EU Criminal Law and Electronic Surveillance: The Pegasus System and Legal Challenges It Poses

The introduction of modern forms of communication, such as encrypted messengers or VoIP telephony, has forced law enforcement agencies to use new technologies to carry out surveillance of people facing criminal proceedings. Rather than relying on the interception of communications during transmission, modern surveillance systems are often based on breaking or bypassing the security features of a user’s mobile device – making it possible to conduct various forms of surveillance that include audio and video recording. One example of such a system is Pegasus – a tool that was initially used to pursue national security objectives but is now increasingly applied in criminal surveillance. The introduction of technical innovations in criminal surveillance must include an examination of their compatibility with legal constraints laid down to protect the individual against the risk of arbitrariness and abuse of power. The effectiveness of surveillance should never be the sole determinant for tasks undertaken by public authorities. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the implementation of modern surveillance measures such as Pegasus must also include a review of existing legal regulations to ensure that the use of these products’ extended capabilities is under proper control and complies with the rule of law.

Global Intellectual Property Protection and New Constitutionalism

The constitutionalisation of intellectual property law is often framed as a benign and progressive integration of intellectual property with fundamental rights. Yet this is not a full or even an adequate picture of the ongoing constitutionalisation processes affecting IP. This collection of essays, written by international experts and covering a range of different areas of intellectual property law, takes a broader approach to the process. Drawing on constitutional theory, and particularly on ideas of ‘new constitutionalism’, the chapters engage with the complex array of contemporary legal constraints on intellectual property law-making. Such constraints arising in international intellectual property law, human rights law (including human rights protection for right-holders), investment treaties, and forms of private ordering.

The State of Democracy in Asia and the Pacific 2021: Old Resilience, New Challenges

The Covid-19 pandemic initially broke out in the Asia and the Pacific region in late 2019, with the first cases in Wuhan, China. The pandemic has served as a magnifier of pre-existing democratic strengths and weaknesses within governing systems around Asia and the Pacific. In the majority of cases, the region’s hybrid and authoritarian regimes tightened their grip on society in response to the pandemic. Quality of democracy continued to decline in number of region’s democracies. Despite these challenges, in its response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Asia and the Pacific region has demonstrated impressive democratic resilience and innovation. In contrast to other regions, several countries already had legal and institutional frameworks in place tailored to dealing with global health emergencies and were able to activate these rapidly. Importantly, experiences by several Asian countries have highlighted the fact that such a crisis can be contained while respecting legal constraints and coordinating across an array of elected and unelected institutions. All democracies needed to balance between individual and collective rights. This Report provides lessons and recommendations that governments, political and civic actors, and international democracy assistance providers should consider in order to counter the concerning trends in the erosion of democracy, and to foster its resilience and deepening.

Un homme est mort. Escritura fílmica de la Historia a través del cine de intervención social

El fascinante legado del cineasta René Vautier (1928-2015) choca con la escasez de referencias académicas a su obra, a pesar de su inmenso valor histórico. Vautier es un exponente clave para ilustrar las fisuras del paradigma historiográfico actual, que excluye voces y opiniones cuyo rol es instrumental para reescribir la Historia. Llevó siempre al límite su pasión por la realidad y la verdad histórica, lo que derivó en una interminable lista de problemas institucionales. A través del caso de estudio del impacto social y artístico de su documental Un homme est mort, esta investigación indaga en las razones por las que hay artistas que han sido irrelevantes para la academia francesa, al mismo tiempo que los poderes establecidos perseguían su obra, a través de peligrosas medidas que atacaban directamente a la libertad de expresión, como restricciones legales, censura o recortes económicos. Estas políticas restrictivas derivaron en un empeoramiento sustancial de las condiciones de rodaje, en la autocensura y, al quedar fuera del circuito de exhibición oficial, redujeron el impacto potencial en las audiencias. Además, al no haber existido oficialmente, estas películas no optan de manera automática a los programas de conservación pública. En definitiva, se produjo una alteración del marco conceptual que debería haberse generado a largo plazo en las relaciones entre arte y sociedad, entregándonos un imaginario cultural construido de espaldas a una parte esencial de la Historia (del arte). The captivating artistic legacy of René Vautier (1928-2015) clashes with the lack of research on the impact of his extraordinary career, given the notable value of his work. Vautier is a key example that illustrates the cracks in the schemas of traditional historiography, unable to recognise the plurality of voices and opinions that should be taken into account to rewrite History. The taste for reality and historical truth so taken to the extreme in his films resulted in a large list of institutional problems. Through the analysis of the social and artistic impact of one of his very first films, Un homme est mort, we will understand why some artists were considered secondary or irrelevant by the French academia. They were also pursued by the Establishment with extremely dangerous measures in regard to freedom of expression such as legal constraints, censorship or financial cuts. These restrictive policies first led to lower quality filming material, smaller crews, fewer projects or self-censorship; but it also implied an alternative exhibition circuit which diminished the scope of audiences. As they never existed officially, these films do not benefit from public conservation programs automatically. In addition, it altered the conceptual leap with long-term implications for art and society since our common cultural imaginary has been built without a significant piece of art history.

