(Re)centering street harassment – an appraisal of safe cities global initiative in Delhi,India

Abstract

In 2012, New Delhi (India) was catapulted into the global limelight for the brutal gang rape of a 23-year old woman travelling in a bus. This wasn’t the first time that sexual violence had been perpetrated on the streets of Delhi and nor would it be the last. Yet this universal fact of everyday violence in public spaces particularly streets, though acknowledged by activists and feminists, has been examined minimally in academic scholarship. Further, even though the United Nations has been instrumental in foregrounding gender-based violence as a critical human rights issue, it has only recently turned its attention to street harassment through its ‘Safe Cities Global Initiative’. Therefore, in this paper, we trace how a routine but understudied form of violence becomes central to United Nations’ agenda to eliminate violence against women. By specifically, analysing the Delhi Safe Cities programme as a case study, our second contribution lies in examining the adequacy of the contemporary Safe Cities framework as a model for addressing sexual violence in public space. We conclude the paper by offering critical conceptual and methodological recommendations to further strengthen the framework.     

The origins and politics,campaigns and demands by the international fisher peoples’ movement: an Indigenous perspective

Abstract

This reflective contribution discusses the intersection of Indigenous and Small Scale Fisheries’ (SSF) issues, and how the international SSF movement has a critical role in the broader struggle for the convergence of social justice regarding the environment, food and lifeways. I explore some of the political tensions around Indigenous and SSF struggles against global neoliberalisation of land and water resources, some of the successes and challenges of the international SSF movement, and future considerations for academic/activist ‘decolonising’ work.     

Crises and unpredictability in developing countries

Developing countries have suffered most of the financial crises in the context of the process of economic and financial globalisation. Both current and previous crises have revealed that unpredictability is a feature common to all the episodes which occurred during the process of globalisation. Although certain alarms went off, any of those external financial crises were actually predicted by the advanced methods in use for prediction and country risk analysis. Taking into consideration the information above, the aim of this paper is to check the ability to foresee external financial crises in developing countries of both the country risk index published by Euromoney and the Credit Ratings variable included therein. We have focused on the external financial crises that took place between 1992 and 2011, that is, in a full globalisation era. The results are negative. It appears that neither the index nor the sovereign ratings are able to reflect early enough the vulnerabilities that arise previously to the setting off the crisis episodes. This leads us to conclude that the existing models of country risk have limits. Thus, it would necessary to develop new instruments to measure this risk, considering uncertainty as an essential feature of the current economic and financial environment.     

Building the Rule of International Criminal Law: The Role of Judges and Prosecutors in the Apprehension of War Criminals

International criminal tribunals are weak institutions, especially since they do not have their own police forces to execute arrest warrants. Understandably then, much of the existing literature has focused exclusively on pressure from major powers and on changing domestic politics to explain the apprehension of suspected war criminals. In contrast, this article turns attention back to the tribunals themselves. I propose three ways in which the activities of international criminal tribunals impact compliance with arrest warrants: through the selection of individuals to indict, demonstrated leniency on some suspects and outreach to domestic legal professionals. Using a duration model that accounts for sample selection and data collected on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, I test these theories alongside other existing explanations. I find that court activities can have an independent effect on the successful implementation of international criminal law.

The quest for inclusion and citizenship in Ghana: challenges and prospects

Ghana's tortuous journey to democracy received a major boost in the year 2006 with the enactments of two human-rights-related pieces of legislation. In this article the author contends, on the one hand, that the recent enactments of an amendment to the law on representation of the people and the persons with disability law in Ghana constituted a noteworthy landmark in the search for inclusive citizenship. On the other hand, the relation between society and the political authority during the processes of the enactments highlighted characteristics of a post-colonial African state. The author explores the antagonisms that surrounded the enactments of these laws. The article concludes that although the Ghanaian experience represents a new wave of re-thinking of rights in Africa, it also underscores the deep-seated issues of contestation and negotiations that unavoidably accompany the expansion of democracy and extension of rights to the excluded and the marginalized.     

Five Challenges to Legalizing Economic and Social Rights

In recent years, dozens of human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) across the globe have begun to advocate for economic and social rights, which represents a significant expansion of the human rights movement. This article investigates a central strategy that NGOs have pursued to realize these rights: legalization. Legalization involves specifying rights as valid legal rules and enforcing them through judicial or quasi-judicial processes. After documenting some of the progress made toward legalization, the article analyzes five unique challenges involved in legalizing economic and social rights. It is important to identify these challenges because they must be overcome if the human rights movement wishes to refute the notion that economic and social rights are inherently non-justiciable (and therefore, to some, invalid as rights). These challenges also point to the possibility that legalization is not the only, or even the best, strategic pathway to realize economic and social rights effectively.

Asylum,welfare and civil society: a case study in civil repair

This paper examines a civil society challenge to UK government legislation withdrawing welfare support from asylum seekers who do not claim on entry to the country. Drawing on the work of Habermas and Alexander, it considers the role of the courts as a deliberative space and elaborates the scope for civil repair in the case of a group rendered marginal by the law. In so doing, it also suggests how links could be made with the broadened conception of citizenship proposed by Isin and Turner.     

我国农地产权分析及制度重构

我国农地产权制度由于产权界定不合理和农民土地产权的缺失,导致违法征地现象严重.土地交易成本昂贵,农民的合法权益得不到保护.文章引入产权理论,特别是从农地的使用权和处置权方面,论述了农地问题造成的原因,提出合理界定农地产权,建立允许农地承包经营权流转的机制,让农民分享产权增值的成果.     

当前金融犯罪的主要特点与对策分析

当前经济犯罪的危害越来越严重,在经济犯罪中又以金融犯罪危害更为突出。目前金融犯罪大案、要案大幅度上升,作案手段呈智能化、多样化、隐蔽化,危害重大,严重影响了社会稳定,给社会造成了不可估量的经济损失,更对社会经济秩序乃至整个社会秩序产生了严重破坏。因此,制定科学、有效及切实可行的打击对策是当前公安工作的当务之急。     

试论我国体育冠名权及其法律规制

2008年北京奥运成功举办,国内体育热潮空前高涨;赛后“鸟巢”推出PPP融资模式（Private-Public Partnership）转让冠名权,学界再度关注体育冠名权之法律规制。在体育法学中,冠名权、体育冠名权是一个层级清晰的属种概念链条。而从整个法律体系或权利体系的维度来看,体育冠名权仍是一个较新型的权利。在实践中,权利定性的模糊亦成为体育产业开发和应用的瓶颈,并导致近年来我国体育市场大量冠名纠纷因缺乏充分的法律依据而无法得到有效调整。