The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child is among the most comprehensive of all international human rights covenants. It was adopted by the U.N. GeneralAssembly in 1989, following a decade of discussion and debate relating to its content, and has now been ratified by every nation in the world except the United States. This level of endorsement and broad acceptance of its provisions establishes the articles of the CRC as global norms for the treatment of (...) children and standards for the dignity and respect that is due them. The CRC provides a global agenda for children and childhood and has been described as “an authoritative, universal definition of the rights of children and young people” (Hammarberg.. (shrink)
One such term is “the international community.†The literal sense is reasonably clear; the U.N. GeneralAssembly, or a substantial majority of it, is a fair first approximation. But the term is regularly used in a technical sense to describe the United States joined by some allies and clients. (Henceforth, I will use the term “Intcom,†in this technical sense.) Accordingly, it is a logical impossibility for the United States to defy the international community. These conventions are illustrated (...) well enough by cases of current concern. (shrink)
A series of individual devotional meditations by the former President of the U.N. GeneralAssembly. The current world crisis is more fundamentally spiritual than political, economic, or military, and hence a crisis to which the Christian gospel has relevance.--J. H. H.
The business leaders' particular concern was the U.N. GeneralAssembly session this September, where the Palestinian Authority is planning to call for recognition of a Palestinian state.
In the summer of 1979, a group of experts on law, medicine, and ethics assembled in Siracusa, Sicily, under the auspices of the International Commission of Jurists and the International Institute of Higher Studies in Criminal Science, to draft guidelines on the rights of persons with mental illness. Sitting across the table from me was a quiet, proud man of distinctive intelligence, William J. Curran, Frances Glessner Lee Professor of Legal Medicine at Harvard University. Professor Curran was one of the (...) principal drafters of those guidelines. Many years later in 1991, after several subsequent re-drafts by United Nations Rapporteur Erica-Irene Daes, the text was adopted by the U.N. GeneralAssembly as the Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and for the Improvement of Mental Health Care. This was the kind of remarkable achievement in the field of law and medicine that Professor Curran repeated throughout his distinguished career. (shrink)
Nations are at once associating and dividing peoples. The fact that peoples are living on the same territory but above all that they have cultural, social and religious traditions constitutes factors of union; but at the same time they see in the traditions of other nations a threat to their identity and survival. The consequence is that many small nations are crushed in the present world, a fact that endangers the human progress of many. John Paul II has raised this (...) problem before the GeneralAssembly of the U.N. and asked for the spread of a philosophy of tolerance and the creation of ad hoc structures at the national and international levels. The present article goes back to the beginning of the question and underlines some of the conditions for solving it. (shrink)
The U.S. relations to Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are since the end of the Cold War revolving around achieving a state of nuclear free Korean peninsula. As non-proliferation is a long term of American foreign policy, relations to North Korea could be categorized primarily under this umbrella. However, the issue of North Korean political system also plays role as it belongs to the other important, more normative category of U.S. foreign policy which is the protection of human rights and (...) spreading of democracy and liberal values. In addition, the North Korean issue influences U.S. relations and interests in broader region of Northeast Asia, its bilateral alliances with South Korea and Japan as well as sensitive and complex relations to People’s Republic of China. As the current administration of president Donald J. Trump published its National security strategy and was fully occupied with the situation on Korean peninsula in its first year, the aim of the paper is to analyse the changes in evolution of U.S. North Korean policy under last three administrations, look at the different strategies adopted in order to achieve the same aim, the denuclearization. The paper does not provide a thorough analysis, neither looks at all documents adopted and presented in the U.S. or within the U.N. It more focuses on the general principles of particular strategies, most significant events in mutual relations as recorded by involved governmental officials and also weaknesses of these strategies as none has achieved desirable result. In conclusion, several options for current administration are drawn, however all of them require significant compromises and could be accompanied with series of setbacks dangerous for regional stability and U.S. position in the region. (shrink)
The reality, however, is very different. Power is increasingly concentrated in unaccountable institutions, and the rich and powerful are no more willing to submit themselves to market disciplines or popular pressures than they ever have been in the past. Let's begin with human rights, because they are the easiest place to start: they are actually codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed unanimously by the United Nations GeneralAssembly in December 1948. In the United States, there (...) has been a good deal of very impressive rhetoric about how we stand for the Universal Declaration, and how we defend the principle of universality against backward, third-world peoples who plead cultural relativism. (shrink)
The Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state is the most famous example of a state with multiparticle entanglement. In this article we describe a group theoretic framework we have been developing for understanding the entanglement in general states of two or more quantum particles. As far as entanglement is concerned, two states of n spin-1/2 particles are equivalent if they are on the same orbit of the group of local rotations (U(2)n). We consider both pure and mixed states and calculate the number of (...) independent parameters needed to describe such states up to this equivalence. We describe how the entanglement of states in a given equivalence class may be characterized by the stability group of the action of the group of local rotations on any of the states in the class. We also show how to calculate invariants under the group of local actions for both pure and mixed states. In the case of mixed states we are able to explicitly exhibit sets of invariants which allow one to determine whether two generic mixed states are equivalent up to local unitary transformations. (shrink)
Relative to the abundance of literature devoted to the legal significance of UN authorisation, little has been written about whether the UN’s failure to sanction an intervention can ever make it immoral. This is the question that I take up here. I argue that UN authorisation (or lack thereof) can have some indirect bearing on the moral status of a humanitarian intervention. That is, it can affect whether an intervention satisfies other widely accepted justifying conditions, such as proportionality, “internal” legitimacy, (...) and likelihood of success. The more interesting question, however, is whether the UN’s failure to provide a mandate can make a humanitarian operation unjust independently of these other familiar considerations. Is a proportional, internally legitimate humanitarian intervention, with a just cause and strong prospect of success, still morally unacceptable if it is not approved by the United Nations Security Council? This is the question that I turn to in the second half of the paper. (shrink)
I n t r o d u c t i o n This volume contains papers on general linguistics written by Hungarian scholars. The term 'general linguistics' is not easy to define. Is a paper on Hungarian at the same time a study in general linguistics? Certainly not.
Suvremene bioetičke rasprave reaktualizirale su pitanje smjene epoha. Bioetika je nastala upravo kao moralna i civilizacijska reakcija u novostvorenoj povijesnoj situaciji. U tom kontekstu, potrebno je analizirati, s jedne strane, promišljanje prijeloma epoha i predviđanje »novog srednjovjekovlja« u djelu ruskog filozofa N. A. Berdjajeva te, s druge strane, pojavu bioetike. Hoćemo li zaista zakoračiti u novu epohu, kakva će ona biti te što ćemo i u kojem obliku prenijeti iz sadašnje epohe – najviše ovisi o tome kakvog će duha biti (...) čovjek. Stanje čovjekova duha možemo iščitati iz čovjekova odnosa prema tehnici, odnosno s obzirom na snažnu interaktivnu ulogu tehnike u našem životu. Kako je pitanje odnosa čovjeka i stroja jedno od ključnih bioetičkih pitanja, problem tehnike nužno je analizirati iz perspektive Berdjajevljeva odnosa čovjeka i stroja, ali i u sklopu Heideggerova promišljanja biti tehnike. Jednako kao i Berdjajev, Heidegger smatra da ne treba poricati tehniku, već tražiti izmjenu uloge tehnike i podlaganje čovjekovu duhu na kojem leži zadatak dokučiti ono spasonosno. Duh današnjeg čovjeka duh je bogolikog čovjeka koji, uz pomoć uznapredovalog stroja, izaziva prirodu , ali taj isti stroj, koji njemu služi kao sredstvo, toliko je uznapredovao da je sada u mogućnosti izazivati njega. U tom je kontekstu nužno okrenuti se bioetici. Upravo je bioetika sa svojom pluriperspektivnom metodologijom zaslužna za pokušaj okupljanja različitih sustava vrijednosti kako bi se zajedno usmjerio sadašnji sustav vrijednosti i zaštitio budući, ali i budućnost uopće. No, hoće li bioetika ostati samo na razini rijetkog pozitivnog primjera u nizu negativnih znakova dolaska nove epohe ili ćemo ozbiljno shvatiti princip odgovornosti što nas dovodi na prag bioetičke epohe te hoće li promjena duha sadašnjeg čovjeka, prema kojem nas vodi bioetičko promišljanje, doista dovesti do podvrgavanja tehnike čovjekovom duhu – ostaju otvorena pitanja.The problem of the turn of epochs is debated once more nowadays. Contemporary discussions on bioethics once again pose this very question. Bioethics as such was created as a moral and civilisational response to the new historical situation. In that context one needs to analyze, on the one hand, both the problem of the turn of epochs and the prediction of the new Middle Ages proposed by Russian philosopher N. A. Berdyayev and, on the other hand, the emergence of bioethics which raised the question of the turn of epochs for the second time. Will we really reach the new epoch, what will it look like, what and in which form shall we transmit from the present epoch? These questions ultimately depend on the state of the human spirit which can be deciphered from man’s relation to technology, taking into account the strong interactive role which technology plays in our daily lives. Bearing in mind that the relation between the man and the machine is one of the crucial bioethical issues, this question of technology should be analyzed from Berdyayev’s relation between the man and the machine, but also within Heidegger’s analysis of the essence of technology. Similarly to