Law and post-communist countries: case of Albania

Communist regimes in general and especially the one in Albania destroyed almost every aspect of political, social, cultural and economic life, including the notion of pluralism and intellectual elite of the country. In Albania, the transition into democracy in 90’ was done through extrication which means that the authoritarian government was weakened, but not as thoroughly as in a transition by defeat. As a consequence, the former Communist elite was able to negotiate crucial features of the transition and was very quickly transformed into the new pluralist political class. This position enabled the communist elite to be rehabilitated and together with the new emerged communist elite to remain a strong influential actor in new emerged democracy and de facto to run in continuance the country. The purpose of the new emerged communist elite to maintain control was favored inter alia by the absence of a new strong intellectual elite and was done merely by sharing the power among its members divided into different political parties and also by using the ‘pluralist’ law as a tool for social control over new emerging intellectual elites. The use of law as a tool for social control by the political class has severely damaged people's understanding and expectations on the law, its relations with the state as well as international community. Indeed, such experience of the use of law by the political class for its own narrow interests, has made people lose confidence in law and state as well as has severely weakened the law enforcement in the country. To conclude, the overall purpose of this paper would be the analysis of law in general and its understandings and development in a post-communist society such as Albania from different points of view

Legal Principles, Legal Values and Legal Norms: are they the same or different?

Legal principles, legal values, and legal norms are essentially part of the same notion. Often in legal literature, legal principles are considered to be legal norms, general legal norms, legal values etc. In fact, legal principles are just legal norms that different from the latter are legal norms of general application that ignore specific legal facts. They can be considered as basic norms that represent the general consensus on basic society understandings. As such they are also kinds of default rules of behavior. From this perspective, the legal principles are rules of human behavior that used to be considered as just, before the law started being written. Thus, legal values would be considered a more general legal norms vis-à-vis legal principles and legal norms. Nonetheless, the coexistence of these three notions shows the complexity of their correlation and gives us an initial idea on what we will go through in out attempt to perform of comparative analysis between them

Justiciability of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Human Rights are natural rights that nature has given to all human beings and are inseparable, undividable and inalienable from human beings. They are vital, necessary and indispensable to a modern society, which without them would be unable to function and cannot be developed. From another perspective, “human rights are indivisible rights on individuals, based on their nature as human beings; they protect these potential attributes and holdings that are essential for a worthy life of human beings”. Human Rights in general and especially ESCR would be just illusory if they wouldn’t be justiciable. In relation to civil and political rights, it is generally taken for granted that judicial remedies for violations are essential. Regrettably, the contrary assumption is too often made in relation to ESCR. This discrepancy is not warranted either by the nature of the rights or by the relevant Covenant provisions, but is rather a result of states’ attempts to justify their failure to perform their obligations under ICESCR

APPLICATION OF PROMOTION IN LIFE INSURANCE BY INSURANCE COMPANIES IN KOSOVO

Mentor: Prof. Ass. Dr. Shaip Bytyq

The European integration of the Albanian legal system

The EU membership criteria as defined by the European Council in 1993include several legislative criteria which require inter alia: 1.Translation ofmore than 120.000 pages of EU legislation; 2.Approximation of domesticlegislation with EU legislation; 3.Continuing harmonization of nationalinstitutional framework with EU legislation and institutional framework. Onthe other hand the Albanian Legal System cannot be integrated into Euro-Atlantic legal system without a significant change of the Albanianjurisprudence in regards to the relationship between international law anddomestic law as a must to achieve a full harmonization between EU law andAlbanian Law

Protection of the Human Right to Water Under International Law - The Need for a New Legal Framework

