The WTO Legality of the EU's GSP+ Arrangement

In EC—Tariff Preferences, the Appellate Body held thatthe WTO Enabling Clause permitted developed countries to grantbetter tariff treatment to some developing countries than toothers, subject to certain conditions. It held further thatthese conditions were not met by the EU's so-called ‘drugsarrangement’, a system of additional preferences (normallyduty free treatment) for certain countries which the EU haddetermined were in need of special tariff preferences, thanksto their involvement in combating the production and traffickingof narcotics. In response to this ruling, when the EU renewedits GSP programme in 2005, it replaced its drugs arrangementand two similar, though less generous, labour and environmentarrangements with a new arrangement popularly known as the ‘GSP+arrangement’. Under this arrangement, additional tariffpreferences (normally duty free treatment), were made availableto developing countries committing to ratify and implement alist of human rights and good governance conventions. Accordingto the EU, the GSP+ arrangement complies with the AppellateBody's interpretation of the Enabling Clause. This article arguesthat it does not. This is primarily because of the substantivecriteria chosen by the EU to select GSP+ beneficiaries, whichdo not meet the Appellate Body's criteria for differential tarifftreatment of developing countries. Second, it is because theEU's requirement that would-be beneficiaries must have appliedby a certain date, replicates the problem of the ‘closedlist’ of beneficiaries that was fatal to the earlier incarnationof the EU's GSP program. The article concludes with some suggestionsfor designing a GSP+ arrangement more likely to meet the AppellateBody's conditions than the EU's present arrangement.     

Analysis of pathological and non-pathological human skeletal remains by FT-IR spectroscopy

In this study, we report the chemical analyses of various non-pathological, tuberculosis and syphilis infected bone samples from different burial environments by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), in the framework of a general study of diagenesis. Dating human skeletal remains is one of the most important and yet unreliable aspects of forensic anthropology. In this paper, a new method has been suggested, using the crystallinity index and carbonate-phosphate index as a means of distinction between recent and archaeological, anthropological bone samples. Pathological bone samples were analyzed with the same method to see if changes in crystallinity interfere with the process of dating.