警察在干预自杀事件中的作用

自杀是一个严重的社会问题。面对当前日益严峻的自杀问题,警察作为维护国家安全、维护社会治安秩序、保护人民生命财产安全的重要力量,在多数情况下是自杀现场的第一处置人员。因此,正确认识自身在处理自杀事件中的角色,掌握恰当的干预自杀的方法与技巧,对于警察来说是极其重要的。     

理想图景与正义问题——《中国法学向何处去》读后

通过对中国法学自1978年以来26年间的这一个时代的批判,邓正来提出了一种以社会秩序的建构及其正当性为核心问题的中国法律哲学观,其任务是建构一种"中国法律理想图景".以"中国法学向何处去"为主题的系列论文,不仅强调了世界结构是这种法律哲学观的历史性条件,还隐含着建构"中国法律理想图景"必须考虑的三类正义问题.     

论"非羁押式强制措施"的刑期折抵——以权利保障为视角

我国的刑事法律仅规定"羁押"的日期应当在被告人被判处的自由刑中予以折抵,而将取保候审、监视居住这样的"非羁押式强制措施"限制人身自由的日期排除于折抵刑期之外.从刑事司法公正、被追诉人的权利保障及权利与义务的对等性三方面论述"非羁押式强制措施"应予折抵刑期的合理性和正当性,并提出具体的立法建议.     

Obtaining redress for abuse of office in Russia: The Soviet legacy and the long road to administrative justice

This article examines the options for redressing abuse of office available to citizens in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. I consider the courts, the procuracy, and the complaint mechanism as sites for citizens to lodge claims against abuse of office in late-Soviet and post-Soviet times. After the collapse of the Soviet system there was an attempt to overcome the Soviet legacy, to strengthen legal institutions and establish administrative justice. Analysis of Soviet and post-Soviet normative documents and statistical data allows us to argue that opportunities for Russian citizens to combat service crimes in the courts have improved substantially. However, the system for coping with abuse of office remains imperfect, and retains features of the Soviet legacy despite vague legislation about administrative justice and dual ways of coping with abuse through legal and quasi-legal mechanisms. The re-establishment of the complaint mechanism in the conditions of contemporary Russia exacerbates this imperfection. Overall, the complaint mechanism occupies a significant place in people's options for making claims against officials, especially claims against high-ranking officials.     

On the political and democratic preconditions of equal recognition

Alan Patten’s Equal Recognition is a compelling justification of a liberal, procedural conception of recognition. This conception is built upon a convincing conception of moral equality, but it does not offer a full theoretical discussion of recognition. I argue that the liberal recognition provided by Patten is too formal and narrow to address all relevant issues regarding conflicts of recognition in democratic societies. In particular, it does not consider the political and democratic preconditions that should be granted to minority groups or immigrants in order to provide them fair opportunities to effectively (and not only formally) reach equal recognition.     

Intervention Theatre: performance,authenticity and expert knowledge in politicians’ travel to post-/conflict spaces

ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of official travel activities by politicians to post-/conflict spaces in German foreign policymaking. Starting from the observation that official travel justifications stress the value of authentic insights and unfiltered information, while journeys in practice are meticulously planned and staged, it asks what kind of knowing is possible, how actors make sense of the staged nature of field trips, and how multiple performances create and/or undermine notions of authenticity and first-hand expertise. The article shows that official on-site visits are composed of multiple conscious performances by all actors involved, but that these performances do not undermine the notions of authenticity and expertise. On the contrary, knowledge authenticity—or truth claims on the basis of authentic insights—and related expert authority are produced through travel-as-performance. The emphasis policymakers put on on-site presence and (the performance of) localized knowledge contradicts intervention literature’s generalized finding of a prioritization of technocratic over localized knowledge. The article draws on politics and performance scholarship and authenticity theories in tourism studies to make sense of a wealth of empirical material on the claims, practice and functions of German MPs’ journeys to post-/conflict spaces as part of broader political struggles over policy knowledge.     

One measure cannot trump it all: lessons from NATO’s early burden-sharing debates

This paper calls for a qualitative turn in discussing NATO burden-sharing. The paper takes issue with the numerical burden-sharing narrative in NATO and identifies its two main problems. Despite being simple, the 2% defence spending pledge lacks other basic attributes of any contributory system: fairness and effectiveness. Drawing from concepts of distributive justice, the paper analyses NATO’s first burden-sharing debates and demonstrates that due to their qualitatively different capabilities, the allies agreed on an egalitarian ability-to-pay distributive justice. Furthermore, it shows that the allies refrained from implementing fairness in terms of a one-size-fits-all formula, since this simple numerical approach could not produce fair and effective burden-sharing at the same time. Rather, they developed a dynamic framework for optimal sharing. These formative burden-sharing debates provide valuable lessons learned for the current build-up of NATO’s posture: less focused on formal sharing, more concerned with strategic outputs.     

The Victims’ Directive and What Victims Want From Restorative Justice

Following fierce campaigning by victims’ groups, the European Commission has entered into a process of legislative and policy reforms with the aim of repositioning the victim in criminal proceedings. By November 2015, member states will need to have demonstrated that they have modified their domestic laws to give effect to the Directive 2012/29/EU establishing minimum standards on the rights, support, and protection of victims of crime. For the first time, restorative justice is explicitly regulated at EU legal level, as the Directive aims to establish a baseline for its safe implementation across member states. With this EU-wide policy backdrop and using original data, the article posits evidence-based recommendations for the implementation of the Directive. The research was carried out in 2013–14 as part of the “Restorative Justice in Europe” project co-financed by the European Commission. The research took place in the United Kingdom and combined desk research and qualitative research strategies with victims, while it triangulated its findings with follow-up surveys with offenders and professionals.     

The identity of ‘the other’ for sexual violence victims: is there anything new in sexual violence prosecutions before the International Criminal Court?

Despite the spectacular development in the field of international criminal law, critical feminism stresses the narrow scope of the sex and gender crimes in the Rome Statute establishing the first permanent International Criminal Court. The current international criminal law discourse, as expressed by recent case law, is geared towards the protection of certain groups targeted on account of their distinctiveness within the framework of a conflict situation, and gender is not recognized as one of these group identities. The question whether international criminal law on sexual violence applies only to inter-group conflicts brings to the fore an uneasy likelihood of exclusion of some recently emergent situations where identities of the conflicting parties transcend a particular ethnicity or nationality, and where victims of sexual violence belong to the same group as their perpetrators. The article argues that, rather than the Rome Statute or newly introduced rules and regulations, a significant obstacle in developing gender justice is the narrow interpretation of sexual violence to inter-group hostilities.