On December 10

On this day in ...
... 1931, the Nobel Peace Prize was bestowed on Jane Addams; she was a co-winner with Nicholas Murray Butler. Nobel Committee Chair Halvdan Koht said in his presentation speech:

(credit)

'America helped – perhaps it would be more correct to say compelled – Europe to create a League of Nations which would provide a firm basis for peaceful coexistence among nations. It was a crushing blow that America herself did not join this organization, and without doubt her failure to do so contributed largely to the failure of the League of Nations to live up to expectations. We still see too much of the old rivalries of power politics. Had the United States joined, she would have been a natural mediator between many of the conflicting forces in Europe, for America is more interested in peace in Europe than in lending her support to any particular country.
'It must be said, however, that the United States is not the power for peace in the world that we should have wished her to be. She has sometimes let herself drift into the imperialism which is the natural outcome of industrial capitalism in our age. In many ways she is typical of the wildest form of capitalist society, and this has inevitably left its mark on American politics.
'But America has at the same time fostered some of the most spirited idealism on earth.'

A longtime advocate of peace, suffrage, and measures to alleviate poverty, Addams was emblematic of that idealism – of "the work which women can do peace fraternity among nations," Koht continued. But Addams, who was then 71 years old, was admitted to a hospital in Baltimore on this day in 1931, and so was unable to attend the ceremony in Oslo, Norway. She would die 4 years later in the city where she had long lived, Chicago. We IntLawGrrls honor her as a transnational foremother.

(Prior December 10 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Write On! "Gender in European & International Law"

(Write On! is an occasional item about notable calls for papers)

From IntLawGrrls reader Joanna Madej, who is studying Public International Law at the Netherlands' Utrecht University (from which this 'Grrl's honored to have received an honorary doctorate), comes an invitation to contribute to Merkourios: Utrecht Journal of International and European Law. Joanna, who is the journal's Junior Solicitations Editor, writes:

'Merkourios is a student-run journal, seeking to establish itself in the academic community. We would be extremely grateful if you and your colleagues at IntLawGrrls might submit articles, or perhaps help spread the word about our publication.'

Her invitation, extended to students and law lecturers and professors alike, is particularly aimed at a forthcoming 77th edition, on "Gender in European and International Law." Papers of no more than 15,000 words including footnotes, and conforming to the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities thus are welcome, Joanna writes,

'addressing any gender-related issue; topics may include, but are not limited to international and/or European human rights law issues such as non-discrimination, employment, corporate social responsibility, health, family life, children’s rights, hate speech, terrorism and the process to strengthen the treaty body system, as well as other areas of international law such as peacekeeping, international humanitarian law, environmental law, women and development, indigenous law, refugee and migration law, legal ethics, and international customary law.'

Deadline for abstracts is February 13, 2013; for paper submissions, March 13, 2013. For information, e-mail merkourios@urios.org.

The Enduring Legacy of Christopher Columbus

The graduating class of my sixth grade year received a special gift from our teacher. It was a book of brightly colored paper held together with a faux-leather binding. We were instructed to capture the grand wisdom that only twelve year olds could impart as we headed into the unknown future of middle school.
I remember a great deal about that book. I remember the feel of the navy blue soft “pleather” cover encasing the pink, yellow and green sheets of paper; I remember that we folded each sheet once it had been written upon so that reading the words was like peeling back treasure. And I remember the gold-plated zipper that sealed the contents and protected this fount of wisdom from the elements.
But I do not remember a single entry in my graduation yearbook except for a short poem penned by a now long-forgotten classmate:

'Columbus discovered America in 1492, and I discovered a good friend when I discovered you.'

