By: Valerie Brankovic
The psychological challenges faced by families of the missing “undermine relationships among communities” and prevent the social fabric from healing for post-conflict states. This paper recommends that Kosovo authorities implement a two-pronged strategy to address the unique challenges posed by families’ ambiguous loss. First, Kosovo’s government should renew its recognition of the plight of families of the missing. Second, the government and civil society…
By: Valerie Brankovic
More than 25 years after the conclusion in 1999 of the war between Serbia and Kosovo, an estimated 1,595 people remain missing due to wartime violence and enforced disappearances. Most of the missing are ethnic Albanians, although ethnic Serbs and some from the minority Roma are also included in that figure. Kosovo’s missing persons problem is not unique: violent conflicts frequently involve disappearances of individuals living in the impacted regions.
By: Caitlin Parets, Scarlett Del Giudice Boyer, & Jenik Radon
Lawyers around the world are bound by codes of ethics designed to protect the legal profession and the individuals it serves, but lawyers need a Hippocratic Oath. Rooted in antiquity and still professed today by medical practitioners, modern iterations of the Hippocratic Oath include promises not only to use one’s medical knowledge to the best of one’s ability but also to “not use [one’s] medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties.” [. . .] Lawyers would benefit from a similar ethical consideration for human rights because sometimes simply following the law does not sufficiently capture ethical practices. The wisdom of Emmanuel Lulin, a lawyer and the Chief Ethics Officer for L’Oréal, sums it up beautifully: “Ethics is not about obeying the law. Ethics is about adhering to shared values. . . . Because very often things can be lawful but awful.” [. . .]
Interviewed and written by Shrinithi Venkatesan and Rachel Sleiman
Dr. Anjanette Raymond is an Associate Professor in the Department of Business Law & Ethics at Indiana University and Director of the Program on Data Management and Information Governance at the Ostrom Workshop. Dr. Raymond’s primary research areas include online dispute resolution, data governance, privacy, and artificial intelligence. The Comparative Jurist interviewed Dr. Raymond to address technology’s consequences on U.S. elections, privacy concerns, and the implications of AI governance in the legal field. [. . .]
By Gábor Halmai.
The recent deviations from the shared values of constitutionalism towards a kind of “populist, illiberal constitutionalism” in East-Central Europe raise the theoretical questions: are populism and illiberalism what the leaders of these backsliding states proud of, reconcilable with constitutionalism? I shall concentrate on a particular version of populism, which is nationalist and illiberal, and mainly present in Hungary and Poland, and in other countries of the region. Most are also members of the European Union, a valued community based on liberal democratic constitutionalism. The arguments set forth below about East-Central European populist constitutionalism in this paper do not necessarily apply to other parts of Europe (Greece and Spain), Latin-America (Bolivia), or the US, where populism has a different character, and its relationship to constitutionalism is distinct from the Hungarian or the Polish variant. […]
By Mel Marquis.
Bundling practices involving patents are fairly common, but in the EU, it can potentially raise competition law concerns. This short comment provides an overview of how EU law may apply in this context. […]
By Anthony Gardner.
The Trump Administration poses challenges to the European Union that are broader than the frequently cited differences over the Paris Agreement on climate change, the Iran nuclear agreement, Russia, Syria or Cuba. […]
By Jose M. de Areilza.
Any decision to leave the European Union carries enormous costs, as witnessed during the current difficult Brexit negotiations. In the United Kingdom, more than a year after the referendum, EU skeptics within both the Conservative and Labor parties have lost the battle against those in favor of maintaining the closest possible ties with the European Union. In time, I believe that many British citizens will demand a second referendum on EU membership out of a desire to avoid exit, right up to the final moments of negotiations next March. […]
By Victoria Jensen.
From January to October 2016, nearly 160,000 refugees crossed the Mediterranean to Italy. In response to the smuggling and trafficking across the Mediterranean, the European Union created Operation Sophia. However, Operation Sophia has resulted in migrant and refugee boats being intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard and being returned to Libya. Through the Operation Sophia training program, the EU has effectively delegated European border control to the Libyan Coast Guard. This practice allows the EU to evade both their duty of non-refoulement and duty to rescue distressed persons at sea. The EU has trained Libyans to conduct actions which the EU could not legally accomplish itself under international law, and is therefore violating international human rights law by aiding and assisting Libya’s wrongful actions. […]
By Lauren Gillespie.
Man is a migrant species. With modern technology, emigration has lost its permanency, and people ebb and flow through borders. And today states struggle to control the movement of humanity across borders while respecting the right to freedom of movement. In this article, I argue that the international law community split freedom of movement into two distinct rights: namely, the right to leave permanently and the right to leave temporarily. […]
By Shaohua Yan.
If common features exist in between the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election, one of them has been the underlying anti-establishment populism at play, and this wave of populism is to test the Italian establishment today, on December 4th, when the country is poised to hold a referendum on constitutional reform. […]