A Veiled Threat: Belcacemi and Oussar v Belgium

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-200
Author(s):  
Jasper Doomen

The freedom of the individual can easily come into conflict with his or her obligation to integrate in society. The case of Belcacemi and Oussar v Belgium provides a good example. It is evident that some restrictions of citizens’ freedoms must be accepted for a state to function and, more basically, persist; as a consequence, it is acceptable that certain demands, incorporated in criminal law, are made of citizens. The issue of the extent to which such restrictions are justified has increasingly become a topic of discussion. The present case raises a number of important questions with respect to the right to wear a full-face veil in public if the societal norm is that the face should be visible, the most salient of which are whether women should be ‘protected’ from unequal treatment against their will and to what extent society may impose values on the individual. I will argue that Belgian law places unwarranted restrictions on citizens and that the values behind it testify to an outlook that is difficult to reconcile with the freedom of conscience and religion.

ICL Journal ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasper Doomen

Abstract The freedom of the individual can easily come into conflict with his or her obligation to integrate in society. The present case provides a good example. That some restrictions of citizens’ freedoms must be accepted for a state to function and, more basically, persist is evident and that, as a consequence, certain demands, incorporated in criminal law, are made from citizens is acceptable. The issue to what extent such restrictions are justified has increasingly become a topic of discussion. The present case raises a number of important questions with respect to the right to wear a full-face veil in public if the societal norm is that the face should be visible, the most salient of which are whether women should be ‘protected’ from unequal treatment against their will and to what extent society may impose values on the individual. I will argue that the Belgian law places unwarranted restrictions on citizens and that the values behind it testify to an outlook that is difficult to reconcile with the freedom of conscience and religion.


Author(s):  
I. Mytrofanov

The article states that today the issues of the role (purpose) of criminal law, the structure of criminal law knowledge remain debatable. And at this time, questions arise: whose interests are protected by criminal law, is it able to ensure social justice, including the proportionality of the responsibility of the individual and the state for criminally illegal actions? The purpose of the article is to comprehend the problems of criminal law knowledge about the phenomena that shape the purpose of criminal law as a fair regulator of public relations, aimed primarily at restoring social justice for the victim, suspect (accused), society and the state, the proportionality of punishment and states for criminally illegal acts. The concepts of “crime” and “punishment” are discussed in science. As a result, there is no increase in knowledge, but an increase in its volume due to new definitions of existing criminal law phenomena. It is stated that the science of criminal law has not been able to explain the need for the concept of criminal law, as the role and name of this area is leveled to the framework terminology, which currently contains the categories of crime and punishment. Sometimes it is not even unreasonable to think that criminal law as an independent and meaningful concept does not exist or has not yet appeared. There was a custom to characterize this right as something derived from the main and most important branches of law, the criminal law of the rules of subsidiary and ancillary nature. Scholars do not consider criminal law, for example, as the right to self-defense. Although the right to self-defense is paramount and must first be guaranteed to a person who is almost always left alone with the offender, it is the least represented in law, developed in practice and available to criminal law subjects. Today, for example, there are no clear rules for the necessary protection of property rights or human freedoms. It is concluded that the science of criminal law should develop knowledge that will reveal not only the content of the subject of this branch of law, but will focus it on new properties to determine the illegality of acts and their consequences, exclude the possibility of using its means by legal entities against each other.


1983 ◽  
Vol 27 (8) ◽  
pp. 733-737 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Konz ◽  
Sudad Al-Wahab ◽  
Helen Gough

Experiment 1 investigated oscillating vs fixed fans. Eight males were exposed to seven conditions in each of three temperatures (25.6, 27.8, and 30 C (78, 82, 86 F); all at 50% rh). The seven conditions were: still air, velocity of 0.4, 0.8 and 1.2 m/s from a fixed fan, and mean velocity of 0.3, 0.5, and 0.7 m/s from an oscillating fan. For equal comfort, for every increase of mean air velocity of 0.1 m/s (between 0.4 and 1.2 m/s), environmental temperature can be increased by .27 C for the oscillating fan and by 0.40 C for the fixed fan. At the same mean velocity, oscillating fans are voted more comfortable than fixed fans. Experiment 2 investigated the effect of a small directional axial-flow desk fan on comfort at 26.1 C (79 F). The 16 females tested fan off vs a 1.5 m/s flow on all six combinations of: torso vs face impact of air stream, and impact from straight ahead, 30° to the right, and 60° to the right. Angle was not significant. The use of the fan was equivalent to a decrease of air temperature of 0.63 C (i.e., 0.1 m/s = 0.042 C). Thus the personal desk fan can be used as a “fine tuner” in an acceptable environment. Those wearing glasses preferred air on the face, those wearing contacts preferred the torso; those wearing neither were divided. Thus fan placement should be left to the individual.