I lost my book decades ago, in one of a multitude of moves across the world, but those words have stayed with me.
What does it mean to say “Columbus discovered America in 1492”?
It suggests, for one, that it is possible to “discover” a continent of anywhere between one million to 18 million people that was continuously inhabited for 12 thousand years before Columbus. It suggests also that others had not discovered America before 1492, although researchers conclude the Vikings established a toehold in Greenland 500 years before Columbus; and, while hotly contested, some scholars maintain Africans, Portuguese and even the Chinese visited our shores well before Columbus. Most importantly, it suggests this act of discovery was Columbus’ seminal achievement – it was, in short, his legacy. But was it?
I am currently immersed in research on Columbus as I prepare to write a book, and I keep coming back to this question of legacy. Columbus seemed to believe his legacy would be his so-called discovery. In a plaintive letter to his benefactors protesting his mistreatment at the hands of the crown’s agents, Columbus rather self-righteously noted:

'For seven years was I at your royal court, where everyone to whom the enterprise was mentioned, treated it as ridiculous; but now there is not a man, down to the very tailors, who does not beg to be allowed to become a discoverer . . .' *

What I have come to understand is that even while the notion of “discovery” is highly contested, its impact on the people, history and law of the Americas is incontrovertible. We now have some idea of the impact Columbus had on the environment and people of this land, but comparatively little has been written on how the principle of discovery informed the laws of the New World. Columbus’ voyage of discovery was first and foremost a trade expedition, a business matter funded by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel. It was a private transaction with a very public objective. To achieve its aim, contracts had to be signed between the parties. The terms of those contracts would ultimately form the basis of law in the Americas.
Almost immediately after Columbus’ death, and for almost forty years thereafter, his descendants engaged in a nasty legal dispute with the monarchy. The Pleitos Colombinos – literally “the Columbus Lawsuits” – ultimately revolved around a single question:

What exactly did Columbus discover? 

On October 5

On this day in ...

(credit for AP photo)

... 1947 (65 years ago today), Americans, or at least those relatively few with access to a television set, watched the 1st-ever telecast from the White House (right). Featured was President Harry S. Truman, who urged Americans not to eat meat on Tuesdays, nor eggs nor poultry on Wednesdays, as a means to reduce demand and so lower prices on those food products. In the same broadcast, Secretary of State George Marshall, whose efforts to rebuild the economy of Europe would become known as the Marshall Plan during the post-World War II years, declared,  according to The New York Times,

'that the American larder was the "vital" instrument of peace and called on the people to "tighten our belts, clean our plates and push ourselves away from the table" to relieve the hungry of Europe.'

(Prior October 5 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Magic, Tintin

Among the hats this 'Grrl wears is Editor of the International, Transnational & Comparative Criminal Law eJournal, a compilations of abstracts, with links to full papers, that is part of the SSRN Legal Scholarship Network. As such I have the opportunity to review abstracts before they're generally available.

A recent one particularly caught my eye. The author is Dr. René Provost (right), Associate Professor of Law and founding Director of the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism at McGill University in Montreal. The title of the paper -- "Magic and Modernity in Tintin au Congo (1930) and the Sierra Leone Special Court" -- overtly links contemporary international criminal justice with a colonial-era book recently the subject of a banning effort. (And see here.)
Here's the abstract:

'Tintin au Congo was the second album written by Hergé in the series that has been hailed to have given birth to the graphic novel genre. It tells the story of the encounter between a young white European reporter and Africa, as imagined by a Belgian author living in Brussels in 1930. Likewise, the judgments of the Sierra Leone Special Court constitute the narrative of an encounter, this time between the international legal community and the grim realities of the civil war that ravaged that African country more than a decade ago. Both encounters can be described as intercultural collisions: much of the original appeal of Tintin au Congo rested in its caricature of African society as backward and in every respect inferior to European civilisation; in the decisions of the Sierra Leone Special Court, there is a similar stark contrast between the culture of international criminal law as the embodiment of justice and humanity on the one hand, and the irrational descent into anarchy and senseless violence on the other. These narratives stand apart in their origins, their style, their aspirations, and yet converge in their intersection of modernity and barbarity. A study of the original Tintin au Congo as published serially in a Brussels newspaper in 1930 and of the transcriptions of the hearings of the Civil Defence Forces Trial in Sierra Leone reveals that, for each, magic is taken as a key to decipher afromodernity and make it comprehensible for the imagined, civilised, western reader. In doing so, each narrator constructs its own identity, in one case European and civilised Belgium, and in the other the universal and rational international criminal law regime.'

