Sanctioning policies - Australian, American and British cross-national reflections and comparisons

Over the last two decades welfare policies have undergone major reforms in Anglo-Western nations such as the U.S., U.K. and Australia. Central to these reforms have been the revision of welfare recipient entitlements and responsibilities and the emergence of a responsibility and obligations agenda. The essence of this agenda is conditionality and reciprocity, and it includes the threat of punitive sanctions for failing to comply with mandatory participation requirements. This paper highlights the potent influence of the ideas of American conservatives on policy reforms in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia and provides a thematic crossnational comparison of sanctioning policies in these nations

Privacy as a Public Good

Privacy is commonly studied as a private good: my personal data is mine to protect and control, and yours is yours. This conception of privacy misses an important component of the policy problem. An individual who is careless with data exposes not only extensive information about herself, but about others as well. The negative externalities imposed on nonconsenting outsiders by such carelessness can be productively studied in terms of welfare economics. If all relevant individuals maximize private benefit, and expect all other relevant individuals to do the same, neoclassical economic theory predicts that society will achieve a suboptimal level of privacy. This prediction holds even if all individuals cherish privacy with the same intensity. As the theoretical literature would have it, the struggle for privacy is destined to become a tragedy. But according to the experimental public-goods literature, there is hope. Like in real life, people in experiments cooperate in groups at rates well above those predicted by neoclassical theory. Groups can be aided in their struggle to produce public goods by institutions, such as communication, framing, or sanction. With these institutions, communities can manage public goods without heavy-handed government intervention. Legal scholarship has not fully engaged this problem in these terms. In this Article, we explain why privacy has aspects of a public good, and we draw lessons from both the theoretical and the empirical literature on public goods to inform the policy discourse on privacy

The ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ legal nature of non-UN sanctions : the case of the US sanctions against Russia

A

Exiting Treaties

This Article analyzes the under-explored phenomenon of unilateral exit from international agreements and intergovernmental organizations. Although clauses authorizing denunciation and withdrawal from treaties are pervasive, international legal scholars and international relations theorists have largely ignored them. This Article draws upon new empirical evidence to provide a comprehensive interdisciplinary framework for understanding treaty exit. It examines when and why states abandon their treaty commitments and explains how exit helps to resolve certain theoretical and doctrinal puzzles that have long troubled scholars of international affairs

Are we predisposed to behave securely? Influence of risk disposition on individual security behaviors

Employees continue to be the weak link in organizational security management and efforts to improve the security of employee behaviors have not been as effective as hoped. Researchers contend that security-related decision making is primarily based on risk perception. There is also a belief that, if changed, this could improve security-related compliance. The extant research has primarily focused on applying theories that assume rational decision making e.g. protection motivation and deterrence theories. This work presumes we can influence employees towards compliance with information security policies and by means of fear appeals and threatened sanctions. However, it is now becoming clear that security-related decision making is complex and nuanced, not a simple carrot- and stick-related situation. Dispositional and situational factors interact and interplay to influence security decisions. In this paper, we present a model that positions psychological disposition of individuals in terms of risk tolerance vs. risk aversion and proposes research to explore how this factor influences security behaviors. We propose a model that acknowledges the impact of employees' individual dispositional risk propensity as well as their situational risk perceptions on security-related decisions. It is crucial to understand this decision-making phenomenon as a foundation for designing effective interventions to reduce such risk taking. We conclude by offering suggestions for further research.</p

TCNs on the EU labour market

This working paper describes the situation of third-country nationals in the EU labour market. What do we know about their conditions of entry to the labour market, employment and integration? What is the legal framework governing the labour relationship and access to social security coverage? What difficulties are encountered in enforcing their rights? While the situation of third-country workers is the result of a delicate combination of national and European rules governing immigration control, access to the labour market and law enforcement, this document suggests a number of ways of improving the effectiveness of their rights. The synthesis of the collection of practices carried out for the Eurodétachement- ED6 project on this issue is appended to the document

TCNs on the EU labour market

This working paper describes the situation of third-country nationals in the EU labour market. What do we know about their conditions of entry to the labour market, employment and integration? What is the legal framework governing the labour relationship and access to social security coverage? What difficulties are encountered in enforcing their rights? While the situation of third-country workers is the result of a delicate combination of national and European rules governing immigration control, access to the labour market and law enforcement, this document suggests a number of ways of improving the effectiveness of their rights. The synthesis of the collection of practices carried out for the Eurodétachement- ED6 project on this issue is appended to the document

EU company law, artificial corporate entities and social policy

The subject of this report spans a broad field of intertwined disciplines. The emphasis is on the phenomenon of (artificial) corporate entities operating in a cross-border context of free provision of services. The starting point is an analysis of the EU-parts of the regulatory frame for the internal market, followed by a general review of adjacent EU-social policies. Company law, in the strict sense, seems hardly to be affected by the developments related to fraud and regulatory arbitrage. The terms ‘genuine’ or ‘non-genuine’ undertaking do not figure in the EU acquis and are only sparsely used in the legislation of Member States. The information, necessary to determine whether a company is a genuine undertaking, of national registries is incomplete and superficial, and commercial databases are inconsistent and easy to manipulate. As far as national instruments are used to tackle fraudulent practices with corporate legal entities in the context of cross-border services, these instruments stem neither from regulations enshrined in company law nor from the (implemented) safety-of-services related legislation. Limited efforts are made to tackle these practices based on secondary legislation in adjacent policy areas (i.e. labour inspectorate, social security offices). These compliance offices lack the competence to act effectively and thoroughly against non-genuine entities

International Treaty Enforcement as a Public Good: Institutional Deterrent Sanctions in International Environmental Agreements

The problem of compliance with treaty obligations has been an area of active study in international environmental law because of its importance to the effectiveness of environmental treaties. This paper examines the problem of enforcement as an important and distinct component of compliance. First, the paper describes the general nature of the problem and the theoretical approaches that have been put forward as alternatives. Second, the paper then locates a key difficulty of environmental treaty enforcement in its public good characteristics. The paper specifically examines the “public good” functions of enforcement as well as the difficulties of generating this “good.” The paper concludes by suggesting three general approaches to overcoming these difficulties and provides a critique of the recently adopted non-compliance mechanism of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the Climate Change Convention