Permanent Ocular Injury Following Paintball Pellet Hit: A Medicolegal Case

Paintball is a ubiquitous recreation, with severe and occasionally irreversible injuries. In this study, a rare medicolegal case of paintball‐related closed globe blunt ocular injury was described. An 18‐year‐old boy who was hit in his right eye by a paintball pellet presented with severe eye pain and blurred vision. Ophthalmologic examinations showed lid edema, conjunctival hyperemia, conjunctival laceration, subconjunctival hemorrhage, corneal edema, anterior vitreous hemorrhage, congested sclera, commotio retinae, vitreous hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage, macular edema, and macular hole. After maximum medical improvement, the patient who sustained incurable maculopathy and decreased visual acuity was referred to the legal medicine center for appraisal of the impairment. AMA Guides was used to assess the impairment of the functional vision. Despite his monocular visual defect, the patient was rated in the range of mild vision loss namely AMA class 1 with 22 percentage visual system impairment.     

Globalization and extraterritorial application of economic regulation: crisis in international law and balancing interests

There are two developments the combination of which has led to new challenges to international law: the growth of economic regulations and globalisation. While the modern economies are associated with the proliferation of regulatory laws which are rooted in the national economic and social policies, the loosening of the national borders and globalisation has led to conflicts of economic regulations. Such developments have posed various risks of violations of national economic regulations by the economic actors and could lead to tension among national states which have jurisdiction over multinational enterprises in one way or another. The private parties involved in such a situation could somehow avoid such risks by their own initiatives and contractual arrangements but in most cases such measures do now work and the conflict has to be resolved through the cooperation between the countries involved. The paper investigates the potentials for public international law to come up with rules, principles and norms to resolve such complex disputes which touch up issues such as non-intervention, equality of sovereign states, state immunity, self-determination and other principles of international law. Unlike certain area of international law such as law of sea where a few factors involved and the disputes could be resolved by relying on simple facts and rules, the application of national economic regulations extraterritorially creates tensions among the nation states in respect of the demarcation of national jurisdictions. It is here that public international faces a new challenges and need to come up with new approaches such a balancing of interests of the states involved in the conflicts.     

The Forgotten Pirates: Iraqi and Iranian Pirates in the Arabian Gulf Who Have Never Been Reported to the International Maritime Bureau

If piracy attacks are unreported, a misleading impression is given of piracy situations in regions where there could be serious consequences for ships traveling in waterways on the assumption that they are piracy-free waters. However, sometimes not reporting piracy attacks could help to contain piracy before it expands, because reporting can lead to the media over-focusing on piratical incidents, and armed guards being deployed on ships, which causes pirates to use heavier arms and escalates the level of conflict. Piracy that took place during 2003–2012 in the north and the center of the Arabian Gulf has never been reported to the International Maritime Bureau. The present article examines this case of unreporting, and discusses its causes and consequences.     

Ethiopian female labor migration to the Gulf states: the case of Kuwait

ABSTRACT

International labor migration is one of the most salient features of the modern globalized world. However, the phenomenon has its roots in some earlier periods in human history. Africa is traditionally a sending continent of all types of migrations, voluntary or forced. This study examines the above-mentioned issues through the mounting phenomenon of migration of single independent women in search for better economic, social, or political conditions across the boundaries of their home countries. In the past, African women migrants were only spouses or dependent family members. But as modernity swept most African societies, with rising unemployment rates, there is evidence everywhere in Africa that women labor migration is a growing phenomenon that deserves to be understood in the context of current gender-related research. This work explores these issues further, focusing on the experience of Ethiopian women labor migrants to Kuwait, within Gulf Cooperation Council, an area with a shared socio-economic background. In addition to numerous difficulties already facing labor migrants, Ethiopian women suffered greater degrees of gender-based violence, underpayment, and trafficking, to mention only few aspects of human rights violations. This situation could be attributed to the fact that most of these women fall under the category of unskilled and/or illiterate migrants, as irregular migrants who are employed within the private sector, outside the purview any legal or labor regulatory authorities.     

Driving Dangerously: Law,Culture and Driving Habits in Iran

Iran has the highest rate of road traffic accidents (RTAs) worldwide. Iranian studies of the growing levels of RTAs are often conducted by medical doctors, who view them in light of the increase in the production and ownership of cars and the changed lifestyle of many Iranians, and discuss them in terms of pathology, morbidity and epidemiology. This article argues that although the high levels of RTAs in Iran are new and reflective of the changing character of Iranian society, the habit of reckless driving is not. Using open and semi-structured interviews, it explores how Iranians describe their driving habits and experience RTAs. Placing the results of the interviews in the historical context of Iranian society, the article goes on to examine driving as a form of behaviour with legal and cultural dimensions indicative of how Iranians interact with each other and with the normative structures of the legal system, the state and society to create a form of social order. Being mediated through the use of automobiles, driving habits also throw light on how Iranians relate themselves to an aspect of modern technology. Thus, this study will treat Iranians' driving habits as an empirical manifestation of one aspect of their legal culture, which is mediated through the technology of the automobile.     

The Defeat of Shabina Begum in the House of Lords

The Court of Appeal last year delivered a well-publicised judgment declaring that now 17-year-old Shabina Begum had been unlawfully excluded from Denbigh High School when she insisted on wearing the Islamic ‘jilbab’ ([2005] EWCA Civ. 199; [2005] 1 W.L.R. 3372; [2005] 2 All E.R. 396 (Judgment of 2 March 2005); The Times, 4 March 2005, at p. 85. See also J. Gau, “Muslim Dress – School Exclusion – Human Rights”, Ecclesiastical Law Journal 8/37 (2005), pp. 239–240.). The dispute received huge national and international press coverage, but on Wednesday 22nd March 2006, in a remarkable u-turn, the House of Lords overturned the Court of Appeal’s decision on all counts (R (On the Application of Begum) v Headteacher and Governors of Denbigh High School [2006] UKHL 15 (Judgment of 22 March 2006); The Guardian, 23 March 2006, at p. 6; and The Independent, 23 March 2006, at p. 4. Members of the Appellate Committee were Lord Bingham of Cornhill; Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead; Lord Hoffmann; Lord Scott of Foscote and Baroness Hale of Richmond.). The reversal meant Shabina’s Article 9 right to manifest a belief had not been violated by the school. This analysis will briefly examine the reasoning behind their Lordship’s judgment and will provide a short commentary on the likely effect the decision will have on religious groups wishing to wear religious symbols in UK schools. LLB (Hons), LLM, Cert. Ed. Mohammad Idriss is Senior Lecturer in Public Law at Coventry University, United Kingdom and is a PhD Candidate at the University of Birmingham; M.Idriss@Coventry.ac.uk     

Migration decision from Bangladesh: permanent versus temporary

More than 50% of the total migration from Bangladesh occurred from Sylhet, located to northern part of the country since the middle of the last century. This paper provides an empirical distinction between the temporary migrants (Bangladeshi citizens engaged in earning aboard) and the permanent migrants (those who have the dual citizenship) based on their cost conditions, earnings, and utilization of remittances in their country of origin. Temporary migrants’ educational status, per capita income allocation to family members, work experience before migration, source of income and income range are much lower compared with the permanent migrants. But, the dependency ratio, contribution to the family, remittances, risk etc. are higher for the permanent migrants than the temporary migrants. Cost of migration and the migration decision are inversely related. Migration costs determine individual’s decision to migrate permanently or temporarily. Our results suggest that higher migration cost reduces the probability of permanent migration.