A provocative look at culture past and present.

On July 29

Íñigo Vélez, Count of Oñate

On this day in ...
... 1617 (395 years ago today), Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria ratified the Acuerdo de Oñate with Spain's counterpart in the House of Habsburg. Named after the Vienna-based Spanish diplomat at right, who negotiated it, this secret Treaty of Oñate used promises of marriage and succession to divvy up disputed territories in Europe's western regions.

(Prior July 29 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On July 11

On this day in ...
... 1980, a plaque was unveiled by which Newfoundland's L'Anse aux Meadows was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. At this windswept location may be found the ruins of a circa-11th C. Viking settlement; it's said to be where Europeans 1st landed in North America, around the year 950. (photo credit)


(Prior July 11 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Coordinating EU Foreign Investment Policy

As part of its effort to make European Union institutions more effective in their areas of competence, the Lisbon Treaty (prior posts) gave the EU exclusive authority over foreign direct investment. The change, which took effect in 2009, has raised many questions and much consternation about the fate of EU member states’ 1200 bilateral investment treaties. In the years since, the EU has elaborated European investment policy and proposed regulations for managing the transition to centralized authority for investment agreements.
To date, the EU has entered into one investment treaty containing a dispute resolution mechanism, and it is negotiating others, which will enable foreign investors to bring claims against the EU for the actions of member states. Additionally, the EU’s exclusive competence in investment matters means that it now bears international responsibility for member states’ violations of even those treaties to which the Union is not a party. Those developments raise two important questions:
► In arbitrations challenging member states’ actions, who should be the named respondent, the EU or the member state?
► When a member state is held liable for violating an investment treaty, should the EU or the member state pay?
The European Commission recently released a proposed regulation addressing those and other issues.
 While affirming that the EU should in principle act as the respondent in any such arbitration, the Commission proposes a “pragmatic solution” to “allow for the smooth conduct of arbitration.” The regulation would permit member states to appear as respondents to defend their own actions, except in certain circumstances where EU actions or interests are particularly at stake.
Similarly, the regulation’s principle for the payment of awards is that responsibility should follow from the origin of the challenged treatment. If the actions giving rise to a successful claim are exclusively those of a member state, the state must pay the arbitral award. If the challenged actions originate in EU institutions or were required by EU law, the EU must pay.
The regulation answers some questions about the future of Europe’s investment treaties, but many unresolved issues remain. For example, the EU is not a party to the Convention of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. As a regional economic organization, the EU cannot become a party unless the ICSID Convention is amended—no small task for a treaty with 158 signatories.

On June 2

On this day in ...
... 2003, the European Space Agency launched its 1st planetary mission. Called Mars Express, it comprised an orbiting vehicle (left) and a landing vehicle, "Beagle 2 ... named after the ship in which Charles Darwin sailed when formulating his ideas about evolution." (image credit) The latter did not land; however, as detailed here,

'Orbiter has been successfully performing scientific measurements since early 2004, namely, high-resolution imaging and mineralogical mapping of the surface, radar sounding of the subsurface structure down to the permafrost, precise determination of the atmospheric circulation and composition, and study of the interaction of the atmosphere with the interplanetary medium.'

... 1953, as detailed our prior post, occurred an event today marked by a Diamond Jubilee.

