Community-based forensic child and adolescent mental health services in England,Scotland and Wales: a national mapping exercise

Aim: We sought to ascertain the current nature of specialist community mental health provision for young people presenting with risk of harm to others or involvement with the youth justice system in England, Wales and Scotland. Methods: Questionnaire-based survey. Results: Fifty-five services were contacted, 48 responded and 35 of these were found to be providing some form of community mental health provision to high-risk young people. Thirteen services provided comprehensive community forensic child and adolescent mental health (FCAMH) services, whilst the remainder offered more ad hoc clinical input. Amongst the comprehensive FCAMH services, staffing, function, commissioning arrangements and population served varied widely. Conclusions: There is patchy geographical provision of comprehensive community FCAMH services across England, Scotland and Wales with heterogeneous commissioning arrangements, staffing and function. Development of a national commissioning strategy for community FCAMH services is required to ensure that the complex needs of high-risk young people are adequately addressed.     

Promoting empowerment? The World Bank's Village Investment Project in Kyrgyzstan

This article examines the extent to which the World Bank's community-driven Village Investment Project empowered people to influence the choice of local investments (micro-projects) and to exact accountability from their leaders. It is based on qualitative interviews and group discussions in 16 rural communities. The research demonstrates that the project provided an effective mechanism for responsive infrastructure delivery to address local priority needs. However, it did not improve accountability either within or outside the micro-project boundaries. The project's bottom-up development model was not by itself sufficient to enable people to exercise power over local government officials and informal leaders in the absence of effective horizontal accountability institutions within the state.     

China’s Peripheral Security Environment: Analytical Framework, Indicator System and Evaluation *

Since the end of the Cold War, the West and China have had diverging interpretations of “security environment.” China tends to define security from the perspective of development, while the West’s definition concerns external threats to security. In Chinese circumstances, the understanding of security environment has evolved from simply military to a more comprehensive one covering military, politics, economics and public opinions. This article develops a theoretical framework to analyze China’s peripheral security environment in the new era, and constructs an indicator system to evaluate it. The indicator system consists of the political security environment, military security environment, development security environment, public opinion security environment, and China’s periphery strategy, drawing upon the theories of Realism, Liberal Institutionalism and Constructivism. Furthermore, this article analyzes indicators through dimensionless methods based on the databases of the World Bank, the “Foreign Relations” database of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University and the People’s Daily, and compares three peripheral security environment scenarios. The result shows that in a general sense, China’s peripheral security environment has improved over the past decades. However, the situations after the 2008 global financial crisis have diverged, and different theoretical perspectives provide very different images. It seems that China has entered a very different environment, and for stable security environment in the future, China needs to cooperate with neighboring countries.     

The Politics of Jurisdiction

Jurisdiction is a central concept in the framing of the legal world but it has received short shrift in mainstream legal theory. This article examines the prevailing conceptual forms of jurisdiction in order to retrieve space for the political. The study of jurisdiction is also the study of the political community that it invokes and authorises. The first part of the article examines the three forms that jurisdiction takes in contemporary scholarship (territory, community, governance) to show that each form overlooks some implication of the political community that is tethered to jurisdiction. The second part of the article flips the inquiry to demonstrate the oversight of jurisdiction in theories of sovereign exception. The emergent understanding of jurisdiction as political provides an anchor for the study of jurisdiction going forward and highlights the potential role for jurisdictional arrangements in contemporary public law and constitutional law settings.     

我国城市社区直接选举探究

社区居委会直接选举作为扩大基层民主的有效形式,已经成为全面推进城市基层民主的突破口,受到社会各界越来越多的关注。本文选取社区居委会直接选举中的两个环节进行分析,梳理了社区选举过程中的程序规范及存在问题,以期进一步推进城市社区居委会直接选举的程序化、公平化。     

城市社区治理中软法作用研究

城市社区治理是我国社会基层治理重要组成部分。基层治理现代化和法治化离不开硬法与软法合力的作用。我国软法理论与实践起步较晚,软法在基层治理中独特作用没有得到充分重视和释放。充分认识软法的内涵、特征及相关理论基础,重新评估软法在基层自治中的特殊作用即完善社区治理法律体系、弥补社区治理硬法不足、有效保障社区自治实现。针对我国目前城市社区治理软法存在的主要问题,提出健全软法规范体系、协调软法与硬法关系、强化软法实施保障机制等建议,从而充分发挥软法在城市社区治理应有的作用。     

世界银行“办理破产”指标与我国的应对思路——以“破产框架力度指数”为视角

世界银行建立了包括抵押品止赎制度、绝对顺位规则、债权人控制权制度以及破产程序的时间、花费、持续经营指数在内的一系列衡量指标来判断一个经济体"办理破产"能力的强弱。我国尽管在2019年初通过发布司法解释的方式补充和完善了相关评价指标,但因出台时间仓促,加之几项重要的制度性规则仍停留在《企业破产法》的立法层面,导致我国仍有多项失分。我国的应对措施应当包括:当前在司法解释层面尝试债权人会议推荐管理人的做法,重视债权人会议对管理人工作绩效的评价;未来在破产法修改层面落实债权人会议对管理人的直接选任权。     

社区服务刑刍议

在我国,社区服务刑作为一种全新的刑罚方式,可以避免传统监禁刑和罚金刑的一些弊端,可以达到犯罪人和社区的双赢效果,体现了轻缓化、非刑罚化的刑罚改革趋势,是完善我国刑罚结构的需要,是我国刑事司法和社区矫正工作的现实要求,也是我国社会发展的必然要求。在我国《刑法》中引入社区服务刑这一刑罚方式具有现实意义,但如何进行立法,有哪些现实困难以及如何解决,增设社区服务刑会有怎样的影响等,都有必要进行探讨。     

弱势群体对社会稳定的影响

我国目前弱势群体在承受“弱势”所带来的种种伤害的同时,正以一种极具破坏性的 方式表达为“强势”,并迫使社会在承受和消弭其影响时支付日益高昂的成本。这种社会机器内部 的撞击,已经严重地影响了整体运行的安全性和稳定性,而确立公平则是解决问题的前提和基础。