Old Love for New Snoops: How Exemption 3 of the Freedom of Information Act Enables an Irrebuttable Presumption of Surveillance Secrecy

Exemption 3 of the Freedom of Information Act states that a federal agency can withhold a document that has already been deemed non-disclosable by a different statute. That exemption is often used by agencies that are involved in traditional national security practices and the controversial modern techniques of pervasive electronic surveillance, as justification for keeping information on those practices secret. This article argues that Exemption 3 has inadvertently made the security and surveillance establishment more secretive, creating a nearly irrebuttable presumption that documents must not be disclosed to citizens or journalists. Exemption 3 jurisprudence has allowed precedents on the secrecy of old-school surveillance techniques to be applied to the far more pervasive techniques exercised by security agencies in the modern era.     

The Due Diligence Standard and the Prevention of Racism and Discrimination

Netherlands International Law Review - The due diligence standard has played a significant role in preventing human rights violations, including racial discrimination. Yet, it is significantly...     

Punctuated equilibrium in the energy regime complex

The concept of a regime complex has proved fruitful to a burgeoning literature in international relations, but it has also opened up new questions about how and why they develop over time. This article describes the history of the energy regime complex as it has changed over the past 40 years, and interprets this history in light of an interpretive framework of the sources of institutional change. One of its principal contributions is to highlight what Stephen Krasner referred to as a pattern of “punctuated equilibrium” reflecting both periods of stasis and periods of innovation, as opposed to a gradual process of change. We show that the timing of innovation depends on dissatisfaction and shocks and that the nature of innovation—that is, whether it is path-dependent or de novo—depends on interest homogeneity among major actors. This paper is the first to demonstrate the empirical applicability of the punctuated equilibrium concept to international regime complexes, and contributes to the eventual development of a dynamic theory of change in regime complexes.     

Methodological issues in monitoring the use of coercive measures

PurposeIn many European countries, initiatives have emerged to reduce the use of seclusion and restraint in psychiatric institutions. To study the effects of these initiatives at a national and international level, consensus on definitions of coercive measures, assessment methods and calculation procedures of these coercive measures are required. The aim of this article is to identify problems in defining and recording coercive measures. The study contributes to the development of consistent comparable measurements definitions and provides recommendations for meaningful data-analyses illustrating the relevance of the proposed framework.MethodsRelevant literature was reviewed to identify various definitions and calculation modalities used to measure coercive measures in psychiatric inpatient care. Figures on the coercive measures and epidemiological ratios were calculated in a standardized way. To illustrate how research in clinical practice on coercive measures can be conducted, data from a large multicenter study on seclusion patterns in the Netherlands were used.ResultsTwelve Dutch mental health institutes serving a population of 6.57 million inhabitants provided their comprehensive coercion measure data sets. In total 37 hospitals and 227 wards containing 6812 beds were included in the study. Overall seclusion and restraint data in a sample of 31,594 admissions in 20,934 patients were analyzed. Considerable variation in ward and patient characteristics was identified in this study. The chance to be exposed to seclusion per capita inhabitants of the institute's catchment areas varied between 0.31 and 1.6 per 100.000. Between mental health institutions, the duration in seclusion hours per 1000 inpatient hours varied from less than 1 up to 18 h. The number of seclusion incidents per 1000 admissions varied between 79 up to 745. The mean duration of seclusion incidents of nearly 184 h may be seen as high in an international perspective.ConclusionCoercive measures can be reliably assessed in a standardized and comparable way under the condition of using clear joint definitions. Methodological consensus between researchers and mental health professionals on these definitions is necessary to allow comparisons of seclusion and restraint rates. The study contributes to the development of international standards on gathering coercion related data and the consistent calculation of relevant outcome parameters.     

Diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder and criminal responsibility

The present study empirically investigates whether personality disorders and psychopathic traits in criminal suspects are reasons for diminished criminal responsibility or enforced treatment in high security hospitals. Recently, the tenability of the claim that individuals with personality disorders and psychopathy can be held fully responsible for crimes has been questioned on theoretical bases. According to some interpretations, these disorders are due to cognitive, biological and developmental deficits that diminish the individual's accountability.The current article presents two studies among suspects of serious crimes under forensic evaluation in a Dutch forensic psychiatric observation clinic. The first study examined how experts weigh personality disorders in their conclusions as far as the degree of criminal responsibility and the need for enforced forensic psychiatric treatment are concerned (n = 843). The second study investigated associations between PCL-R scores and experts' responsibility and treatment advisements (n = 108).The results suggest that in Dutch forensic practice, the presence of a personality disorder decreased responsibility and led to an advice for enforced forensic treatment. Experts also take characteristics of psychopathy concerning impulsivity and (ir)responsibility into consideration when judging criminal accountability. Furthermore, they deem affective deficiencies sufficiently important to indicate suspects' threat to society or dangerousness and warrant a need for forensic treatment.     

Negotiation in legislatures over government formation

We question results claiming to extend non-cooperative models of legislative bargaining to the theoretically general and substantively typical case with an arbitrary number of disciplined parties. We identify problems with both the derivation of formal results and empirical evaluation of these. No empirically robust formateur advantage is observed in field data on bargaining over government formation. Given this theoretical and empirical impasse, we reconsider the substantive premises that should form the foundation for any new attempt to model this fundamental political process, arguing that models should be grounded in binding constitutional constraints on the government formation process in parliamentary democracies.