Application of Gold Nanoparticle-Based Materials in Cancer Therapy and Diagnostics

Several metal nanoparticles have been developed for medical application. While all have their benefits, gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are ideal in cancer therapy and diagnosis as they are chemically inert and minimally toxic. Several studies have shown the potential of AuNPs in the therapeutic field, as photosensitizing agents in sonochemical and photothermal therapy and as drug delivery, as well as in diagnostics and theranostics. Although there is a significant number of reviews on the application of AuNPs in cancer medicine, there is no comprehensive review on their application both in therapy and diagnostics. Therefore, considering the high number of studies on AuNPs’ applications, this review summarizes data on the application of AuNPs in cancer therapy and diagnostics. In addition, we looked at the influence of AuNPs’ shape and size on their biological properties. We also present the potential use of hybrid materials based on AuNPs in sonochemical and photothermal therapy and the possibility of their use in diagnostics. Despite their potential, the use of AuNPs and derivatives in cancer medicine still has some limitations. In this review, we provide an overview of the biological, physicochemical, and legal constraints on using AuNPs in cancer medicine.

Aberrant Behaviors of Heavy Vehicle Drivers Carrying Hazardous Materials at an International Border in Iran

Background: Most road collisions are directly attributed to human factors. Since aberrant behaviors of drivers play a pivotal role in the occurrence of road accidents, it is worth studying driver behaviors in a riskier situation of carrying hazardous materials. This study aimed to evaluate the behaviors of the drivers carrying hazardous materials at the international border of Bashmaq-Marivan, Iran. Methods: This descriptive-analytical study was conducted on 250 Iranian drivers carrying hazardous materials at the international border of Bashmaq-Marivan. The participants were included taking a census. Data were collected using the Manchester Driver Behavior Questionnaire (MDBQ). Data analysis was performed by SPSS v 16. The p-value of less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: The drivers carrying inflammable liquids had more lapses compared to those carrying inflammable gases. The drivers with less driving experience and higher driving speed had more errors, as well as aggressive and ordinary violations. Higher rates of aggressive violations and errors were detected in young drivers, while the drivers with higher rates of accidents had comparatively more lapses and ordinary violation. Conclusion: Considering the effects of age, driving experience, high speed, and accident experience on aberrant behaviors in driving, it is recommended that public training targeting specific groups be implemented regarding the legal constraints of driving.

A Video Summarization Approach to Speed-up the Analysis of Child Sexual Exploitation Material

Identifying key content from a video is essential for many security applications such as motion/action detection, person re-identification and recognition. Moreover, summarizing the key information from Child Sexual Exploitation Materials, especially videos, which mainly contain distinctive scenes including people’s faces is crucial to speed-up the investigation of Law Enforcement Agencies. In this paper, we present a video summarization strategy that combines perceptual hashing and face detection algorithms to keep the most relevant frames of a video containing people’s faces that may correspond to victims or offenders. Due to legal constraints to access Child Sexual Abuse datasets, we evaluated the performance of the proposed strategy during the detection of adult pornography content with the NDPI-800 dataset. Also, we assessed the capability of our strategy to create video summaries preserving frames with distinctive faces from the original video using ten additional short videos manually labeled. Results showed that our approach can detect pornography content with an accuracy of 84.15% at a speed of 8.05 ms/frame making this appropriate for realtime applications.

Study of Oenological Fermentation: Which Strategy and Which Tools?

Wine fermentation is a specific and complex research subject and its control is essential to ensure full process completion while improving wine quality. It displays several specificities, in particular, (i) musts with a very high sugar content, low pH, and some limiting nutrients, as well as a great variability in must composition according to the year, grape variety, and so on; (ii) atypical fermentation conditions with non-isothermal temperature profiles, a quasi-anaerobiosis and legal constraints with a limited and predefined list of authorized operations. New challenges have emerged, related to the increasing diversity of commercially available yeast strains; the fluctuating composition of musts, particularly owing to climate change; and sustainability, which has become a key issue. This paper synthesizes approaches implemented to address all these issues. It details the example of our laboratory that, for many years, has been developing an integrated approach to study yeast diversity, understand their metabolism, and develop new fermentation control strategies. This approach requires the development of specific fermentation devices to study yeast metabolism in a controlled environment that mimics practical conditions and to develop original fermentation control strategies. All these tools are described here, together with their role in the overall scientific strategy and complementary approaches in the literature.

How fiduciary duty law incentivises investors to manage sustainability risks

The compatibility of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) risk management with the investment management requirements under the investors’ fiduciary duties (FD) figures among the key questions in today’s context of a rapid growth of sustainable investment strategies. Despite some legal developments, namely, in Europe, investors still have no clear answer to this question, which leaves them inert in the face of these new, unconventional types of risk. In our research, we explore the recent advancements in the EU and the US legal practice with the objective to establish to what extent the FD actually requires investors to consider ESG risks in their investment management decisions. Through analysis, we define a theoretical decision-making pattern for ESG risk management set by the current FD law as applied to investors and identify: 1) ESG risk materiality and 2) the effectiveness of ESG risk hedging as its fundamental elements. Then, we design a theoretical representation of ESG risk materiality under the FD legal constraints and identify that the current FD law binds investors to assimilate ESG risks to financial risks; thus, their management is required only if they are financially material for investments. We show that this principle equally applies to long-term ESG risks (like climate change); investors are incentivised to manage only those that are sufficiently financially material considering the applied hypothetical discount rate. Also, through the case study of a recent US ERISA ESOP lawsuit, we reveal that risk aversion towards probability to successfully hedge material ESG risks could impede efficient risk management by incentivising investors not to hedge a material ESG risk, i.e. to breach their FD.