Controlling Internal Controls

Two recent examinations of management practices in three federal departments provide contemporary evidence of the need to incorporate procedures like those of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the public sector. Although each department established what appeared to be well-designed internal controls, all lacked sufficient monitoring and assessment of the efficacy of those controls. By requiring senior management to attest to the strength of their control mechanisms, as required by the newly revised OMB Circular A-123, the quality of this monitoring should improve. Findings from a recent study of private-sector implementation of these reforms are described, along with suggestions for public administration research and practice at all levels of government.     

The Dissemination of Detainees Awaiting Trial Before International and Internationalized Criminal Tribunals

This paper will focus on the rights attributed to detainees who are facing charges before international and internationalized criminal courts. The question is whether their position merits a different approach compared to the position of detainees who are confronted with domestic criminal trials. In particular, this paper will address the question whether, and to what extent, international human rights have a direct effect on the position of the former detainees. Attention will focus on case law of the European Court of Human Rights vis-a-vis the rights of detainees and the impact thereof on the position of detainees who are held in custody on behalf of international and internationalized criminal courts. The author is Professor of International Criminal Law at Utrecht University (The Netherlands), defence counsel acting before the ICTY, ICTR and SCSL, and a partner of the law firm Knoops & Partners Advocaten in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.     

Routes and paths of comparison and choice

This paper studies aspects of sequential choice (and elimination) through the ‘routewise’ application of choice. (A choice is a mapping of the subsets of a set X into their respective subsets.) This approach sheds some further light on the ‘path-independence’ of choice, as well as on the logical structure of several rationality criteria for choice, as expressed through the properties of the comparison (or preference relation) revealed by a choice. The results bear particular relevance to the theory of collective choice.     

加强未成年被害人的保护维护未成年被害人的利益

在未成年人犯罪预防中,我们的关注点常常集中在犯罪的预防上,期望通过未成年人的教育、保护等各种犯罪措施,来控制和减少未成年人犯罪,其实,犯罪作为一种社会现象,是由犯罪人、被害人和犯罪行为三个基本要素构成的。被害人学研究的大量成果表明,加强未成年被害人的保护,维护未成年被害人的利益,同样可以达到未成年人犯罪预防之目的。大量研究表明,现实生活的未成年人被害与未成年人犯罪是紧密联系在一起的,例如,未成年被害人和未成年犯罪人的角色往往是不固定的。从预防犯罪角度看,预防未成年人被害与预防