U.S. Department of Labor\u27s 2007 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor

[Excerpt] This publication is USDOL’s seventh annual report prepared in accordance with Section 412(c) of the Trade and Development Act of 2000 (TDA). The TDA expands country eligibility criteria for preferential tariff treatment under the Generalized System of Preferences program (GSP) enacted by the Trade Act of 1974 to include the implementation of commitments to eliminate the worstforms of child labor. The TDA also applies this criterion to eligibility for trade benefi ts under the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), the U.S.-Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act (CBTPA), and the Andean Trade Preference Act/Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPA/ATPDEA). Section 412(c) of the TDA contains a mandate for the Secretary of Labor to report on each “beneficiary country’s implementation of its international commitments to eliminate the worst forms of child labor.” The TDA definition of the “worst forms of child labor” uses the definition of the term that is contained in ILO Convention 182. The TDA and Convention 182 consider a “child” to be a person under the age of 18. The definition includes as “worst forms of child labor” all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, the sale or trafficking of children, debt bondage or serfdom; the forcible recruitment of children for use in armed conflict; the commercial sexual exploitation of children; the involvement of children in drug trafficking; and work that is likely to harm children’s health, safety, or morals. This report contains profiles of 122 independent countries and a summary report on 19 non-independent countries and territories designated as GSP benefi ciaries and/or beneficiaries under the ATPA/ATPDEA, CBTPA, and AGOA. In addition, the report includes information on former GSP recipients that have negotiated free trade agreements with the United States, in view of House Report 110-107.5 Each profi le contains a table on key child labor indicators and three text sections that cover: (1) incidence and nature of child labor; (2) child labor laws and enforcement; and (3) current government policies and programs to eliminate the worst forms of child labor. The report closes with an Appendix that contains information on country ratifications of existing international instruments relevant to child labor. Information included covers the period March 2007 through February 2008

JavaScript Dead Code Identification, Elimination, and Empirical Assessment

Web apps are built by using a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. While building modern web apps, it is common practice to make use of third-party libraries and frameworks, as to improve developers' productivity and code quality. Alongside these benefits, the adoption of such libraries results in the introduction of JavaScript dead code, i.e., code implementing unused functionalities. The costs for downloading and parsing dead code can negatively contribute to the loading time and resource usage of web apps. The goal of our study is two-fold. First, we present Lacuna, an approach for automatically detecting and eliminating JavaScript dead code from web apps. The proposed approach supports both static and dynamic analyses, it is extensible and can be applied to any JavaScript code base, without imposing constraints on the coding style or on the use of specific JavaScript constructs. Secondly, by leveraging Lacuna we conduct an experiment to empirically evaluate the run-time overhead of JavaScript dead code in terms of energy consumption, performance, network usage, and resource usage in the context of mobile web apps. We applied Lacuna four times on 30 mobile web apps independently developed by third-party developers, each time eliminating dead code according to a different optimization level provided by Lacuna. Afterward, each different version of the web app is executed on an Android device, while collecting measures to assess the potential run-time overhead caused by dead code. Experimental results, among others, highlight that the removal of JavaScript dead code has a positive impact on the loading time of mobile web apps, while significantly reducing the number of bytes transferred over the network

The Global Problem of Sex Trafficking in Women A Comparative Legal Analysis of International, European, and National Responses

PhDThere has been a flurry of legislative action at the international and regional levels to address the global problem of trafficking in persons, which victimises epidemic-proportions of individuals and generates one of the largest proceeds of organised crime. The harmonisation of national legal responses based on minimum standards around prevention, prosecution, and protection as espoused by those international and regional instruments is a prerequisite for effective and wide cooperation among countries of origin, transit, and destination. However, the reluctance of states to lift to the lofty heights of international consensus the contentious policy issues surrounding trafficking, including prostitution, has resulted in the adoption of rather ambiguous anti-trafficking norms and obligations, which allow states to individually determine what constitutes ‘trafficking in persons’ within their own jurisdictions. The subsequent divergence in national responses reveals that legal harmonisation has not taken place. The mechanisms of enforcement, which attach directly or indirectly to those international and regional instruments, therefore, have the formidable task of assisting states in the implementation of the substantive content of anti-trafficking norms and obligations through their monitoring and reporting mandates. However, their work remains a neglected area of academic research, compared to writings on the ambiguity of the international anti-trafficking framework. The challenge to international regulation of the trafficking problem, as identified in this thesis, relates on a fundamental level to the systemic limitations of the formal processes of law based on state consent and respect for the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Through a comparative legal analysis of international and European legal responses to sex trafficking in women, this thesis illuminates the main systemic challenges to combating trafficking in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, the Netherlands, Romania, and Sweden, and how the work of those enforcement mechanisms remedies some of those challenges.Department of Law at Queen Mary, University of London