One of the important components of an intelligent Human computer Interface system is accurate classification of the various affect states. Such interface systems are however plagued by a recurring problem of image occlusion. The challenge hence is to be able to classify the various affect states accurately from whatever portions of the face are available to the system. This paper attempts to investigate if there are segments within the facial region which carry sufficient information about the affect states. In this paper we have used two pre-defined Convolutional Neural networks (CNN). We have implemented a ResNet-50 network and a modified version of ResNet-50 which has a Squeeze and Excitation network connected to ResNet-50. This is called SE-ResNet-50. We use these two networks to classify seven basic affect states of Angry, Contempt, Disgust, Fear, Happy, Sad and Surprise from various segments of the face. We partition the face into four regions with each region comprising of only 50% of the original data. The results obtained are compared with that obtained using the full face. The validation accuracy values are obtained for full face as well as the four segments of the face. The paper also calculates precision and recall for each partitioned area for each of the affect states using the two networks. Our evaluation shows that both, ResNet-50 as well as SE-ResNet-50 are successful in accurately classifying all the 7 affect state from the Right segment, Left segment Lower segment and Upper segment of the face. While ResNet-50 performs marginally better compared to the SE-ResNet-50 in identifying the various affect states form the right, left and lower segments of the face, SE-ResNet-50 performs better in identifying the affect states from the upper segment of the face. We can thus conclude that right segment, left segment, lower segment and upper segments of the face contain sufficient information to correctly classify the seven affect states. The experimental results presented in this paper show that pre-defined Convolutional Neural Networks gives us very high accuracy, precision and recall values and hence can be used to accurately classify affect states even when there are occlusions present in the image and only certain portions of the face are available for analysis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dongya Wu ◽  
Xin Li ◽  
Jun Feng

Brain connectivity plays an important role in determining the brain region’s function. Previous researchers proposed that the brain region’s function is characterized by that region’s input and output connectivity profiles. Following this proposal, numerous studies have investigated the relationship between connectivity and function. However, this proposal only utilizes direct connectivity profiles and thus is deficient in explaining individual differences in the brain region’s function. To overcome this problem, we proposed that a brain region’s function is characterized by that region’s multi-hops connectivity profile. To test this proposal, we used multi-hops functional connectivity to predict the individual face activation of the right fusiform face area (rFFA) via a multi-layer graph neural network and showed that the prediction performance is essentially improved. Results also indicated that the two-layer graph neural network is the best in characterizing rFFA’s face activation and revealed a hierarchical network for the face processing of rFFA.


Author(s):  
A. Haddadi ◽  
F. Ravaz

Under criminal law, euthanasia can have two distinct qualifications: that of homicide in the event that the act of directly killing another person is characterized, or that of assisting a third party in the suicide. These two qualifications are applicable on the condition that the agent — the author of the act of causing death — is not the one who went through it. In fact, selfeuthanasia is nothing more than suicide.In addition to euthanasia imposed to a third party (such as in the case of Malevre, nurse from Mantes-la-Jolie, tried in 2003), the euthanasia requested and subscribed constitutes a complex legal question. Answering this question first involves specifying the position of contemporary criminal law in the face of suicide.In the event that suicide is only decriminalized, in fact, the author of the act — regardless of the outcome of his actions, who is himself the victim, cannot be prosecuted. Nor ultimately receive any condemnation.However, this lack of prosecution and conviction is by no means an endorsement of the act — suicide — by the law.Moreover, in the event that suicide is a right, it would then be necessary to agree that any candidate for this act can request assistance in the accomplishment of his death. Given these two opposing approaches, imposed on us the question of whether there is a right to die.Although the euthanasia imposed is unequivocally under ordinary criminal law, the euthanasia requested and granted is not based on any rights. To date, there is no right to approve a death request, but on the other hand, it does allow it to be respected and to some extent promotes its approach with dignity. This work will focus on two central points which are the possibility that euthanasia is a homicide under common law (I) and the attitude of French law concerning the right to death (II).