(Prior June 2 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Statelessness & the right to have rights

(Thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post)

In 2011 the Italian Lampedusa Island has turned, to paraphrase the artist Francis Picabia, into a beautiful monster.
Spectacular views unfolding from the Island were marred with images of thousands of people crowded in immigration centers, and hundreds more dying on their way to find shelter there. (map credit)
Although the Island has long been a destination of migrants from North Africa, looking for safe haven and shelter in Europe, the influx reached its peak in 2011, as IntLawGrrl Jaya Ramji-Nogales has posted. The new wave of immigrants and the island’s inability to handle them renewed the European political debate on migration.
In my paper, Lampedusa and Beyond: Recognition, Implementation and Justiciability of the Stateless Persons’ Rights under International Law, I argue that this debate should be expanded to discuss the protection of stateless persons’ rights beyond the moments of crises.
A number of scholars have addressed the question.
► On the one end of the continuum is the20th century philosopher (and IntLawGrrls foremother) Hannah Arendt (below right). (image credit) Herself stateless for more than a decade, she argued that paradoxically, human rights can only be realized within the nation state. She wrote:

'The Rights of Man had been defined as 'inalienable' because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.'

Many commentators, including Seyla Benhabib, Laura van Waasm, and Patrick Weil, have shared Arendt’s skepticism.
► On the other end of the continuum is Dr. Yasemin Soysal (below left), of the Department of Sociology, University of Essex, England. (photo credit) In her well-known book, The Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (1995), Soysal argued that elaboration and conclusion of international human rights treaties, including those that relate to non-citizens, influence the membership situation of those persons domestically, either by creating a separate legal category of migrants or by influencing domestic discourses and invocation of rights claims. Soysal argued:

'Individual rights and obligations, which were historically located in the nation-State, have increasingly moved to a universalistic place, transcending the boundaries of particular nation-States.'

My article contributes to this trajectory of debate in two ways.
First, the article puts forward a genealogy of state participation in the international legal recognition of statelessness and of the enforcement of the treaty regime on statelessness. This allows for novel conclusions as to what extent international law has been effectively implemented in protecting the rights of stateless persons.
Second, I enrich the aforementioned debate with the most recent specific analysis of the treatment of the stateless persons’ rights- claims by a major international human rights tribunal, the European Court of Human Rights. (credit for photo, below right, of court's headquarters in Strasbourg, France)
As a result, I advance a number of findings.

Overall framework
International law has evolved from considering that stateless persons have no rights, as it did in the 1930s.
Today, there is an elaborate international treaty regime on statelessness, which includes three types of treaties:
►1st, general treaties that cover the rights of stateless;
►2d, treaties that protect the rights of stateless among disadvantaged groups, such as women and children; and
►3d, treaties that protect specific rights of stateless persons, such as copyright.
Nevertheless, states are reluctant to accept international obligations in relation to stateless persons. This is evidenced by continuously low number of states participating in these treaties.
States are more likely to accept international obligations in relation to statelessness when those obligations are part of a regime of protecting disadvantaged populations, such as women and children.
Even in this instance, however, the implementation of these obligations is a problem. Provisions on the nationality of women and children are variously: subject to interpretation in accordance with the domestic legislation; hotly contested; or given by states a low priority for implementation.