Evolutionary Dynamics on Complex Networks

Many complex systems such as the Internet can be represented as networks, with vertices denoting the constituent components of the systems and edges denoting the patterns of interactions among the components. In this thesis, we are interested in how the structural properties of a network, such as its average degree, degree distribution, clustering, and homophily affect the processes that take place on it. In the first part of the thesis we focus on evolutionary game theory models for studying the evolution of cooperation in a population of predominantly selfish individuals. In the second part we turn our attention to an evolutionary model of disease dynamics and the impact of vaccination on the spread of infection. Throughout the thesis we use a network as an abstraction for a population, with vertices representing individuals in the population and edges specifying who can interact with whom. We analyze our models for a well-mixed population, i.e., an infinite population with random mixing, and compare the theoretical results with those obtained from computer simulations on model and empirical networks

Preventing human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation: the need for a bottom-up approach : the case-study of Brazilians trafficked to Portugal

Masters Thesis – Academic Year 2007/2008 - European Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Democratization (E.MA) - European Inter-university Centre for Human Rights and Democratization (EIUC) -Faculdade de Direito, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL)Trafficked people experience multiple processes of avoidable human rights violation in countries of origin, transit and destination. In recent years, international, regional organizations and States, have adopted an anti-trafficking hard and soft law approach based on an ‘integrated perspective’ consistent with the ‘three P’s approach’, namely prosecution, protection and prevention. However, disposals concerning prevention, meant as human-centred public policies and targeted development cooperation initiatives aimed at reducing potential victims’ vulnerability in the countries of origin, are neither legally binding on States nor concretely translated into national anti-trafficking strategies, that keep being focused mainly on reactive and protective measures. These last sets of policies, although complementary, do not contribute to the eradication of potential victims’ vulnerability. A human rights-centred perspective entails going grassroots in order to identify the daily contextual threats that make individuals likely to believe in traffickers’ promises in order to escape to hopeless living conditions. In fact, a bottom-up approach implies investing resources to eradicate the root-causes at the basis of human trafficking that go beyond the mere presence of traffickers and lie in women’s socio-economic vulnerability. The case-study of Brazilians trafficked to Portugal for the purpose of sexual exploitation shows that human trafficking turns into the mean through which many Brazilian women attempt to escape everyday socio-economic vulnerability. For this very reason, it is argued that anti-trafficking policies, carried out also in cooperation with non-traditional bottom-up stakeholders, must reach potential victims of trafficking in their own daily context and provide them with viable alternatives in order to be effective and human

Human trafficking and human (in)security : the role of the State of Myanmar as a security provider

Dissertação de mestrado em Relações InternacionaisO ser humano é confrontado com problemas de insegurança, tais como tráfico de seres humanos, migração ilegal, pobreza, degradação ambiental, pirataria e crimes transnacionais resultantes da globalização. A grande maioria das mulheres e jovens birmanesas são atraídas pelas redes de traficantes, que trabalham em grupos organizados ou individualmente. As vitimas são levadas para a Tailândia e vendidas como prostitutas. As causas e as ameaças à segurança individual são escalpelizadas em dois tipos de insegurança: insegurança de saúde e insegurança pessoal. O presente estudo sugere ser de crucial importância que o estado birmanês proteja ativamente os seus cidadãos de forma a colmatar as suas falhas enquanto agente segurador. Assim, procede-se à análise das ações do estado em três níveis. A nível nacional, socorrendo-nos de uma bordagem interligada, cujas componentes são: “liberdade do medo”, “liberdade para viver com dignidade” e “liberdade da necessidade/desejo”. Consideramos tratar-se de um modelo a seguir. Identificámos uma série de lacunas no enquadramento legal birmanês e a respetiva aplicação. Importa, assim, determinar se o governo se compromete a fazer cumprir o código de conduta dos direitos humanos. Em todo o caso, importa sublinhar que o estado parece mais envolvido com as questões de segurança do estado do que com a segurança humana. Finalmente, de referir que a atitude nacional para estas questões não tem grande impacto ao nível da cooperação regional e internacional da Birmânia. Todavia, são questões passíveis de provocarem sérios constrangimentos ao nível da cooperação bilateral, requerendo para tanto esforços mútuos.Nowadays, people of the world face with non-traditional security issues such as human trafficking, illegal migration, poverty, environmental degradation, piracy, terrorism and transnational crime because of the effect of globalization. The vast majority of Myanmar women and girls fall victims to the deception of traffickers who work in organized groups or individually. They are taken across the border to Thailand and are sold into prostitution. Causes and threats to individual security are pointed out with regards to two types of insecurity: health insecurity and personal insecurity. The study suggests that it is crucial and urgent that Myanmar government actively protect its citizen at its best with the least flaws as possible. We analyze the state’s actions at three levels. At the national level, using interconnected approach, whose components are ‘freedom from fear’, ‘freedom to live in dignity’ and ‘freedom from want’. It is a good method to follow. A number of gaps within the Myanmar’s legal instruments and implementing entities are found. The question is to determine whether the government is committed itself to enforcing and abiding itself by the human rights code of conduct. Most of the government’s actions focus upon state security other than human security. The national distraction does not impact much upon Myanmar government’s regional and international cooperation. The only issue arises in bilateral cooperation and the solution requires mutual efforts

