The Prefect and State Reform

The article intends to explain why although tremendous changes have occurred in the structure of government – especially the laws organizing decentralization since 1982 – the institution of the Prefect is still alive in the year 2000. Created in 1800, the institution of the Prefect derives from the will of the central authority to rely on its own representatives to ensure that public policies will be equally implemented over the whole territory. This objective remains but it has to be combined with the objectives of decentralization which are to transfer a number of responsibilities to elected bodies. Consequently, the task of the Prefect is to co-ordinate locally the action of the representatives of the ministers with the action of the elected body. To study the conditions under which the institution carries out this task the article focuses primarily on the limited capacity of the Prefect to mobilize the relevant actors. The second point concerns the difficulty of bringing together the information produced by field services. The third point considers the valuation of proximity and its impact on the action of the Prefect. The article concludes that the function of the Prefect is still the framing of local action but within the new context this can be done more often through the diffusion of information and less often through authority.     

Witnessing as activism: Watching the other at the Israeli checkpoints

The practice of external witnessing—bearing witness to someone else's suffering—is often criticized as further destroying the victim's subjectivity. As a result, this approach limits the use of the practice to extreme cases in which victims lack the ability to speak for themselves. This article argues against limiting the use of the practice by tracing its potential to promote identification with the Other, thus undermining cases of dehumanization. This claim is developed through an analysis of the Checkpoint Watch movement in Israel, which reveals the way the movement challenges the dehumanization of the Palestinians. The activists address the delegitimation of the voice of the Palestinians through witnessing as representation and the unwillingness of the Israeli public to understand their experiences as suffering by witnessing as transformation. As such, this account calls for conceptualizing external witnessing as a prominent form of social and political activism.     

An American Perestroika in Dutch Cities? Urban Policy in the Netherlands at the End of a Millennium

This paper discusses the implications of the recent adoption of interactive forms of governance in Dutch urban policy. Advocates of this new approach claim that interactive governance will have positive effects for (1) the quality of urban democracy and urban governability and (2) for the solution of the information problems inherent in coping with (wicked) urban problems. On the basis of an extensive evaluation of the implementation of the new policies in four of the 25 Dutch municipalities involved, these claims are critically assessed.     

Provisional Court Protection in Administrative Disputes in Europe: The Constitutional Status of Interim Measures Deriving from the Right to Effective Court Protection. A Comparative Approach

Abstract: Interim protection in remedies against the public administration has proved to be one of the key issues in today's justice. In effect, the slowness of judicial proceedings means that final judicial decisions cannot guarantee the rights and interests of the litigants any more, because those decisions arrive too late. Thus, effective judicial protection is at stake. On the other hand, public administrations have traditionally disposed of privileges, one of the most important of them being the so‐called executive character of administrative acts. The national debate on the equilibrium between both principles—effective judicial protection and the executive character of administrative acts—needs to be exported to the Community law context. Community law should therefore learn from national experiences, as other legal orders, such as the Spanish one, have done, turning to comparative law in order to improve their own model of interim protection.     

Taking Capital Punishment Seriously

Although Asia is the most important region of the world when it comes to capital punishment, it is also one of the most understudied. This article identifies four research questions that deserve attention from students and scholars who believe taking capital punishment seriously requires studying Asia seriously too. What are the empirical contours of capital punishment in contemporary Asia? What are the histories of capital punishment in Asia? Can Western theories of capital punishment explain patterns and changes in Asia? And what is the future of capital punishment in Asia? If researchers take the trouble to explore these questions, the death penalty will not only become an interesting window into law and society in Asia, but Asia will prove to be an instructive window into the death penalty—the gravest real-life problem in the law.     

New Nonlinear Approaches for the Adjustment and Updating of a SAM

Many structural relationships should be taken into account in any reasonable adjustment and updating process. These structural relationships are mainly represented by ratios of different types, such as technical coefficients or the proportion of the cell value in relation to its row or column total. We believe that in many cases (either because of lack of information or when the time elapsed for the estimation of a social accounting matrix is not long enough to allow for any significant structural change) the updating process should try to minimize the rela- tive deviation of the new coefficients from the initial ones in a homogeneous way. This homogeneity would mean that the magnitude of this relative deviation is similar among the elements of each row or column, therefore avoiding the concentration of the changes in particular cells of the SAM. In this work, we propose some new adjustment criteria in order to obtain a more homogeneous relative adjustment of the structural coefficients. These criteria combine the adjustment method proposed by Matuszewski et al. (1964) with other deviation functions. Each of the adjustment criteria proposed leads to a nonlinear optimization problem which is reformulated as a linear program. We test the usefulness of this proposal by comparing its results with the ones obtained by more standard approaches and we are able to show that these approaches tend to produce a less homogeneous pattern of coefficient adjustment, under certain circumstances, than the ones we put forward.     

Allele frequencies of nine STR loci—D16S539, D7S820, D13S317, CSF1PO, TPOX, TH01, F13A01, FESFPS and vWA—in the population from Alagoas, northeastern Brazil

The polymorphism of nine STR loci has been studied in a sample of 598 individuals from the population of Alagoas, Northeastern Brazil. Determination of the allele frequencies as well as of several commonly used statistics in forensic and paternity testing were defined. The most polymorphic loci were TH01 and D7S317. The exact test demonstrated that the nine loci analyzed in the population have no deviation from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium (P>0.05).