Berdyayev, Heidegger states that technology must not be contradicted or denied, but rather, changed in a way to serve the human spirit – which is entrusted with the task of understanding the saving elements. The spirit of the modern man is the spirit of the divine-like creature . It is the spirit of a man who, with the help of a developed machine can challenge nature , but this same machine, which serves him as a means, has evolved to the point that it can challenge the man. In this context it seems essential to turn to bioethics. It is precisely bioethics which, thanks to its pluri-perspective methodology, takes credit for covering different systems of values to direct the present system in the right way and protect the future system and the future in general. However, the questions remain whether bioethics will stay the only positive example among the multitude of negative signs and predictions, whether it will lead us to a new, yet unknown, epoch and whether we will take seriously the principle of responsibility which leads us to the threshold of the bioethical epoch and whether the change in the spirit of the present-day man, triggered by the bioethical thinking, can change technology to make it subordinate to the human spirit. (shrink)
One of the most vexed issues in income tax policy is how family or household status should affect tax liability. This article suggests a general approach for thinking about the treatment of households in the fiscal system generally under a utilitarian social welfare norm. The United States fiscal rules considered include those not only in the income tax but under Social Security, Medicare, and safety net programs. Among the recommendations that emerge from the analysis are (1) recognizing couples for (...) tax and transfer purposes without limitation to those that are married, (2) reducing the fiscal system's current distributional bias in favor of one-earner couples and its discouraging work by secondary earners, and (3) providing significantly more favorable treatment of households with children than of those with similar resources but no or fewer children, without limiting this more favorable treatment, in the manner of present U.S. law, to relatively poor households. Footnotesa * I am grateful to Lily Batchelder and Louis Kaplow for comments on an earlier draft. (shrink)
Abstract In the last 20 years the ruthless competition for natural resources, political instability, armed conflicts, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have paved the way for private military and security companies (PMSCs) to operate in areas which were until recently the preserve of the state. PMSCs, less regulated than the toy industry, commit grave human rights violations with impunity. The United Nations has elaborated an international binding instrument to regulate their activities but the opposition of the U.S., U.K., and (...) other Western governments?and from PMSCs, which prefer self-regulation?have prevented any advancement. (shrink)
The N ational Assembly held in the Frankfurt Paulskirche in 1848, which opened w ith high hopes for the unification o f Germ any on parliam entary constitutional principles, was left to die a year later, in the telling phrase o f D onoso Cortes, ‘like a street w om an in the gu tter’. In the period o f reaction that followed, during w hich the Paulskirche convention came to be described as the ‘parliam ent o f pro (...) fessors’, one o f its m em bers, Georg G ottfried Gervinus, was accused, in a trial for high treason, o f attem pting to prove the historical inevitability o f the supersession o f monarchical forms by republican forms. This was Gervinus’s second experience as a professorial m artyr. In 1837 he had been one o f the professors at the U niversity o f G ottingen, the ‘Gottingen Seven’, w ho protested the revocation o f the H anoverian constitution. For this he had been banished and given three days to leave the kingdom. The lesson he, and m any other liberal thinkers, learned from these experiences was that the Germ an middle classes were incapable o f perform ing the historical role assigned to them; they lacked the political will to establish a republican order. (shrink)
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted on December 13, 2006, and entered into force on May 3, 2008, constitutes a key landmark in the emerging field of global health law and a critical milestone in the development of international law on the rights of persons with disabilities. At the time of its adoption, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights heralded the CRPD as a rejection of the understanding of persons with disabilities “as objects (...) of charity, medical treatment and social protection” and an embrace of disabled people as “subjects of rights.”The text of the Convention itself, and the highly participatory process by which it was negotiated, signal a definitive break from previous international approaches that focused on disability within a medical model framework. In contrast to traditional approaches, the CRPD embraces a social model of disability, concentrating the disability experience not in individual deficiency, but in the socially constructed environment and the barriers that impede the participation of persons with disabilities in society. (shrink)
Chairman Hua emphasized in his speech last year at the opening ceremony of the Central Party School that: "Chairman Mao instructed us over and over that ‘the integration of theory and practice is the most fundamental principle of Marxism.’ Chairman Mao fought all his life against the evil work style of boasting and of separating theory from practice. … Political swindlers such as Lin Biao, Chen Boda, and the "gang of four" have messed up many basic theoretical issues and damaged (...) our Party's good learning style. We must make a tremendous effort to correct that.". (shrink)