Combating human trafficking in South Africa : a comparative legal study

This research is aimed at evaluating the adequacy and effectiveness of the legal framework dealing with human trafficking in South Africa. To achieve this purpose, a comprehensive diachronic as well as contemporary overview of the punishment and prevention of human trafficking in South Africa as well as in the legal systems of the US, Germany and Nigeria is provided. An overview of the history of slavery and an analysis of the modern conceptualisation of human trafficking indicate that human trafficking is a highly complex concept, and that there are various approaches to the understanding of the concept of human trafficking. There are various definitions of trafficking found in international instruments of which the most important has been identified as that contained in the Palermo Protocol. The definitions vary also because trafficking is closely related to the phenomena of migration, slavery and smuggling of humans. The study further identifies some significant root causes of trafficking generally, as well as specific, to the four selected regions. It was found that in South Africa – similar to the history of slavery in the jurisdictions of the US, Germany and Nigeria – colonisation and the institution of slavery and, more particularly in South Africa, the legacy of the apartheid regime has had an impact on modern human trafficking. The research concedes that although common-law crimes, statutes and transitional legislation can be utilized to challenge some trafficking elements, these offences are not comprehensive enough to amply deal with the crime’s complexities and provide only a fragmented approach to combating the crime. The study shows that South Africa needs to adopt specific and comprehensive anti-trafficking legislation that is based essentially on the provisions of the Palermo Protocol, that is, the draft TIP Bill. Although the Bill is a major improvement on the provisions in the Palermo Protocol as well as on certain aspects of the anti-trafficking legislation in the US, Germany and Nigeria, the Bill can still be improved, especially with regard to more effective victim assistance and the combating of local-specific vulnerability factors. Anti-trafficking efforts undertaken in the US, Germany and Nigeria which may be of value also for the adoption of anti-trafficking legislation, law enforcement and other strategies in South Africa, are further identified. iv The research further establishes also that international, regional and sub-regional instruments on trafficking and related aspects of trafficking provide guidelines for developing effective strategies to deal with trafficking within the region. The counter-trafficking strategies as found in treaties (including conventions), protocols, declarations and resolutions – those focussing specifically on combating trafficking and those with a human-rights focus – oblige states to prosecute traffickers, protect people vulnerable to trafficking as well as those already trafficked and create structures for prevention. Regional instruments specifically formulated to combat trafficking as well as instruments that make reference to the issue of trafficking in persons may further provide the basis for long-term strategies to combat human trafficking. However, it was found that although South Africa has adopted many cooperative mechanisms in the form of direct bilateral or multilateral agreements, as well as international and regional treaties and conventions, the jurisdiction has not as yet implemented comprehensive strategies to combat human trafficking. The introduction of legislation to combat human trafficking, and various other strategies envisaged in the TIP Bill and also recommendations suggested in this thesis, should be considered by parliament as a matter of priority. A comprehensive response to human trafficking which includes adequate protection of victims is required in terms of various constitutional imperatives identified in this research.Criminal and Procedural LawLL. D