Decentralisation and poverty: conceptual framework and application to Uganda

In order to shed further light on the discussion about decentralisation‐poverty linkages in developing countries, this article introduces a conceptual framework for the relationship between decentralisation and poverty. The framework takes the form of an optimal scenario and indicates potential ways for an impact of decentralisation on poverty. Three different but interrelated channels are identified. Decentralisation is considered to affect poverty through providing opportunities for previously excluded people to participate in public decision‐making, through increasing efficiency in the provision of local public services due to an informational advantage of local governments over the central government and through granting autonomy to geographically separable conflict groups and entitling local bodies to resolve local‐level conflicts. Based on the experience with decentralisation in Uganda, it is shown that these channels are often not fully realised in practice. Different reasons are singled out for the Ugandan case, among them low levels of information about local government affairs, limited human capital and financial resources, restricted local autonomy, corruption and patronage, high administrative costs related with decentralisation and low downward accountability. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reconciliation in Times of Impunity: Challenges for Social Justice

In human history there is no lack of malice, revenge, or savagery. The twentieth century has seen 33 million military deaths. Victimization deaths are estimated at six times that number, at 205 million people. The past decade has seen people enslaved, tortured, raped, and persecuted as members of political, racial, ethnic, or religious groups in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Yet we have not seen meaningful prosecution of crimes that have occurred on a massive scale. Former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights José Ayala Lasso has stated that a person stands a better chance of being tried and judged for killing one human being than for killing 100,000. This paper examines reconciliation in the aftermath of protracted, deadly, wide scale conflict characterized by impunity when crimes against individuals, groups, and humanity go unpunished. It describes the relevance of moral exclusion theory to conflicts in which dehumanization and violence are normalized, and it argues that impunity is an urgent matter for psychology and social justice research.     

To Pay Suspicious Attention: Following the Weave of ‘Mixed Logics’ in Women’s Ethical Decision Making

This article explores areas of law loosely within English equity and trusts law that have not conventionally been subject to feminist debate, and within the context of a discussion about feminist method. The particular areas examined are whistleblowing and trustees’ powers of investment, each of which calls for consideration of decision-making processes which have an ethical content. These sites are chosen because they take debate outside the all too familiar locations of woman or ‘the body of woman’, including the family home, where feminist analysis in relation to equity and trusts tends to stray. In exploring these chosen fields, Hobby’s (Feminist Perspectives on Equity and Trusts, Cavendish Publishing, 2001, pp. 219–255) critique of gender dimensions in relation to whistleblowing and Dunn’s (Feminist Perspectives on Equity and Trusts, Cavendish Publishing, 2001, pp. 179–196) account of women trustees’ investment decisions are evaluated and developed. The debate within feminist legal criticism of the possibility of integrating an ‘ethics of care’ and an ‘ethics of rights’ is acknowledged. Whilst acknowledging of the difficulty of adopting an approach that recognises ‘mixed logics’, it is concluded that women (and men) do integrate the ethics of care and the ethics of rights in their decision-making. It is argued that the effort should be made to trace the specific weave in particular circumstances, thereby paying suspicious attention to the values that underlie courts’ analyses of ethical choices.     

Special Issue: Gender,Sexuality and Human Rights

This brief article introduces a special issue of Feminist Legal Studies addressing gender, sexuality and human rights, and comprising papers drawn from an E.S.R.C.-funded workshop held at the University of Kent in June 2004 on the theme of “Gender-Auditing the Human Rights Act”. The article begins by situating the themes of the special issue within the broader context of feminist engagement with rights discourse. It goes on to consider the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 into the U.K. with a view to assessing its implications in terms of engendering a positive legal and political culture for equality-seeking initiatives. The article concludes with a survey of the contributions to the special issue, highlighting the possibilities for feminist theory and strategy posed by a wider intersectional engagement with rights issues.     

Choosing Healthplans All Together: a deliberative exercise for allocating limited health care resources

CHAT (Choosing Healthplans All Together) is an exercise in participatory decision making designed to engage the public in health care priority setting. Participants work individually and then in groups to distribute a limited number of pegs on a board as they select from a wide range of insurance options. Randomly distributed health events illustrate the consequences of insurance choices. In 1999-2000, the authors conducted fifty sessions of CHAT involving 592 residents of North Carolina. The exercise was rated highly regarding ease of use, informativeness, and enjoyment. Participants found the information believable and complete, thought the group decision-making process was fair, and were willing to abide by group decisions. CHAT holds promise as a tool to foster group deliberation, generate collective choices, and incorporate the preferences and values of consumers into allocation decisions. It can serve to inform and stimulate public dialogue about limited health care resources.     

From autobiography to biography: Roma the First

Roma Flinders Mitchell, 1913–2000, AC, DBE, Queen's Counsel, Judge, Founding Chair of the Human Rights Commission, Chancellor of the University of Adelaide, Governor of South Australia, was the first woman in Australia—often also the first in the British Commonwealth—to gain the positions and honours that gild any narrative of her life. How did she do this? What was it like for her? Such questions follow immediately. And then, making it more complicated, what else was there in her life besides achievements and honours? What other doors opened before her as she moved through her days? And what doors closed? How did she choose some doors and not others?

