International law has come to play an expanded role in the use of force. This expanded role has elevated evolving humanitarian law concepts over the long-standing preference for sovereignty, and has contributed to the state losing its uncontested control over the direction of war. The “state therefore has an interest in reappropriating the control and direction of war.” As Hew Strachan notes, “that is the purpose of strategy.” Arguments about international law are part of diplomacy, and “diplomatic arguments are a means to an end. They are part of a…
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THE RIGHT TO A FAIR TRIAL IN INTERNATIONAL LAW: UNIVERSAL AND REGIONAL INSTRUMENT
All general universal and regional human rights instruments guarantee the right to a fair hearing in judicial proceedings (criminal, civil, disciplinary and administrative matters) before an independent and impartial court or tribunal. A treaty is an international written agreement concluded between States and/or intergovernmental organisations and governed by international law. The name the parties give to a treaty is of no relevance here (Covenant, Convention, Treaty, Protocol, etc.); what matters is the content and the language of the treaty, as well as the parties’ intention to be bound by it.…
Read MoreNEEDFULNESS OF VOTER FRAUD DEFINITION: VOTER FRAUD AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIDENCE : PART I
Conceptual clarity is important in evaluating evidence of fraud. We begin with a discussion of what voter fraud is and what it is not. The first problem in defining voter fraud is that as a crime, it defies precise legal meaning. In fact, some states do not criminalize ‘voter fraud.’ However, they all criminalize acts that are commonly lumped together under the term, such as illegal voting, providing false information to register to vote, and multiple voting. The legal incoherence contributes to popular misunderstandings. We need a basic definition of…
Read MoreGLOBAL “ONE HEALTH” LAW AND GLOBAL HEALTH LAW AS INTERNATIONAL PEACE AND SECURITY LAW
If enterprises and foundations represent new actors and sources of global health law, and international adjudicatory bodies represent the future of how global health law is applied, then animals, both domesticated and wild, represent the expansion of global health law’s subjects. Human health, narrowly defined, prevailed throughout most of the twentieth century. In some ways, the comprehensive approaches to animal, human, and plant life should have been obvious and inevitable from the earliest days of World Health Organization (WHO). Its most ambitious, early eradication effort focused on malaria. This effort…
Read MoreBETWEEN ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES RELATED TO ATMOSPHERIC CO2 AND UNSUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: THE SYMPTOMATIC CASE OF ATOLLS
The importance of considering the pressures of climate change and ocean acidification in a broader context of anthropogenic pressures. The aim is to show how future threats initially take root in the current issues of “unsustainable development”, that is to say, non-viable development, illustrated in particular by the strong deterioration of coastal ecosystems and uncontrolled urbanization. In this case, climate change and ocean acidification play the role in the acceleration of pressure on the living conditions of insular communities. The case of the coral archipelago of Kiribati (Central Pacific) illustrates…
Read MoreDIGITAL SILK ROUTE: PROMOTING DIGITAL AUTHORITARIANISM METHODS AND PROJECTS
China is providing different governments, with little protection of human rights, with telecommunications technology, facial-recognition hardware and analytical tools to process data. These technologies are then combined, in order to create advanced surveillance systems that can be used for policing, such as identifying political and social threats. But it also serves repressive purposes and can therefore strengthen authoritarianism. China’s export of these systems started to increase in 2012, and since 2016 it has increased even more rapidly. Many of these technological systems are on the border between public security, control…
Read MoreWAR CRIMES INTERNATIONAL ARMED CONFLICT AND INTERNALLY DISPLACED PEOPLE
After the end of the Second World War, the allies entered into two agreements. These were the Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis (London Agreement) and Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg Charter). When the Nuremberg Trials started, the accused, all Nazi Party members who actively participated in the Nazi Regime’s activities in various capacities, were charged on four counts. These were:- a. Conspiracy to commit aggression. b. Commission of aggression. c. Crimes in the conduct of warfare. d. Crimes…
Read MorePROTECTED AREAS AND COMMUNITY LAND RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
Human actions to conserve the Earth’s biodiversity have a deep history, in which the main actors are Indigenous Peoples and local communities who have stewarded lands and resources across generations as part of their cultures and ways of life. This local conservation, which is inseparable from customary lands and resources, is distinct from the formal national and international conservation enterprise that took shape in the context of nineteenth-century colonialism, but has been greatly affected by it. Expropriation and exclusion Conservation protected areas began to be established in an era of…