European Convention framework
The system established by Europe's 1950 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms maintains three separate rights regimes depending on the legal status of the rights-bearer:
► 1st, rights applicable to everyone, notwithstanding their immigration status;
► 2d, rights applicable only to citizens; and
► 3d, rights applicable to migrants.
Overview of the court’s case law in relation to the claims by stateless claimants evidences that some individual claimants have been able to defend their rights through the Convention machinery, including their rights to private and family life, right to freedom of movement, prohibition of torture and the right to a fair trial.
The jurisprudence of the Court has advanced in the direction of affording more protection to stateless persons’ rights in two areas; specifically: the threat or the fact of expulsion of stateless persons has acquired more seriousness and a bigger potential for being recognized as a violation of the Convention; and case law indicates emerging socio-economic obligations of host countries towards stateless individuals.
Nevertheless, despite this positive dynamic, there are three particular issues, which hinder effective protection of stateless persons’ rights.
► 1st, those stateless applicants who pass the admissibility threshold of the Court (up to 90% of applications are declared inadmissible) are confronted with the Court’s inconsistent approach to determining the principles applicable to the recognition of statelessness.
► 2d, in the third-party intervention, or amicus curiae, procedure, stateless persons have no possibility of being supported by the state’s intervention.
This is because states can only intervene in support of an application by their own nationals. As the third-party intervention procedure is an important mechanism to provide the Court with expertise and information, the lack of this possibility puts stateless persons at a disadvantage vis-à-vis citizens. Furthermore, it deprives the court of the ability to hear voices representative of the condition of statelessness.
► 3d, the larger structural problem should be kept in mind.
Applicants often have to wait for up to 14 years before the Court adjudicates their claims. Meanwhile, applicants often face deportation threats and undergo detention.
Costs for legal services for preparing an application vary, from the equivalent of US $25 to as much as $160 per hour.
How many of the stateless persons, who already have trouble realizing their rights due to lack of citizenship status, can afford to wait under duress for more than a decade for their application to be adjudicated, or pay for legal services without legal aid? Undoubtedly, such persons are a minority. Hence, the dozen or so cases in which stateless persons vindicated their rights through the Court are a tip of the iceberg of stateless persons’ grievances which might require redress.

Involving the UNHCR
Finally, my article puts forward a set of recommendations which can partially address the aforementioned problems.
Among others, I suggest amending the European Convention so that the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the agency experienced in advocating internationally for stateless persons, will be endowed with the right to intervene as a third party before the European Court of Human Rights when stateless persons’ claims are at stake.

On June 2

On this day in ...
... 1992, the electorate in Denmark rejected the Maastricht Treaty, which inter alia contemplated a single European currency, by a margin of fewer than 50,000 votes. A New York Times editorial wrote that the vote in Denmark (flag at left) (photo credit) reflected sentiment "[i]n several countries," to an "unease," "about surrendering the attributes of sovereignty to a centralized authority," that was "heightened by suspicions that the new Europe may be dominated by Germany and other big states." In the interim years, of course, subsequent European states' approval of integration treaties in fact led to that single currency, the euro -- and to current bailouts of smaller countries like Ireland, Portugal, and Greece.

(Prior June 2 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

on May 8

On this day in ...
... 1945, according to the BBC, "[h]uge crowds, many dressed in red, white and blue, gathered outside Buckingham Palace in London and were cheered as the King, Queen and two Princesses came out onto the balcony." The reason for the outpouring: Prime Minister Winston Churchill had just broadcast the news that at least for the European theater, World War II was over. (credit for Keystone photo, taken at Whitehall, London, as "an RAF officer and two members of the Women's Royal Air Force and a civilian celebrate on VE Day 1945") End to war in the Pacific theater would not come for many more months.