These are questions that we are addressing in our biography of Roma Flinders Mitchell. They are not questions that we will consider here, though. Rather, our subject in this article is not our narrative but Roma Mitchell's own story of her life. It develops into a three‐stranded narrative, composed principally of interviews for press and television, predominantly during the last decades of her life. It is therefore a story shaped by her recognition of herself as exceptional, ‘Roma the First’, and also by other people's desires that she be—for them—precisely that: ‘Roma the First’. This is the ‘authorised’ narrative of Roma Mitchell's life, the story that she told herself. Many regard it as unquestionably definitive, and therefore determining. Yet, it does, itself, prompt an array of questions.

The story is set in Australia, ‘the last of lands, the emptiest’ wrote poet A.D. Hope, in a time that historian Michael Ignatieff deemed ‘“the worst century there has ever been,” in wanton destruction of human life and in murderous unreason masking itself as reason’. More specifically, it takes its beginning from the early years of the twentieth century, in the city of Adelaide, core of a British colony founded less than a century earlier, on the plain that had basked in the custodianship of the Kaurna people before the arrival of the ships from Britain, roughly in the middle of the southern curve defining the Australian continent. The forms that appear in the story derive from those origins: the British law which the colonists practised, with all its theatrical paraphernalia and terminology; a gradually developing copy of Westminster government, but with deference to British rule and allegiance always observed; education adopted from schools and universities in England and Scotland. Only in its churches was it distinct, for, among all of Britain's colonies in Australia, South Australia was the ‘paradise of dissent’. Here, on the edge of the anglophone world, this story did not so much unfold as gather itself together and take off.     

Validation and implementation of the PowerPlex 16 BIO System STR multiplex for forensic casework

The PowerPlex 16 BIO multiplex short tandem repeat (STR) system contains the 13 CODIS loci (FGA, TPOX, D8S1179, vWA, D18S51, D21S11, TH01, D3S1358, CSF1PO, D16S539, D7S820, D13S317, and DS5S818), plus two pentanucleotide repeat loci (Penta D and Penta E) and the sex-identifying locus. Amelogenin. The PowerPlex 16 BIO System is optimized for use with the Hitachi FMBIO gel imaging systems. A consortium of seven independent laboratories collaborated to perform the studies defined by the FBI standards for performing a developmental validation, including the evaluation of sample concordance, percent stutter determination, nonprobative casework, precision, sensitivity, mixture determination, effect of substrates, the impact of environmental insults, and species specificity. All samples tested for concordance were consistent except for one sample from the Virginia Division of Forensic Science database that displayed discordance at D13S317, a locus whose primer sequence was altered. Stutter values were comparable to those of other STR multiplex systems, the precision was comparable to other multiplexes analyzed by gel electrophoresis, the DNA profiles were unchanged by the substrate upon which the blood samples were placed, and the nonprobative casework samples re-typed for the PowerPlex 16 BIO System were consistent with previous typing results. When greater than 0.125 ng of DNA was placed into the PowerPlex 16 BIO System amplification reaction, a full profile was generated by all laboratories. The mixture study results were comparable to those reported for other multiplex systems, the environmental study demonstrated a loss of larger molecular weight loci when samples were incubated at elevated temperatures for a prolonged period of time, and the only notable cross species hybridization was observed with primate DNA samples. This extensive validation work performed demonstrates that the PowerPlex 16 BIO System provides STR data of a quality comparable with other PowerPlex STR multiplex kits as well as other widely used STR multiplexes and is thus suitable for evidentiary casework analysis as well as database sample profiling.     

Application of the BioMek 2000 Laboratory Automation Workstation and the DNA IQ System to the extraction of forensic casework samples

Robotic systems are commonly utilized for the extraction of database samples. However, the application of robotic extraction to forensic casework samples is a more daunting task. Such a system must be versatile enough to accommodate a wide range of samples that may contain greatly varying amounts of DNA, but it must also pose no more risk of contamination than the manual DNA extraction methods. This study demonstrates that the BioMek 2000 Laboratory Automation Workstation, used in combination with the DNA IQ System, is versatile enough to accommodate the wide range of samples typically encountered by a crime laboratory. The use of a silica coated paramagnetic resin, as with the DNA IQ System, facilitates the adaptation of an open well, hands off, robotic system to the extraction of casework samples since no filtration or centrifugation steps are needed. Moreover, the DNA remains tightly coupled to the silica coated paramagnetic resin for the entire process until the elution step. A short pre-extraction incubation step is necessary prior to loading samples onto the robot and it is at this step that most modifications are made to accommodate the different sample types and substrates commonly encountered with forensic evidentiary samples. Sexual assault (mixed stain) samples, cigarette butts, blood stains, buccal swabs, and various tissue samples were successfully extracted with the BioMek 2000 Laboratory Automation Workstation and the DNA IQ System, with no evidence of contamination throughout the extensive validation studies reported here.