Read MoreTHE APPLICATION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN RECRUITMENT
The application of Artificial Intelligence(AI) in Human Resources Management (HRM) was one of the most remarkable trends among recruitment professionals from 2018 onwards. The researcher defines information extraction as a process where information and knowledge can be gathered by scanning a text. Especially in recruitment of new employees, AI can be used by information extraction techniques that can make the process of resume scanning and extraction of relevant information automated. Since the number of job applications have increased and can even overwhelm Human Resources (HR) departments, automated systems that ranks…
Read MoreMAJOR COMPONENTS OF SOIL HEALTH AND SOIL HEALTH DYNAMICS
While different authors have suggested many different ways to systematize soil health measures, they all share a common framework. Soil health can be parsed into three primary components : physical characteristics, chemical characteristics, and biological characteristics. Within each of these three components – physical, chemical, and biological – exist many possible soil health characteristics and indicators. The three major components of soil health: physical, chemical, and biological. For each, we identify what we argue are the most economically meaningful characteristics in the component. By economically meaningful, we mean the characteristics…
Read MoreTHE POWAR OF PROXIES : WHY NON STATE SPONSORS USE LOCAL MILITARY SURROGATES
The use of proxies in warfare is typically understood as a state sponsor’s reliance on military surrogates that are outside the purview of the state’s conventional armed or security forces, and that offer services to their benefactors in exchange for tangible material support. A long-standing feature in the history of armed conflict , the reliance on surrogates has become particularly endemic in the post–World War II era, with important implications for international security. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing “global war on terror,” the use of…
Read MoreTHE KEY ROLE OF STAKEHOLDERS AND EXPERTS IN SPACE AND GOVERNANCE
Institutional design includes constitutional-level rules that specify the participants, how authority is distributed, and how rules can be made, or what Hart would call “secondary rules.” Central to polycentric governance is users’ self-organization or self-governance, i.e., that users organize themselves to address shared problems and interests. In self-governance, the users of the Common pool Resources (CPRs) (e.g., fishermen fishing from the same lake, farmers using the same water basin) themselves establish, modify, and possibly enforce the rules regulating the use and protection of a common resource. As Elinor Ostrom noted,…
Read MoreDIGITAL CYBER REVOLUTION: AUTHORITARIANISM, CYBER SOVEREIGNTY AND REASSERTION OF STATE CONTROL
International law has generally recognized that, “ sovereignty is perhaps the most fundamental [principle]. From [which] emerges, inter alia, notions of non-intervention; prescriptive, enforcement, and adjudicative jurisdiction; sovereign immunity; due diligence; and territorial integrity.” A sovereign state thus maintains the right “to conduct its affairs without outside interference. Between independent states , respect for territorial sovereignty is an essential foundation of international relations.” Extending this principal of independent sovereign control to the ephemeral territory of cyber space, Russia and China have actively advocated for cyber sovereignty—“the idea that states should…
Read MoreLEVERS TO IMPROVE INDOOR AIR QUALITY: BEST PUBLIC POLICIES/ PRACTICES AND INNOVATIVE INITIATIVES
A crucial lever is improving access to clean energy for Three billion people. Getting renewable energy on small local distribution grids will help people phase out fossil and polluting fuels. The Climate and Clean Air Coalition(CCAC) has worked with development banks and micro-finance institutions to develop programs to support impoverished communities and enable them to get access to renewable energy. One example is XacBank, in Mongolia. In this country, the smoke from coal and wood burning is a major contributor to black carbon and Particulate Matter (PM) 2.5 air pollution,…
Read MoreTHE AGE OF NEW WARS: THE USE OF CHILD SOLDIERS IN ARMED CONFLICTS
In history & current warring parties, political scientists counted a large number of wars and armed conflicts worldwide, almost all of them in developed countries &developing countries. Observers of these current ‘New wars’ or ‘complex political emergencies’ have noted that the main target of the war parties is the civilian population, and systematic atrocities, massacres and bombings are often applied as rational strategies within current warfare. Some believe in witnessing a qualitative change in the way wars are waged and organized violence is exerted; in other words, a transformation in…
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