(Prior May 8 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

People Power Meets Fortress Europe

The people power movement has been celebrated throughout North Africa in recent weeks, but the resultant political unrest has also pushed many Tunisians to flee their homes. Some fear reprisal under a new political regime; others are simply concerned for their safety in an unstable political environment. Though the push for democratic change in Tunisia has been welcomed in Europe, not so the Tunisians fleeing political instability in their native land. European nations have been quick to apply a security rather than a humanitarian lens to the issue of North African migration.
As noted on the Immigration Prof blog, Italy declared a humanitarian emergency last weekend, referring to the estimated 5,000 Tunisians who have arrived on the Italian island of Lampedusa in recent weeks as a "Biblical exodus." The migrants are fleeing a state of lawlessness in Tunisia, where strikes and clashes have become commonplace and police protection is scarce. IOM officials described the migration as a "mixed flow", including both refugees and economic migrants.
Lampedusa, which is closer to North Africa than to Italy, has a native population of 5,000 and an immigration holding center designed for 850 people. While most have been moved to better-equipped migrant camps elsewhere in Italy, the 1,814 Tunisians who remain threatened a hunger strike yesterday rather than face return.
Last weekend, Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni (of the anti-immigrant Northern League party) asked the EU border patrol to step up controls in the Mediterranean, the EU to cover part of the cost of deporting migrants (to the tune of 100 million euros), and EU members to share the burden of accommodating them. On Tuesday, the EU offered fast-track money to Italy to assist with accommodation infrastructure, material aid and medical care, social assistance, legal aid, and language assistance.
The individual member states have not been quite so forthcoming. Austria, Germany, and France have all refused to come to the aid of the Tunisian migrants. On Monday, France said that it "will not tolerate any illegal immigration from Tunisia." Though the French government recognized that there might be refugees in the flow, it said there were very few such cases. Moreover, the French advocated a return to regular patrols along the coasts of North Africa to keep immigration levels as low as possible. On Tuesday, the German Interior Minister said, "we cannot solve all the world's problems."
While the EU appeared willing to take a stab at stepping up border controls, its bureaucratic rigidity has left it ill-prepared to do so. On Monday, Frontex, the EU agency focused on border security, said it was ready to assist with the Tunisian situation and indeed had sent two experts to Lampedusa, but could not yet get involved because it had not received a formal request from Italy for assistance. And the idea of increasing EU patrols in the Mediterranean through Frontex could take weeks as EU nations have to agree on personnel and equipment contributions to the mission.
To its credit, in addition to the aid to Italy, the EU announced a 258 million Euro aid package to Tunisia through 2013. Unfortunately some of these funds are earmarked for radar equipment and patrol boats for the Tunisian military -- presumably to prevent migrant outflows. After refusing Italy's request to put its armed forces on Tunisian soil in order to put an end to these migration streams, the Tunisian government itself has been enforcing European borders. Tunisian troops have already arrested between 1000 and 1500 people trying to flee; given that at least some of those in flight are refugees, encouraging such border closure appears contrary to international refugee law obligations. Even worse, the Tunisian coast guard was accused last week of ramming and sinking a ship containing 120 migrants headed to Italy; 5 died and 30 are missing. People power, undaunted by brutal security forces and dictators alike, may be no match for Fortress Europe.

On February 1

On this day in ...
... 2006 (5 years ago today), asserting the freedom of the press was at stake, 6 newspapers in 4 European countries "reprinted controversial cartoons of the prophet Muhammad which have provoked outrage, trade boycotts and threats of violence towards Danes." The 12 cartoons had been published in several months earlier in "a right-of-centre Danish broadsheet." The controversy has resurfaced at times since; for example, in 2009, when Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was selected as NATO Secretary-General, and just last month, when trial began involving an alleged plot to attack the cartoonist.

(Prior February 1 posts are here, here, and here.)

On December 15

On this day in ...
... 1995 (15 years ago today), on the 1st day of a 2-day summit in Madrid, Spain, European leaders unanimously agreed on a timetable for introduction of "a single, unifying currency for the 21st century," which they called the euro (symbol at left). According to The New York Times, the agreement marked an effort by

many European leaders to forge a single currency and a broader economic and political integration of the Continent that they hope will invigorate its flagging economy and insure greater political stability and peace.

The euro would become legal tender at the stroke of midnight January 1, 2002 (at which moment this 'Grrl acquired a mint set of coins and notes, in Salzburg, Austria), and go on to have more notes and coins in circulation than any other type of money, including the U.S. dollar. But it has fallen on hard times amid European economic demise these last months -- so much that some pundits now wonder whether the end of the euro is nigh.

(Prior December 15 posts are here, here, and here.)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

By comparison to those modern post-World War II constitutions, ours is an old-fashioned Constitution, a creature of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Several years ago, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld disdainfully referred to 'old Europe.' If he had been speaking of human rights, he should have referred to the 'new Europe' and the 'old United States.'