2020 ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
David Cabrelli

This chapter examines the current terrain of criminal law as a technique of labour market regulation. It identifies a range of possible interactions between the criminal law and civil law in the legal enforcement of labour standards. Sometimes fundamental labour rights, such as the right not to be unfairly dismissed or the right not to be discriminated against, are protected exclusively through a ‘private’ enforcement model at the initiative of the individual right-holder. Sometimes there will be exclusive enforcement through the criminal law with no private right of civil action, as under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. Finally, there may be mixed enforcement regimes where there is a combination of criminal and civil measures linked to specific statutory rights, as with the enforcement of the National Minimum Wage Act 1998.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-56
Author(s):  
T. V. Klenova

The article is devoted to the institution of criminal liability for attacks on the honor and dignity of the individual. The article, using the historical method, examines the stages of development of this institution and the features of protecting the honor and dignity of the individual from the point of view of the values of a modern democratic state. The author analyses the impact of explicit and implicit criminal policy objectives on the ways to protect the honor and dignity of the individual. Particular attention is paid to the criminalization and decriminalization of libel and slander. The research is aimed at identifying the problems of targeting in changes in the institution of criminal liability for attacks on honor and dignity, when the relevant criminal law norms are replaced by administrative law norms. The author seeks to depoliticize the protection of the personal right to honor and dignity on the basis of the principle of equality of citizens before the law. The current Russian criminal legislation is mainly aimed at protecting the honor and dignity of persons in connection with their social accessories. Within the protective concept of criminal law, the author of the article justifies the conclusion that the right of anyone who has suffered from slander or insult to achieve the truth and state censure of the perpetrator is guaranteed. Such a view will also be interesting to researchers of the criminal process.


2020 ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Mykhailo Babii

The author examines the process of establishment of Christian understanding of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion and tolerance. In doing so, he draws on the achievements of the Greek and Greek-Roman traditions of interpreting freedom of conscience. The time of late antiquity accounts for the time of organizational establishment and strengthening of the new religion - Christianity. Describing this period, the author notes the presence of a variety of cults and sects in which foreign gods (in particular, Egyptian and Iranian) were worshiped. In this situation, individuals were free to choose their faith and satisfy their personal need for spiritual connection with God or gods. Against the background of the fall of the authority of ancient religions, the emergence and strengthening of the Emperor cult Christians seek recognition by the authorities, the equation of rights. After all, Christianity becomes a state religion. At this time, a new religious paradigm was emerging that could be a factor in the multi-ethnic, multi-tribal, or multilingual unity of the Roman Empire. The tendency of growing interest in monotheistic, in particular Jewish, religion became noticeable: the idea of one and all-pervading God was opposed to ancient polytheism. The article reveals the peculiarities of the Christian understanding of freedom, which underlies the inner personal spiritual freedom bestowed by God. Christianity the first formulated the idea of freedom of religious conscience as freedom to choose religion. In addition to the individual dimension of freedom of conscience, Christianity has actualized the community's right to freedom of religion, freedom of outside religion, and worship. At the same time, it theoretically substantiated these rights and practically required its observance by the authorities. The legitimacy of the affirmation of the principle of freedom of religious conscience is the Milan edict of 313, which opened the union of the Christian church and the state, as well as the constitutionalization of the Christian church as a state church. This provoked persecution on religious grounds and the struggle of different movements, both within Christianity and beyond, for the right to freedom of religion, the free expression of their religious beliefs. Christianity significantly influenced the evolution of ideas about freedom of conscience, becoming the semantic nucleus of its modern understanding. However, early Christianity proved to be a force that, in the struggle for its claim, was repeatedly harassed, but also resorted to persecution of dissenters, showing intolerance to other worldviews and religions.


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