South Africa: airline found guilty of employment discrimination

On 28 September 2000, the Constitutional Court of South Africa ruled that South African Airways (SAA) violated the constitutional rights of Jacques Hoffmann in September 1996 by refusing to employ him as a cabin attendant on the ground that he is HIV-positive.     

Canada loses appeal of WTO panel ruling on minimum patent terms

In the last issue, we reported on a ruling of a Panel of the World Trade Organization (WTO) that Canada was in breach of the international Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (the TRIPS Agreement). The Panel found that Canada's Patent Act does not provide the minimum patent terms required by the trade agreement. Canada appealed that decision, but on 18 September 2000 the WTO Appellate Body upheld the Panel ruling.     

The business judgment rule and other protections for the conduct of not-for-profit directors

The authors review the Business Judgment Rule as applied to a not-for-profit director's duty of care, with particular emphasis on the different forms of state statutory liability shields that serve to enhance the protections of the Rule. They also examine current trends in enforcement of breach of fiduciary duty of care standards, and provide a series of specific recommendations for not-for-profit boards to consider implementing as a means of increasing the likelihood of affording such protections to individuals serving as directors.     

Toward analysis of the relations among the youth counterculture,telephone hotlines,and anonymity

During the 1960s, there emerged a youth culture which had two major orientations: the Counterculture and the Movement. We are well informed about this youth culture, its social values, social norms, and emergent social roles (e.g., hippie, freak, radical, dropout). Part of these social and political movements was the creation of alternative, counterculture, or radical human service programs. Early examples were free medical clinics, drop-in centers, and telephone hotlines. Among the actual differences in these programs compared to older, established human service agencies was (is) the prominent position of the social value of client anonymity. This notion of client anonymity is examined in the attempt to understand its role in the relations among themes of the Counterculture, individual youth, their peers, and youth-serving agencies.Holds degrees in social work and public health and is currently completing a report of a national survey of hotlines and youth crisis programs and working with others in editing papers for a monograph from a conference on evaluating hotlines. The survey data will appear in that publication.     

Collecting Africana

"To add a library to a house, is to give that house a soul."     

Bibliography of Recent Publications on Africa

This bibliography covers publications noticed between Septemberand November, 1953. It has been compiled with the co-operationof Professor T. Heyse (lately of the Belgian Ministry of Colonies)and Miss Ruth Jones (International African Institute).     

Towards the Real Cross-examination Criminal Procedure in Hungary

Act of XIX/1998 on Criminal Procedure that had become known in theeyes of the public and the legal sciences as The New Code on CriminalProcedure was promulgated by the Hungarian Parliament on its sessionof 10th of March 1998. The reason for the creation of such an Act was theeagerness to finally get rid of the criminal procedure act of the socialistera, e.g. to get rid of its principle of equality of two main phases: theinvestigation and the procedure in front of the court. Also it was among thepurposes of the new act to adjust our rules of procedure to the regulationsof the Western European Countries. The legislator was took into considerationthe general principles and institutions of Act XXXIII of 1896 on CriminalProcedure, without reviving its surpassed parts. The practices of the Strasbourginstitutes were considered as well.     

The net effects of the Project NetWork return-to-work case management experiment on participant earnings, benefit receipt, and other outcomes

The Social Security Administration (SSA) initiated Project NetWork in 1991 to test case management as a means of promoting employment among persons with disabilities. The demonstration, which targeted Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) beneficiaries and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) applicants and recipients, offered intensive outreach, work-incentive waivers, and case management/referral services. Participation in Project NetWork was voluntary. Volunteers were randomly assigned to the "treatment" group or the "control" group. Those assigned to the treatment group met individually with a case or referral manager who arranged for rehabilitation and employment services, helped clients develop an individual employment plan, and provided direct employment counseling services. Volunteers assigned to the control group could not receive services from Project NetWork but remained eligible for any employment assistance already available in their communities. For both treatment and control groups, the demonstration waived specific DI and SSI program rules considered to be work disincentives. The experimental impact study thus measures the incremental effects of case and referral management services. The eight demonstration sites were successful in implementing the experimental design roughly as planned. Project NetWork staff were able to recruit large numbers of participants and to provide rehabilitation and employment services on a substantial scale. Most of the sites easily reached their enrollment targets and were able to attract volunteers with demographic characteristics similar to those of the entire SSI and DI caseload and a broad range of moderate and severe disabilities. However, by many measures, volunteers were generally more "work-ready" than project eligible in the demonstration areas who did not volunteer to receive NetWork services. Project NetWork case management increased average annual earnings by $220 per year over the first 2 years following random assignment. This statistically significant impact, an approximate 11-percent increase in earnings, is based on administrative data on earnings. For about 70 percent of sample members, a third year of followup data was available. For this limited sample, the estimated effect of Project NetWork on annual earnings declined to roughly zero in the third followup year. The findings suggest that the increase in earnings may have been short-lived and may have disappeared by the time Project NetWork services ended. Project NetWork did not reduce reliance on SSI or DI benefits by statistically significant amounts over the 30-42 month followup period. The services provided by Project NetWork thus did not reduce overall SSI and DI caseloads or benefits by substantial amounts, especially given that only about 5 percent of the eligible caseload volunteered to participate in Project NetWork. Project NetWork produced modest net benefits to persons with disabilities and net costs to taxpayers. Persons with disabilities gained mainly because the increases in their earnings easily outweighed the small (if any) reduction in average SSI and DI benefits. For SSA and the federal government as a whole, the costs of Project NetWork were not sufficiently offset by increases in tax receipts resulting from increased earnings or reductions in average SSI and DI benefits. The modest net benefits of Project NetWork to persons with disabilities are encouraging. How such benefits of an experimental intervention should be weighed against costs of taxpayers depends on value judgments of policymakers. Because different case management projects involve different kinds of services, these results cannot be directly generalized to other case management interventions. They are nevertheless instructive for planning new initiatives. Combining case and referral management services with various other interventions, such as longer term financial support for work or altered provider incentives, could produc