《中华人民共和国仲裁法》修改暨中国仲裁协会章程起草研究工作座谈会综述

国务院法制办于2006年4月18~20日在厦门主持召开了《仲裁法》修改暨中国仲裁协会章程起草研究工作座谈会。出席会议的有国务院法制办领导以及全国十几家仲裁机构的主要负责人等。与会代表围绕此次会议的两个主要议题积极发言,献计献策,最终形成了一个面向全国仲裁机构征求意见的《仲裁法》修改草案,并且初步完成了中国仲裁协会章程的起草工作,为进一步征求各方意见并最终成立协会做好了准备。     

论“全国统一战线之模范”战动总会的典范意义

成立抗日民族统一战线组织第二战区民族革命战争战地总动员委员会,是中共中央为推动全国抗日民族统一战线的早日建立和巩固而实施的一项重大决策,也是配合八路军挺进山西,立足华北敌后,实践党的全面抗战路线的一项重大决策。战动总会在组织形式和抗日斗争中,都充分体现了党关于建立抗日民族统一战线的科学思想,并成为当时全国统一战线的一个典范。     

新时代的机构编制管理:战略定位、辩证关系与改革路径

机构编制管理关系到行政成本的高低和行政机构的效能。机构编制管理中的突出问题在于编制配置不科学、不合理,规范化和制度化建设相对滞后。新时代的机构编制管理需要站在治国理政和治理能力现代化的战略高度,平衡“管牢”与“管活”双重目标,处理好事业发展需要与总量控制、“条线”要求与编制管理整体、短期成效与长期成本、编制增加与编制减少、编制管理部门收紧与财政部门宽松之间的辩证关系。在此基础上,通过立法保障、全盘统筹、规划引领、观念更新、机制联动等多维度改革为国家治理能力现代化奠定坚实的组织基础。     

So Close,but so Far? The Davies Commission and the Contested Politics of UK Airport Expansion

Aviation expansion and the construction of a third runway at Heathrow airport is firmly back on the political agenda. Yet, the stark fact remains that a growing list of British governments has been unable to engineer a partial or temporary policy settlement in aviation. In exploring the challenges of reaching such a settlement, this article characterises the shifting and contested political and policy contexts of UK aviation. It begins by exploring the ‘wicked issue’ of aviation expansion before foregrounding how the politics of air travel is riven by competing policy frames, fragmented governance and the absence of gatekeepers. It argues that the Davies Commission and its efforts to remove aviation from the domain of partisan politics provided little more than a temporary respite for government. It thus concludes by questioning whether the May government's expansion proposals will succeed this time around, outlining how the contributions in this collection address the themes and issues of this overriding policy puzzle.     

On our terms! How domestic elites localised the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala

Abstract

In summer 2004, an UN-sponsored international rule of law commission based on an initiative of the Guatemalan human rights community was rejected by Guatemalan political elites. In 2007, a new version, the International Commission against Impunity (CICIG), was approved by the Guatemalan Congress and has since been active in the country, supporting the modernisation of the Guatemalan judicial system and the investigation and prosecution of criminal networks. The CICIG has been hailed as part of a new generation of rule of law promotion that addresses the problems of post-conflict states. How did this change in elite support come about? Neither increased pressure from the international community nor changes in the elite groups in power can fully explain this shift. Rather, Guatemalan elites actively reshaped the commission; in addition, the human rights community reframed it to better fit the risk perceptions of the general public.     

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.     

Absurd Asymmetry – a Comment on R v Cottrell and Fletcher1 and BM,KK and DP (Petitioners) v Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission2

This note examines two cases in which English and Scottish courts have insisted that the English and Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commissions adopt the same definition and approach as them to alleged ‘miscarriages of justice’ in order to reduce the number of potential referrals and increase finality, and to reduce the challenge posed by these Commissions to the courts' authority in the legal sphere. The authors consider whether the courts' approach is either necessary or appropriate.     

Agenda-setting under pressure: Does domestic politics influence the European Commission?

The European Union (EU) has become increasingly visible and contested over the past decades. Several studies have shown that domestic pressure has made the EU's ‘electorally connected’ institutions more responsive. Yet, we still know little about how politicisation has affected the Union's non-majoritarian institutions. We address this question by focusing on agenda-setting and ask whether and how domestic politics influences the prioritisation of legislative proposals by the European Commission. We argue that the Commission, as both a policy-seeker and a survival-driven bureaucracy, will respond to domestic issue salience and Euroscepticism, at party, mass and electoral level, through targeted performance and through aggregate restraint. Building on new data on the prioritisation of legislative proposals under the ordinary legislative procedure (1999–2019), our analysis shows that the Commission's choice to prioritise is responsive to the salience of policy issues for Europe's citizens. By contrast, our evidence suggests that governing parties’ issue salience does not drive, and Euroscepticism does not constrain, the Commission's priority-setting. Our findings contribute to the literature on multilevel politics, shedding new light on the strategic responses of non-majoritarian institutions to the domestic politicisation of ‘Europe’.     

The development language: BPL category and the poverty discourse in contemporary India

The paper highlights the complex relationship between development and language and argues that poverty as a condition of underdevelopment is materialized in representation. Instead of limiting the scope of the topic to the rhetorical aspects of development thought, it is proposed that development language produces a specific reality of poverty while writing about it. Using a post-structuralist framework and drawing from various Planning Commission reports on poverty lines, the paper goes on to implicate these reports in the production of authoritative knowledge and the elision of the poor. Through the identification of the cut-off line, which distinguishes the poor from the non-poor, these reports control our ways of knowing and suspend our ability to imagine poverty in any non-institutional manner. Such representation not only omits poor’s everyday experience and converts poverty as experience to poverty as knowledge, but also predicates its objectivity on such elision. The paper also highlights the slippages and contradictions in these reports, and shows how in the seeming inevitability of poverty knowledge, people find innovative ways to appropriate and disrupt it.