Religion, Risk and Legal Culture: Balancing Human Rights against a ‘War on Terror’

Author(s):  
William L. Miller

‘Legal cultures’ in European countries have been under the twin pressures of moves towards ‘European and international standards’ on the one hand, and the ‘war on terror’ on the other—the first exerting pressure in a liberal direction, the second exerting pressure in an authoritarian direction. Data from focus groups and interviews with the general public and Muslim minorities provide insight into how the public in general, and Muslims in particular, have responded to the pressure of terrorism and the ‘war on terror’ in a spectrum of five countries ranging across Europe. Muslims have very different attitudes towards paying the price of the so-called ‘war on terror’, but our study suggests that attitudes towards that price are directly influenced more by ‘risk assessment’ than by religion.

2012 ◽  
pp. 461-474
Author(s):  
Angelica Bonfanti

Pursuant to their WTO commitments, Member States shall liberalize trade in goods, services and intellectual property rights, without any exceptions apart from those expressly provided by the covered agreements. Among them is the public morals exception. This paper aims to assess whether the implementation of the WTO commitments may have the effect of removing the filters imposed by some States through censorship, and whether the liberalization of international trade may contextually function as a means for enhancing freedom of expression. In so doing the paper examines how the public morals exception should be interpreted when censorship measures, on the one hand, and human rights protection, on the other, are at stake.


Author(s):  
J. H. Gittus ◽  
M. R. Hayns

SynopsisRisk involves consideration both of the consequences of accidents and the frequency with which the accidents occur. Indeed formally risk is equal to the product of frequency and consequences. The important question of the perception of risk by the public and by the professional is first addressed. Two tenets are proposed as being a suitable summary of the public requirement:1. If it can happen, then it must not matter.2. If it matters, then it must not happen.A mathematical interpretation is placed upon these tenets and is shown to be consistent with various professional safety targets. The tenets do not indicate what numerical values for risk would be acceptable to the public but they do show how the consequences of accidents should diminish as the frequency or likelihood of a particular accident increases. It is argued that the best way of determining what level of risk the public accepts is to be guided by statistics for man-caused accidents. These, it transpires, pose risks which are considerably greater than those implied, for example, by the professional targets for nuclear reactors. The risk posed to the public by two energy installations is summarised. The one installation, situated on Canvey Island, exports energy in the form of gas, some of which (methane) is pumped into a national gas grid. The other installation, the Sizewell “B” Pressurised Water Reactor nuclear power station has not yet been constructed, but a comprehensive risk assessment has been undertaken, the results of which are summarised. The two installations are comparable in the sense that each exports a power of the order of a million kilowatts (in the form of gas in the one case and electricity in the other). Both have been the subject of Public Inquiries. The risks posed by the Canvey installations are accepted, since they only constitute a small fraction of the risks which the public run in any case during the course of their everyday lives. The predicted risks for the PWR are smaller still. The form taken by the risks posed by both installations corresponds broadly with the two tenets. That is to say the greater the consequences the lower should be the frequency of a particular accident.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 103-115
Author(s):  
Olga Vinogradova

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, real GDP of Russia is expected to fall by 4-6%. The banking industry provides liquidity to Russian business in times of hardship. On the one hand, the Bank of Russia facilitates lending opportunities for the business and subsidizes the mortgage interest rate for banks and the public in order to prevent business bankruptcies. And on the other hand, it provides liquidity to banks via REPO (repurchase agreement) auctions. Currently, there is not enough demand for REPO transactions from banks, but it might increase after other measures of support begin to be canceled. The article studies the effectiveness of current forbearance measures for Russian banks and provides an insight into the future development of the banking industry after the COVID-19 pandemic.


Author(s):  
Ljubica Spaskovska

The last chapter looks at the ways the Youth League initially sought to reform and re-invent its role and mission and was later subsumed in and divided by the wider Yugoslav political debates and developments in the country. The proposed statute changes which came out of the public debate organised by the SSOJ in 1989 reflected both the gap between the Slovenian, on the one hand, and the Serbian, the Montenegrin and the Army youth leagues, on the other, but also shed light on a spectrum of shared visions and values which existed among the other branches. The chapter reflects upon the (lack of) consensus about the dilemma of how to modernise Yugoslav society and the sphere of institutional youth politics and culture and shows how by the end of the decade the consensus on change and reform and the discourse of ‘pluralism of self-managing interests’ was almost entirely replaced by a new discourse of human rights and liberal values which foreshadowed the ‘exit from socialism’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-412
Author(s):  
Umut Korkut ◽  
Andrea Terlizzi ◽  
Daniel Gyollai