-- Judge William A. Fletcher (above), U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in "International Human Rights and the Role of the United States," just published in the Northwestern University Law Review. The article, which idenitifes the United States as an exceptionalist in its approach to human rights, follows another article that Fletcher published a few years ago, in the University of Virginia Law Review. (photo credit) Both were based on lectures given at the respective universities.

On September 29

On this day in ...
... 1954, the European Organization for Nuclear Research began operations. Dissolved was the provisional council on nuclear research in the region, which had been established a couple years earlier; nonetheless, the French acronym by which that first effort had been known, CERN, remains the shorthand term for this organization to this day. The organization now has 20 member states. Its laboratory, which "sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva," is a center for physics research; a number of its scientists have earned Nobel Prizes in the field.

(Prior September 29 posts are here, here, and here.)

On August 14

On this day in ...
... 1900 (110 years ago today), a fleet of ships containing more than 20,000 sailors and Marines from 8 countries arrived to suppress anti-foreigner violence in the Chinese capital then known as Peking. Thereafter the "forces of the Western powers and Japan in China continued to grow," and they spread across northern China after completing their occupation of the capital. The landing occurred months after the beginning of the Boxer Uprising -- which, as posted, eventually had united nationalists and troops authorized by Empress Dowager Longyu in battles against foreigners in China. The uprising would come to a full stop on September 7, 1901, when representatives of China, Japan, 9 European countries, and the United States signed the Boxer Protocol (above) in Peking. (photo credit)

(Prior August 14 posts are here, here, and here.)

Write On! Regulating disasters

(Write On! is an occasional item about notable calls for papers.)

"Emergency Regulation under the Threat of a Catastrophe" is the subject of a call for papers from École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris, or HEC Paris, since 1881 an international business school based in the French capital.

Prompting the call -- and the HEC Paris workshop at which papers will be presented, on November 10 and 11, 2010: the ash plumes (below right) from an Icelandic volcano that grounded airlines, and thus stranded thousands of spring 2010 travelers in, to, and from Europe. (photo credit)

An informative account of the regional and international regulatory mess this entailed was just published as an ASIL Insight by Alberto Alemanno, an associate professor in business law and taxation at HEC Paris, and a co-organizer of this event.

Here's an excerpt from the full call for papers:

The ash crisis is not the first or the only such problem to have occurred. It is one of a series of recent real or potential catastrophes -- natural disasters, terrorism, pandemics -- that have taken by surprise globalized firms and partly regulators. As such it represents a rich case study in the problem of emergency regulation ....
[W]e propose a workshop with selected speakers and discussants that will retrospectively look at what happened during the worst aviation crisis in European history, and proactively suggest how the lessons learned can affect other regulatory systems which might be faced with similar crises.

Questions that papers might address:

► Roles of science and technology in supporting both risk assessment and decision;

► Institutional design and capability of the regulatory system; and

► Various stakeholders' roles.
Selected papers may be published in the European Journal of Risk Regulation, for which Alemanno serves as Editor-in-Chief, and published in a book to follow.

Submit 300-word abstracts no later than September 15, 2010, to Alemanno at alemanno@hec.fr, or to his co-organizer, Maryland Engineering Professor Emeritus Vincent Brannigan, at firelaw@firelaw.edu.

Further details here.

On May 31

On this day in ...
...1975 (35 years ago today), the European Space Agency was established the day after plenipotentiaries meeting in Paris approved the ESA Convention, which formally entered into force 5-1/2 years later. The ESA's purpose is "to provide for, and to promote, for exclusively peaceful purposes, cooperation among European States in space research and technology and their space applications ..." It's also involved in monitoring of the global environment, including the Gulf of Mexico oil debacle, which IntLawGrrls have discussed in posts available here.

(Prior May 31 posts are here, here, and here.)