Getting to Peace? Negotiating with the LRA in Northern Uganda

Getting to peace is not a straightforward process. In Uganda, internal conflict has raged for more than 20 years between the Government and the Lord’s Resistance Army. The construction of a comprehensive negotiated settlement is at the mercy of conflicting ideologies and influences at the international, national and grassroots levels. This paper examines the Juba peace talks, the major actors in the negotiation process, and tension between prosecution and amnesty.

Peace in Northern Ireland and the Remaining Issue of the “On-the-Runs”

The return of devolution to Northern Ireland in May 2007 marks an important turning point in the Northern Ireland peace process, but there remains the issue of the “on-the-runs”—a term used to describe persons suspected of committing a range of terrorist acts during the Troubles, who were never arrested, charged, prosecuted, or tried. It is thought that the On-the-Runs want to return to Northern Ireland, but determining the conditions for their return is a difficult and controversial issue, raising legal and moral concerns and causing strong and painful reactions among the victims of terrorist violence on all sides of the Northern Ireland conflict. It is also an issue that is complicated by the fact that while the Belfast Agreement of 1998 did not address expressly the situation of the On-the-Runs, it did provide for the accelerated release of a significant number of paramilitaries, both republican and loyalist, from prisons in both Ireland and Northern Ireland. This paper reviews the possible options in law for addressing the situation of the On-the-Runs, including extradition and prosecution, as well as trial and amnesty, and pardons. While the paper makes clear that the political offence exception to extradition is no longer the obstacle it once was, it also concludes that politics, rather than law, or simply the passage of time is more likely to offer the solution to the problem posed by the On-the-Runs.

The wall in the ballot box: The Berlin election of 1995

The Berlin election of October 1995 produced very different results in the eastern and western halves of the city, and although the end result was a continuation of the Grand Coalition, it was the PDS and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen who stole the limelight once the votes were counted. This article attempts to account for the performance of the parties in each half of the city and considers the political consequences for them. It concludes by considering what the election can tell us about the public mood in Berlin and about political trends in the Federal Republic in general. What emerges is a ‘wall in the ballot box’, a practical manifestation of die Mauer im Kopf which clearly continues to exist five years after the first all‐German election.     

Toward the formation of a partisan alignment in France

This article investigates the extent to which and the ways in which a basic partisan alignment appeared to be forming in France between 1958 and 1988. During that period, the incidence of party identification rose from abnormally low to normal levels, and the composition of the alignment evolved from indeterminacy, through a left-right standoff, to Socialist party predominance. The basic question asked is how a partisan alignment is createdin the first place. The main elements of the answer suggested are by simplifying, clarifying, and stabilizing the terms of electoral choice. This process is traced closely, with special reference to the incidence of PI and the composition of the alignment by age in 1988, and including a comparison between France in 1968 and the U.S. in 1932. Finally, the fragility of the 1988 alignment is underscored. Comparatively new and shaped mainly by the partisan identifications of the younger citizens, the 1988 alignment was vulnerable to any weakening of the conditions that contributed to creating it. The party with the most to lose was the Socialist party, which had gained the most while the party system stabilized and the incidence of party identification rose.This is a revised version of a paper that was originally presented at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C.     

Partisanship and the party system

The defining properties of party identification long established for the United States fail with some frequency to be replicated in electoral systems abroad. A number of plausible suggestions have been made to account for this system-level variability: Most of these have some face merit, but none taken alone is adequate to provide a full cross-system explanation. Variation in party system size or fractionalization has recently been discussed as another source of differential dynamics of party loyalties. Unfortunately, the conventional means of assessing party identification properties are subject to rather severe artifacts, typically ignored, when comparisons are made across systems of very different party size. The conceptual stakes underlying key methods options for such comparisons—most notably, between continuous and discrete statistical tools—are examined. The use of continuous statistics for systems of very multiple parties rests on an assumption that voters do in some degree regard these party systems as imbedded in a continuous space. A simple test for this assumption is mounted in four systems and unsurprisingly it shows very clear support. Analysis of residuals beyond this obvious result add several points of less obvious information about the distribution of party affect in such systems.     

规则制定与行政程序法

规则与规则制定是美国联邦行政程序法中确定的一个重要的政府规制工具,本文对规则制定的发展史作了一个简要的回顾,对其实施过程中产生的问题作了分析与评估,并对其未来发展以及行政程序法的实施作了展望,对于我们了解规则制定与美国联邦行政程序法具有较大的作用。     

Australia: Supreme Court of Western Australia orders retrial in case of man convicted of infecting girlfriend with HIV

On 3 October 2002, the District Court convicted an HIV-positive man, Houghton, of unlawfully causing grievous bodily harm to his girlfriend for having unprotected vaginal and anal intercourse with her. Houghton had not told her of his HIV status prior to intercourse. He had been aware of his status for some years before meeting the woman, but testified at his trial that he believed that he could not transmit HIV if he did not ejaculate inside the woman. The woman became HIV-positive as a result of the sexual intercourse. The question put before the jury was twofold: whether there had been bodily injury caused by the applicant to the complainant; and whether that injury was of sufficient severity to constitute grievous bodily harm. The jury found Houghton guilty and in doing so made a finding that the transmission of HIV constitutes grievous bodily harm.