Abstract This article analyses the humanitarianism and securitisation nexus in effect to migration controls in Italy and Hungary. Noteworthy for our purposes is how the humanitarian discourse is undervalued as the EU border states emphasise either full securitisation or else securitisation as a condition for humanitarianism when it comes to border management and refugee protection measures. Our goal is to trace, on the one hand, how politicians conceptualise humanitarianism for the self and for the extension of the self; and, on the other, how they subscribe to humanitarianism for the other as long as the other follows what the self demands. Reflecting on the institutional and discursive nexus of humanitarianism and securitization in effect to migration controls, we trace political narratives of Europeanisation geared to affect the public. We refer to how securitisation challenges humanitarianism while undervaluing human rights for the other and foregrounding human rights for the self.


2020 ◽  
Vol 151 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-126
Author(s):  
Kathryn Crim
Keyword(s):  
The One ◽  

Karl Marx’s comments on silk manufacture in “The Working Day” chapter of Capital, volume 1, demonstrate how “quality”—usually associated with “use value”—has been mobilized by capital to naturalize industrialized labor. Putting his insight into conversation with a recent multimedia poetic project, Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems (2016–17), this essay examines the homology between, on the one hand, poetry’s avowed task of fitting form to content and, on the other, the ideology of labor that fits specific bodies to certain materials and tasks.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-291
Author(s):  
Manuel A. Vasquez ◽  
Anna L. Peterson

In this article, we explore the debates surrounding the proposed canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken defender of human rights and the poor during the civil war in El Salvador, who was assassinated in March 1980 by paramilitary death squads while saying Mass. More specifically, we examine the tension between, on the one hand, local and popular understandings of Romero’s life and legacy and, on the other hand, transnational and institutional interpretations. We argue that the reluctance of the Vatican to advance Romero’s canonization process has to do with the need to domesticate and “privatize” his image. This depoliticization of Romero’s work and teachings is a part of a larger agenda of neo-Romanization, an attempt by the Holy See to redeploy a post-colonial and transnational Catholic regime in the face of the crisis of modernity and the advent of postmodern relativism. This redeployment is based on the control of local religious expressions, particularly those that advocate for a more participatory church, which have proliferated with contemporary globalization


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marine Vekua

The main goal of this research is to determine whether the journalism education of the leading media schools inGeorgia is adequate to modern media market’s demands and challenges. The right answer to this main questionwas found after analyzing Georgian media market’s demands, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, differentaspects of journalism education in Georgia: the historical background, development trends, evaluation ofeducational programs and curricula designs, reflection of international standards in teaching methods, studyingand working conditions.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick

Against the background of the trend of Islamizing human rights on the one hand, as well as increasing skepticism about the compatibility of Islam and human rights on the other, I intend to analyze the potential of Islamic ethics to meet the requirements for vitalizing the idea of human rights. I will argue that the compatibility of Islam and human rights cannot be determined merely on the basis of comparing the specific content of the Islamic moral code(s) with the rights stipulated in the International Bill of Rights, but by scanning (different conceptions of) Islamic ethics for the two indispensable formal prerequisites of any human rights conception: the principle of universalism (i.e., normative equality) and individualism (i.e., the individual enjoyment of rights). In contrast to many contemporary (political) attempts to reconcile Islam and human rights due to urgent (global) societal needs, this contribution is solely committed to philosophical reasoning. Its guiding questions are “What are the conditions for deriving both universalism and individualism from Islamic ethics?” and “What axiological axioms have to be faded out or reorganized hierarchically in return?”


APRIA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
José Teunissen

In the last few years, it has often been said that the current fashion system is outdated, still operating by a twentieth-century model that celebrates the individualism of the 'star designer'. In I- D, Sarah Mower recently stated that for the last twenty years, fashion has been at a cocktail party and has completely lost any connection with the public and daily life. On the one hand, designers and big brands experience the enormous pressure to produce new collections at an ever higher pace, leaving less room for reflection, contemplation, and innovation. On the other hand, there is the continuous race to produce at even lower costs and implement more rapid life cycles, resulting in disastrous consequences for society and the environment.


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