Human rights, non-refoulement and the protection of refugees in Hong Kong

Although the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol do not apply to Hong Kong, asylum seekers have challenged Hong Kong's lack of an adequate refugee policy in a series of judicial review actions grounded in human rights and common law principles. This article focuses on two cases in particular in which the applicants have attempted to rely, in part, on a right to non-refoulement, derived from international and domestic law, to compel the Government to establish procedures to determine the status of refugees and other similar categories of claimants. The first, Secretary for Security v. Sakthevel Prabakar, led to the creation of a 'torture screening' mechanism based on article 3 of the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. In the second, C v. Director of Immigration, the court considered whether a rule of non-refoulement has emerged in customary international law and, if so, whether it applies to Hong Kong and requires government-administered refugee status determination. Although the applicants failed at first instance,1 an analysis of the judgment with reference to Hong Kong's human rights obligations reveals gaps in the court's reasoning and demonstrates the potential for greater reliance on these standards as the basis for developing a more comprehensive protection framework. This examination of the Hong Kong experience may have broader comparative value, especially in the Asian region and in jurisdictions not bound by the Refugee Convention or its Protocol. © The Author (2010). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.postprin

Picosecond Transient Thermoreflectance: Time-Resolved Studies of Thin Film Thermal Transport

The advent of new and sophisticated material growth processes (molecular beam epitaxy, chemical vapor deposition and ion sputter deposition) has produced new exotic materials such as amorphous alloys and compositionally modulated structures [1]. The atomic level structure of these materials can be proved by techniques such as x-ray diffraction. The electrical and thermal transport properties are also used to characterize these materials, which are usually deposited as thin films onto supporting substrates. Although the substrate may be electrically isolated from the film, complete thermal isolation is more difficult to achieve and thermal transport measurements are complicated.</p

The PTR 8900: An Industrial Apparatus for Testing Materials by Infrared Photothermography

Infrared thermography, as a NDT tool, has been used intensively by nondestructive evaluation engineers for the testing of composite and plastic materials. Some application, vibrothermography [1,2], requires the use of a mechanical shaker to induce localized heating in the material, while some other, stimulated photothermography, requires the application of an external light source to create time-varying thermal patterns in the material under test [3,4

Dimensioning and location planning for wireless networks under multi-level cooperative relaying

This paper studies the problem of network dimensioning and location planning in multi-hop wireless networks. A key technology of wireless multi-level cooperative relaying (CR) is incorporated, which has been recognized as an effective design paradigm for achieving throughput enhancement. A mathematical formulation is presented to capture the nature of the problem, and characterize the behavior of multi-level CR. The tasks of dimensioning, relay placement, relay allocation, and relay sequence design have been considered in a unified optimization framework. The formulation is a nonlinear integer program. To avoid the intractable computation complexity in solution, an efficient two-phase algorithm is developed. We conduct a series of case studies to verify the proposed algorithm, in which the results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed algorithm and the significant benefits in terms of deployment cost reduction under multi-level CR. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Pathways to sustainability: a critical review of the sustainable development paradigm

Different methods of NDT of carbon-epoxy laminates have been used up till now, including ultrasonics, X-ray photography and vibrothermography. Thermal methods are now appearing, because they can be contactless and single ended [1–3]. Among these methods, pulsed back emission photothermal radiometry seems attractive because it is a simple method, where elasticity is uncoupled. So the possibility of quantitatively characterizing delaminations is offered, as the model describing the phenomenon is simple. Results recently obtained at the Office National d’Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales (ONERA) are presented here to demonstrate that the method is well suited to the detection, in-depth localization and characterization of delaminations in carbon-epoxy composites

Predicting the stress-strain behaviour of carbon steels under hot working conditions: An irreversible thermodynamics model

An irreversible thermodynamics treatment of plastic deformation is re-formulated to include the effects of steel chemistry in austenite hot rolling. By relating the entropy to the relevant fluxes and forces, the assumption dS ∝ d τ / T is removed, where S and τ are the entropy and stress at temperature T. The effect of composition is incorporated in the activation energy for cross-slip, obtaining a good description of the stress-strain behaviour of various grades as a function of temperature and strain rate. © 2009 Acta Materialia Inc.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Management of ameloblastoma - to resect or not?

We have previously described the time-resolved infrared radiometry (TRIR) technique and demonstrated how both measurement of coating thickness and detection of coating disbonding can be made within the same measurement [1]. We have also reported indications of the sensitivity of the TRIR technique to differing degrees of coating disbonding [2]. In the present work we examine this question in detail and compare TRIR experimental results with both an analytical multilayer theory and a destructive analysis of the coating-substrate interface. While the material system studied in this work is a zirconia thermal barrier coating on a superalloy substrate, the methodology and analytical basis of the technique are applicable to a wide variety of materials and components including printed circuit boards and composite materials. The capability of the TRIR technique for characterization of these specific systems will depend on details of the thermal properties and layer thickness in these specimens