The human right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses. An adequate amount of safe water is necessary to prevent death from dehydration, to reduce the risk of water-related disease and to provide for consumption, cooking, personal and domestic hygienic requirements. Indeed, the right to water clearly falls within the category of guarantees essential for securing an adequate standard of living, particularly since it is one of the most fundamental conditions for survival. Thus, the human right to life doesn’t have any sense without the right to water and other vital human rights that are a pre-condition for human life. Consequently, the enjoyment of the human right to water is a prerequisite for the enjoyment of other basic human rights such as the right to the highest attainable standard of health and the rights to adequate housing and adequate food etc. Nevertheless, today in this era of quasi irreversible clime changes as well as very extensive increase use of natural fresh water resources, their quantity and quality is significantly decreased. From this perspective, the future of the entire mankind depends mostly in the preservation of world natural water resources. However their preservation requires from mankind a new world approach that would include inter alia the following steps: the adoption of a new international treaty on world environmental protection, the establishment of the World Water Authority under UN that would deal with issues such as the protection, management and use of international waters, ICJ shall be empowered with biding jurisdiction to exanimate inter-state disputes over international watercourses, a new international treaty on Artic shall be adapted at least to address environmental concerns, and finally International Humanitarian Law shall address other environmental protection issues raised by enormous development of weapons destruction power including avoidance of loopholes that allow derogations from these treaties obligations. Certainly, any failure to do so, will undoubtedly lead mankind to future massive wars that shall be mostly fought for water rather than for oil

The Role of Risk Management Departments in Banking Institutions

The topic of risk and risk management is a topic where the interest of academics, field professionals but also ordinary people has increased enormously. When this topic is dealt with in the banking system, the dominant element in the overall financial system of a country, then the interest rate is even higher, especially after the global financial crisis. In the case of the banking system, credit risk is one of the main risks to which the system is exposed. Over the last decades, loans have occupied the main weight among the assets of the banking system. Moreover, in recent years, the quality of the loan portfolio has deteriorated significantly, which is evident from the significant increase in bad loans served (otherwise known as non-performing loans as defined in the Albanian regulatory framework). Another objective of the paper is to identify and evaluate various macroeconomic factors and factors related to the structure of bank assets and liabilities affecting the bad credit indicator. Before interpreting the variables, all the necessary statistical tests have been made and their conclusions analyzed. Further, the impact of these factors is also transferred to the probability of default and the risk index as the credit risk metering for the banking system

Simplified SIMPs and the LHC

The existence of Dark Matter (DM) in the form of Strongly Interacting Massive Particles (SIMPs) may be motivated by astrophysical observations that challenge the classical Cold DM scenario. Other observations greatly constrain, but do not completely exclude, the SIMP alternative. The signature of SIMPs at the LHC may consist of neutral, hadron-like, trackless jets produced in pairs. We show that the absence of charged content can provide a very efficient tool to suppress dijet backgrounds at the LHC, thus enhancing the sensitivity to a potential SIMP signal. We illustrate this using a simplified SIMP model and present a detailed feasibility study based on simulations, including a dedicated detector response parametrization. We evaluate the expected sensitivity to various signal scenarios and tentatively consider the exclusion limits on the SIMP elastic cross section with nucleons.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure

Improving data integrity and performance of Cryptographic Structured Log File Systems

Modern File systems like CLFS (Cryptographic Log Structured File System)are aimed to provide security and confidentiality. Current deployments of such FileSystems do not currently ensure data integrity of the encrypted data that is stored ondisk. Due to Kernel bugs, racing conditions and arbitrary dead-locks, CLFS data onthe disc can be damaged, also there is always the possibility that system users canmodify the encrypted data. Our study aims toward ensuring data integrity on CLFSwithout compromising on overall performance. This paper considers the standardmethods using file metadata check-summing in CLFS with the main goal toovercome one of its major limitations, low performance of File-System checksumming.CLFS matches our performance expectations, as it performs close enoughto non-cryptographic file systems. To improve the performance of the checksummingprocess we try to study and examine various design choices and proposean in-kernel database for storage and reduction of check-sum verification once in Nread requests

Simulation of Structured Streams Transport Protocol using Network Simulator 2

There has been a lot of efforts from researchers lately to deploy alternativetransports protocols and mechanisms on providing better packet ordering anddelivery semantics. The current development of Internet and Streamingtechnologies suggests that there is a clear need for such alternatives to TCPTransport Protocols. Structured Streams Transport protocol(SSTP) is a newtransport abstraction introduced lately on ACM and it is based on a differentapproach compared to other alternative transports. Main objective of SSTP is toenhance the TCP's byte stream abstraction to permit high level applications to usecontinuous byte streams in larger numbers easily and more efficiently. SST is stillin an early experimental stage and the aim of this study is to develop a new modulefor this Protocol so it can be simulated and tested on the mostly used scientificnetwork simulator in NS2. By implementing the module in NS2, we can simulatemany aspects of this protocol and fine-tune it before we implement it on high levelapplications