to indicate that the ECJ has taken a different path, moving away from its earlier Kalanke decision which had jeopardised further development of affirmative action in the European Union. On a closer examination, both Kalanke’s sweeping ban of preferential treatment based on gender and Marschall’s new interpretation appear as discursive replies to the same dilemma: should the Court deny the normative objective of equality contained in EC law to generate meaning, thus turning equality into a mere formal principle and rendering judicial review trivial? Or should it embrace a substantive reading of the fundamental principle of equality between men and women, thus substituting the Court judgment for that of the legislature, and subverting the limits of the ECJ’s powers? The aim of this article is to analyse the ECJ’s rhetorical response to the complexities contained in affirmative action judicial review.     

论职务发明人的权利及其立法保护

随着人们对创造性智力劳动作用认识的提高 ,职务发明人的权利越来越受到重视 ,如何确认并保护职务成果完成人特别是职务发明人的权利已经成为当今软科学的重要课题。本文阐述了确认职务发明人权利的意义 ,对职务发明人的权利内容作了较深入的探讨 ,并提出了职务发明人权利保护的立法建议。     

Measuring legal implementation of the international guidelines on HIV/AIDS and human rights

With over 36 million people now living with the virus and over 21 million people dying of AIDS in the last two decades, HIV/AIDS is a global health and security problem. These shocking figures eclipse the human toll of many wars, and reveal in themselves that human rights are not being respected, protected, or fulfilled, either through negligent omissions or violations. A human rights approach to the epidemic was advocated early by advocates such as Jonathan Mann, who recognized that infections thrived in conditions of inequality. This approach was crystallized in the International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights that were developed at the Second International Consultation in 1996 convened by UNAIDS and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The Guidelines cover three main areas: improving governmental responses in terms of multisectoral responsibility and accountability; widespread law reform and legal support services; and supporting increased private sector and community participation in effective responses to the epidemic. This article focuses on the half of the twelve Guidelines that concern rights that are justiciable and amenable to law reform. It highlights the responsibilities of States Parties to human rights treaties, as they bear the principal burden of the obligations to implement.     

AIDS-related risks in the health care setting: HIV testing of health care workers and patients

Do patients and health care workers have the legal right to know each other's HIV status? Professor Flanagan argues that they do not. Given that with appropriate precautions the risk of transmitting HIV in the health care setting is extremely small and that the discriminatory consequences of HIV disclosure can be extremely high, it is suggested that the right of a patient or a health care worker not to disclose their HIV status must outweigh the other's "right to know."     

Resolving legal, ethical, and human rights challenges in HIV vaccine research

In the absence of a cure for AIDS, attention has turned to the possibility of developing a preventive vaccine for HIV infection. Yet many scientific, ethical, legal, and economic obstacles remain. At the current rate, the development and production of an effective vaccine could take 15 to 20 years or longer. If tens of millions more HIV infections and deaths are to be avoided in the coming decades, vaccine research needs to be greatly expedited. Furthermore, it must be undertaken ethically, and the products of this research must benefit people in developing countries. This article, an edited and updated version of a paper presented at "Putting Third First," addresses challenges arising in HIV preventive vaccine research in developing countries. It does not address clinical research in developing countries relating to treatments or therapeutic vaccines. Nor does it address legal and ethical issues relating to HIV vaccine research in industrialized countries, although similar issues arise in both contexts. The article concludes that while ethical codes are silent on the obligation to undertake research and development, international law provides strong legal obligations--particularly with regard to industrialized states--that should be invoked to accelerate HIV vaccine development, and distribution.     

Policy deviations,uncertainty, and the European Court of Justice

The implementation of European Union directives into national law is at the discretion of member states. We analyze incentives for member states to deviate from these directives when the European Commission may sue a defecting member state and rulings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are uncertain. We find that higher uncertainty about the preferences of the ECJ increases policy deviation, irrespective of whether a case is taken to court or not. If decisions of member states to deviate are interdependent, the incidence of filed cases decreases while for those policies reaching the ECJ deviations increase.     

The Evolving Judicial Politics of European Integration: The European Court of Justice and national courts revisited

This article analyzes how the judicial politics sparked by the European Union's (EU) legal development have evolved over time. Existing studies have traced how lower national courts began cooperating with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to apply EU law because this empowered them to challenge government policies and the decisions of their domestic judicial superiors. We argue that the institutional dynamics identified by this ‘judicial empowerment thesis’ proved self‐eroding over time, incentivizing domestic high courts to reassert control over national judicial hierarchies and to influence the development EU law in ways that were also encouraged by the ECJ. We support our argument by combining an analysis of a dataset of cases referred to the ECJ with comparative case study and interview evidence. We conclude that while these evolving judicial politics signal the institutional maturation of the EU legal order, they also risk weakening the decentralized enforcement of European law.     

Analysis on the legal protection of merchandising rights in characters

The case of cartoon character “San Mao” triggers broad debates on merchandising right in fictional characters within the academic circle of intellectual property law. For lack of explicit legal provisions and theoretical supports, the final judgments of such cases may be unfair or inconsistent. By introduction to the origin of the merchandising right in fictional characters and the practice of its protection in the US, this paper holds that China shall learn from the US comprehensive protection mode in practice, give consideration to its protection standard formed in its case law, research typical cases and, if necessary, establish the standard on protection of the merchandising right in fictional characters by judicial interpretations.     

论死者生前权益的法律保护

作为个体的人死亡以后 ,原先依附于其身的权益是否依然存续 ?如若存续 ,其存续形式是什么 ?当这种权益形式遭受不当侵害时 ,又如何运用法律手段予以维护 ?近些年 ,因侵犯死者生前权益如名誉、肖像等而涉讼的案件 ,每每引起争论 ,说明有必要对与死者生前权益有关的一些问题进行深入的法理思考 ,并在此基础上探讨如何健全与完善我国维护死者生前权益的法律制度。     

Barcelona 2002: law, ethics, and human rights. HIV testing for peacekeeping forces: legal and human rights issues

In 2001, the United Nations Security Council established an Expert Panel to study the issue of whether the UN should institute HIV testing of peacekeeping personnel. This article, based on a 9 July 2002 presentation to the XIV International AIDS Conference (abstract TuOrG1173), reports on the findings of a paper prepared for the Expert Panel by the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. The paper examined whether it is permissible for the UN to implement mandatory HIV testing of its peacekeeping personnel, and whether HIV-positive UN peacekeeping personnel should be excluded or restricted from service on the basis of their HIV status or HIV disease progression. The article describes some of the court cases in which these issues have been considered; discusses the importance of analyzing such issues in the context of a human rights-based approach to the pandemic; and formulates a series of key principles for guiding UN decision-making. The article concludes that a policy of mandatory HIV testing for all UN peacekeeping personnel cannot be justified on the basis that it is required in order to assess their physical and mental capacity for service; that HIV-positive peacekeeping personnel cannot be excluded from service based on their HIV status alone, but only on their ability to perform their duties; and that the UN cannot resort to mandatory HIV testing for all UN peacekeeping personnel to protect the health and safety of HIV-negative personnel unless it can demonstrate that alternatives to such a policy would not reduce the risk sufficiently. In the end, the Expert Panel unanimously rejected mandatory testing and instead endorsed voluntary HIV counselling and testing for UN peacekeeping personnel.