What is the criterion of truth? This is a question that was resolved long ago by the revolutionary teachers of the proletariat. But as a result of damage done by the "Gang of Four" and a mass of distorted propaganda in the media under their control, it has become muddled beyond compare in recent years. In order to deepen the criticism of the "Gang of Four" and eradicate the remnants of their poison and influence, it is very important to clear (...) this up and sort it out. (shrink)
This article reviews the contributions of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to the progressive development of both international human rights law and global health law and governance. It provides a summary of the global situation of persons with disabilities and outlines the progressive development of international disability standards, noting the salience of the shift from a medical model of disability to a rights-based social model reflected in the CRPD. Thereafter, the article considers the Convention's structure (...) and substantive content, and then analyzes in specific detail the particular contributions of the Convention to health and human rights law and global health governance. It concludes with an exploration of the potential implications of the CRPD's innovations for some of the most pressing issues in global health governance, including the Convention's contributions to the principle of participation in decision-making. (shrink)
Towards the end of the first world war, a “principle of self-determination” was proposed as a foundation for international order. In the words of its chief advocate, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, it specified that the “settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of political relationship” is to be made “upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage (...) of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for sake of its own exterior influence or mastery” (Wilson 1927, 233). The principle played a significant role in deliberations about lands newly liberated by the first world war, and, in the aftermath of the second, it was enshrined within Article 1 of the United Nations Charter which called upon member nations “to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.” Its status within international law was further heightened by the 1966 Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, whose first articles specify the following: “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development.” In 1970, GeneralAssembly Resolution 2625 added that, “every state has the duty to respect this right in accordance with the provision of the Charter.”. (shrink)
Rymarz, Richard An important theme in the contemporary disposition of the church toward the wider culture is the need for a new evangelisation. The thinking was given great impetus by St John Paul II. Whilst a bold strategy, there is little doubt that any attempt to evangelise contemporary secular cultures also presents significant challenges. The church, understood however as an agent of evangelisation not by choice but by its very nature, must carry on its Pauline mission with an eye to (...) more long-term goals and not be discouraged by the task ahead of it. The commitment to engage the wider culture needs to be consistent, realising that the task ahead is difficult but that its difficulty can be mitigated by intelligence and resourcefulness. As Lonergan remarked: 'Ours is a new age, and enormous tasks lie ahead. But we shall be all the more likely to surmount them, if we take the trouble to understand what is going forward and why'. (shrink)
Should the U.N. Security Council use its coercive powers to bring about effective climate change mitigation? This question remains relevant considering the inadequate mitigation goals set by the signatories of the Paris Climate Accord and the ramifications of U.S. withdrawal from the Accord. This paper argues that the option of the unsc coercing climate change mitigation through military action, or the threat thereof, is morally flawed and ultimately antithetical to effectively addressing climate change. This assessment is based significantly on the (...) application of jus ad bellum principles of just war theory, incorporating some feminist critiques of this theory. (shrink)
We have synthesized a 582,970-base pair Mycoplasma genitalium genome. This synthetic genome, named M. genitalium JCVI-1.0, contains all the genes of wild-type M. genitalium G37 except MG408, which was disrupted by an antibiotic marker to block pathogenicity and to allow for selection. To identify the genome as synthetic, we inserted "watermarks" at intergenic sites known to tolerate transposon insertions. Overlapping "cassettes" of 5 to 7 kilobases (kb), assembled from chemically synthesized oligonucleotides, were joined by in vitro recombination to produce intermediate (...) assemblies of approximately 24 kb, 72 kb ("1/8 genome"), and 144 kb ("1/4 genome"), which were all cloned as bacterial artificial chromosomes in Escherichia coli. Most of these intermediate clones were sequenced, and clones of all four 1/4 genomes with the correct sequence were identified. The complete synthetic genome was assembled by transformation-associated recombination cloning in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, then isolated and sequenced. A clone with the correct sequence was identified. The methods described here will be generally useful for constructing large DNA molecules from chemically synthesized pieces and also from combinations of natural and synthetic DNA segments. 10.1126/science.1151721. (shrink)
