Two Ships in the Night or in the Same Boat Together? Why the European Court of Justice Made the Right Choice in the Kadi Case. College of Europe EU Diplomacy Paper 03/2009, June 2009

This paper investigates the approaches to the recent Kadi case taken by both the Court of First Instance and the Advocate General and asks whether the European Court of Justice made the right choice with regard to the case’s implications for the relationship between European and international law. It argues that the Court’s judgement of 3 September 2008 in Kadi is to be welcomed, also from an internatio-nal perspective. It rightly rejected the approach presented by the Court of First Instance, which, albeit stressing the importance of the UN Charter, ultimately turned out to be a ‘false friend’ of international law. By largely following the Advocate General’s Opinion, the Court maintained the integrity and the superior human rights standard of the EU legal order. Without jeopardizing the compliance of the Member States with their UN Charter obligations right away, it sent a clear warning signal to the United Nations Security Council to exhaust its potential for reform of the targeted sanction regime to the fullest. The Court showed that in an interdependent world of multilevel governance, the different components cannot ‘pass by each other like ships in the night’. In the face of threats like global terrorism like the threat of terrorism as well as undue curtailing of human rights, we are all in the same boat together after all

Policy Algebras for Hybrid Firewalls

Firewalls are a effective means of protecting a local system or network of systems from network-based security threats. In this paper, we propose a policy algebra framework for security policy enforcement in hybrid firewalls, ones that exist both in the network and on end systems. To preserve the security semantics, the policy algebras provide a formalism to compute addition, conjunction, subtraction, and summation on rule sets; it also defines the cost and risk functions associated with policy enforcement. Policy outsourcing triggers global cost minimization. We show that our framework can easily be extended to support packet filter firewall policies. Finally, we discuss special challenges and requirements for applying the policy algebra framework to MANETs

Contested organizational change and accounting in trials of incompatibility

This paper is about the role of accounting in making decisions about contested organizational change. We study how two strategic options emerged and were valued differently in a protracted case regarding sourcing by the Danish Defence Force. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory we show how the two strategic options emerged and were pitted against each other in what Callon describes as ‘trials of strength’. The contribution of the paper is in three actions: First, it develops the concept of ‘trial of strength’ for accounting and organizational research by showing that extant literature can be enhanced with the conceptualization of a typology of trials that distinguishes between prototype trials and trials of incompatibility. Second, it shows that accounting inscriptions may play changing roles which we label ‘versatile’ when forged in the contested circumstances and resultant pressure of a trial of incompatibility. Third, it highlights how accounting inscriptions take part in (re)formulating, evaluating and advancing mutually exclusive reform options in a series of trials of strength involving both a prototype trial and trials of incompatibility. In addition to the frequency, number and intensity of the inscriptions there appears to be an increased prospect of unfaithful behavior by some inscriptions. This work also has implications for governmentality theorization and processual views of outsourcing decision making - as well as its paradoxical outcomes.publishedVersio

Public-Private Sector Partnerships in Developing Countries: Prospects and Drawbacks

Many developing countries are searching positive impacts on the efficiency, equity and quality provision of the public services through increasing competition and active participation of the private sector, considering public-private partnerships (PPPs) as the appropriate instrument to attain such endeavour. Accordingly, PPPs have been used for many and widespread purposes, ranging from the construction of physical infrastructure, to the provision of health and social services, to public administration. But, while the idea of a PPP in general is theoretically appealing, its practical implementation in developing countries is not so easy as theory suggests. Perhaps partly for that reason, a large number of implemented PPPs have left the contractual parties dissatisfied, which may indicate that, either developing country authorities, or investors (or both) may have had too high expectations to what could be attained. Though some contracts have been granted under circumstances that made them susceptible to changes in the political environment, the large majority of the others have also suffered from inflated or unrealistic expectations. So, the need for a legal and regulatory framework, which can guarantee a transparent and credible relationship between the different actors, is critical. Unfortunately many, if not all, regulators in developing countries lack one, or more, qualities required for an effective regulation.Contracting out, public services, market/government failure, infrastructures, public-private partnership

SERVICE PROVIDING ENTERPRISES IN ROMANIA

Service enterprises became important with the development of the tertiary sector in Romania which has recently become the predominant sector holding a share higher than 50% GDP. The specificity of these companies contribute in a sustainable way to the evolution of the number but also the turnover within the economy. Heterogeneity of services with the other main characteristics of the services put their mark on service enterprises transposing them an extremely high variability given the typology of services. The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the evolution of service enterprises in the 1997-2013 time frame in order to establish the trend that these companies followed but also to establish a hierarchy of services depending on thnumber of companies provided. We have to considerboth the commercial and social enterprises and we will use statistical data provided by the NIS but also the studies on this subject so far. Our ultimate objective is to determine the evolution of service businesses in Romania and to extract the causes that have led to this development

A Civic Republican Analysis of Mental Capacity Law

This article draws upon the civic republican tradition to offer new conceptual resources for the normative assessment of mental capacity law. The republican conception of liberty as non-domination is used to identify ways in which such laws generate arbitrary power that can underpin relationships of servility and insecurity. It also shows how non-domination provides a basis for critiquing legal tests of decision-making that rely upon ‘diagnostic’ rather than ‘functional’ criteria. In response, two main civic republican strategies are recommended for securing freedom in the context of the legal regulation of psychological disability: self-authorisation techniques and participatory shaping of power. The result is a series of proposals for the reform of decisional capacity law, including a transition towards purely functional assessment of decisional capacity, surer legal footing for advanced care planning, and greater control over the design and administration of decision-making capacity laws by those with psychological disabilities

Towards Explaining Growth of Private and Public services in the Emerging Market Economies

The employment in public and private services in Emerging Market Economies (EME) has undergone disparate patterns of change during the transition. The paper reveals the main determinants of employment growth in different service groups in the period 1995-2008. Standard variables (per capita income, productivity gap and government expenditure) provide insufficient explanation for the increasing share of services employment while transition reforms indicators exert statistically significant influence. Estimations differ substantially for public, mixed and private services. Deviations from the theoretical framework and patterns in developed economies are observed that need to take into account path dependency of the convergence process of emerging market economies in major service groups. The findings are inconclusive and call for the extension of research towards additional explanatory factors and improvement of data set.employment growth, tertiarisation, public services, private services, transition