Decapitation due to car accident

The occurrence of complete decapitation as a consequence of car accident is an extremely rare event. This fatality is generally seen in pedestrians run over by trains and also in motorcyclists who impact against the tailboard of trucks. Moreover, complete transection of pedestrians and occupants of cars has been described in road accidents especially in case of vehicles traveling at a high speed. We present a case of decapitation with complete degloving injury of the neck in a patient involved in a traffic accident, and we briefly discuss the possible mechanisms producing this injury.     

Psychopathology and weapon choice: a study of 103 perpetrators of homicide or attempted homicide

Bone marrow (BM) analysis is of forensic interest in postmortem toxicological investigation in case of limited, unavailable or unusable blood samples. However, it remains difficult to determine whether a drug BM concentration is therapeutic or represents overdose, due to the lack of studies on this alternative matrix. Given the variations in BM composition in the body, sample location was suggested to be a relevant factor in assessing BM concentration. The aim of the present study was to compare postmortem caffeine concentrations in various BM sample locations and secondly to consider the correlation between BM and blood concentrations. Six BM samples (right and left side: proximal and medial femur and 5th rib) and a blood sample were collected from 21 forensic autopsies. Gas chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry was performed. Blood caffeine concentrations ranged from 60 to 7591ng/mL. Femoral and rib BM concentrations ranged from 51 to 6171ng/g and 66 to 7280ng/g, respectively. Blood concentrations were always higher than BM concentrations. As a good correlation was demonstrated between blood and rib BM and between blood and the average of the four femoral BM concentrations, blood caffeine concentrations could be correctly extrapolated from BM concentrations. BM caffeine concentration was found to depend on sample location. Rib BM caffeine concentrations appeared to be systematically greater than averaged femur values and concentrations were much more variable between the 4 femur BM samples than between the 2 ribs. From a practical point of view, for caffeine analysis, rib BM appeared more relevant than femoral BM, which requires multisampling to overcome the concentration variability problem.     

Remedying the Inequalities of Economic Citizenship in Europe: Cohesion Policy and the Negative Right to Move

European supranational citizenship draws the boundaries of a community of citizens, sharing the status of economic actors in the single market. The specter of inequality threatens however the resulting promise of shared membership: economic citizens face profoundly different opportunities for economic involvement, depending on their nationality and residence within the Union. Free movement rights open up a narrow way out of inequality by enabling European citizens to relocate; however, they cannot alone solve the inequality problem that economic citizenship poses. In the quest for alternative remedies to this problem, this article explores the potential of European cohesion policy. It argues that cohesion policy, by addressing gaps in wealth throughout the Community, draws the traits of a negative right to move, which adds to the protection of European economic citizenship. Through the cohesion lens, the premises are laid for a renewed assessment of the project of shared economic citizenship.     

Italy and the Comprehensive Agreement on Investments: disappointment over the process

Asia Europe Journal - The formal conclusion of the Comprehensive Agreement on Investments (CAI) has drawn much criticism. Criticisms for member states did not always recognise the same critical...     

Vulnerability as a normative argument for accommodating “justice” within the AFSJ

Vulnerability is a concept that stems from ethics and legal theory. It has progressively gained momentum in international human rights law, in particular in the European contextof the European Court of Human Rights adjudications. Also, the European Union is sensitive to it.By the introduction of competences in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) we are witnessing a progressive “vulnerabilisation” of EU law. This article intends in the first place to outline such a problematic notion and then to highlight the normative effects of vulnerability. In particular, this article will put forward the argument that such notion could serve to revamp the profile of “justice” of the AFSJ, which has been neglected so far, calling for the development of a more sophisticated ethics of State duties.     

European Citizenship and EU Immigration: A Demoi‐cratic Bridge between the Third Country Nationals' Right to Belong and the Member States' Power to Exclude

European citizenship entails, for EU nationals, a right to belong across borders. This article questions the implications of this latter right for the status of third country nationals in the EU. It contributes to address a gap between the literature on European citizenship and the literature on the admission and civic integration of third country nationals. The article begins by tracing a disconnect in the rules and narratives on admission and naturalisation of third country nationals in the EU. This is a disconnect between logics of individual rights protection, which European citizenship infiltrates, and logics of state sovereignty and governmental discretion, which otherwise dominate relevant rules and narratives. The article relies on the political science literature on mutual recognition and demoicracy to reinterpret European citizenship's norm of belonging across borders so as to reconcile the disconnect. Ultimately, the theoretical bridge that the article draws between citizenship narratives and immigration narratives offers a novel perspective on the tension between liberal values and integration discourses in Europe. It also sets out a possible frame to begin rethinking rules of engagement and cooperation in the context of the EU common immigration policy.     

Allele sharing in first-degree and unrelated pairs of individuals in the Ge F I AmpFlSTR Profiler Plus database

Eleven Italian forensic laboratories participated in a population study based on the AB Profiler Plus loci with proficiency testing. The validated database, including 1340 individuals, is available on-line. Tests for Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, gametic unbalance, and heterogeneity of gene frequency were generally not significant. Gene frequencies at each locus were consistent with those of two previously published Italian studies, but different from a third. Individuals of each subsample were paired, and the total number of alleles shared across the nine loci was determined in each pair. The analysis was replicated over the total sample. In addition, two samples of mother-child pairs (N=315) and full-sib pairs (N=91) were subjected to allele sharing analysis. The resulting distributions were sufficiently distinct from the sample of unrelated pairs as to be of practical usefulness.     

Caring for the elderly in the family or in the nation? Gender,women and migrant care labour in the Lega Nord

This article aims at gendering our understanding of populist radical right ideology, policy and activism in Italy. It does so by focusing on migrant care labour, which provides a strategic site for addressing the relationship between anti-immigration politics and the gendered and racialised division of work. Three arrangements and understandings of elderly care are analysed, whereby care work should be performed ‘in the family and in the nation’, ‘in the family/outside the nation’ and ‘in the nation/outside the family’. Party documents and interviews with women activists are used to show how the activists’ views and experiences partly diverge from the Lega Nord rhetoric and policy on immigration, gender and care work. The article locates populist radical right politics in the context of the international division of reproductive labour in Italy and suggests the relevance of analysing gender relations in populist radical right parties in connection with national care regimes.     

Evidence on women trafficked for sexual exploitation: A rights based analysis

The aim of this paper is to investigate which factors influence the pattern of enforcement (violation) of basic rights among women trafficked for sexual exploitation. A conceptual framework is adopted where the degree of agency and the possibility to influence the terms of sex-based transactions are seen as conditional on the enforcement of some basic rights. Using data collected by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) on women assisted by the organization after having been trafficked for sexual exploitation, we investigate the enforcement (violation) of five uncompromisable rights, namely the right to physical integrity, to move freely, to have access to medical care, to use condoms, and to exercise choice over sexual services. By combining classification tree analysis and ordered probit estimation we find that working location and country of work are the main determinants of rights enforcement, while individual and family characteristics play a marginal role. Specifically, we find that (1) in lower market segments working on the street is comparatively less ‘at risk’ of rights violation; (2) there is no consistently ‘good’ or ‘bad’ country of work, but public awareness on trafficking within the country is important; (3) the strength of organised crime in the country of work matters only in conjunction with other local factors, and (4) being trafficked within one’s country, as opposed to being trafficked internationally, is associated with higher risk of rights violation.