Ensuring the right to education for Roma children : an Anglo-Swedish perspective

Access to public education systems has tended to be below normative levels where Roma children are concerned. Various long-standing social, cultural, and institutional factors lie behind the lower levels of engagement and achievement of Roma children in education, relative to many others, which is reflective of the general lack of integration of their families in mainstream society. The risks to Roma children’s educational interests are well recognized internationally, particularly at the European level. They have prompted a range of policy initiatives and legal instruments to protect rights and promote equality and inclusion, on top of the framework of international human rights and minority protections. Nevertheless, states’ autonomy in tailoring educational arrangements to their budgets and national policy agendas has contributed to considerable international variation in specific provision for Roma children. As this article discusses, even between two socially liberal countries, the UK and Sweden, with their well-advanced welfare states and public systems of social support, there is a divergence in protection, one which underlines the need for a more consistent and positive approach to upholding the education rights and interests of children in this most marginalized and often discriminated against minority group

Municipal waste management systems for domestic use

© 2017 The Authors. Every year, the average citizen of a developed country produces about half a tonne of waste, thus waste management is an essential industry. Old waste management systems based on the collection of mixed/ sorted waste and transporting it a long way to disposal sites has a significant negative impact on the environment and humans. This paper will review the available waste management systems for house- holds. Biological methods (such as composting or anaerobic digestion) and physicochemical methods (such as burning or pyrolysis) of waste utilization will be considered from the householder’s point of view. The most important features of each system will be discussed and compared. Municipal waste management systems for domestic use could eliminate or significantly reduce the stage of waste collection and transportation. Additionally, they should not require special infrastructure and at the same time should allow garbage to be changed into safe products or energy sources with no harmful emissions. The aim of the work is to identify the best available waste disposal systems for domestic use.This reported work was conducted as part of the“Design Optimisation of the HERU Waste Treatment System”project that wasfunded by Manik Ventures Limited Project ID: 10300

Intra-institutional rivalry and policy entrepreneurship in the European Union

The topic of information and communications technology (ICT) convergence is now of primary interest to policy makers in industry and government at the national and international level, as well as the academic community. In 1997, the European Commission published a Green Paper on the matter, and subsequently launched a consultation process which resulted in a series of re-regulatory proposals as part of the 1999 Communications Review. In recent years, there has been considerable evidence of Commission pro-activity and agenda setting in telecommunications and broadcasting. This article argues that ICT convergence policy is an interesting case of both policy entrepreneurship and intra-institutional rivalry within the Commission. Here, the ambitious initial proposals of interests in the Commission in favour of creating a uniform, light-touch regulatory ICT regime at EU level were significantly modified in the light of opposition from the Commission's own quarters, other EU institutions, the national political level and the broadcasting sector. As a result, it appears that in the immediate future there will be only limited, though still very significant, development of a convergent approach to ICT regulation, in the form of measures dealing with infrastructure and associated services

Picking the Wrong Fight: Why Attacks on the World Trade Organization Pose the Real Threat to National Environmental and Public Health Protection

A principal reason for popular concern about the World Trade Organisation is that national rules-especially those for environmental and public health pro-tection-may be overturned because they are incompatible with the WTO's rules. This article argues that while these concerns are not totally unfounded, they are exaggerated. A central reason for this exaggeration is that environmental and consumer advocates discount the pivotal role of governments in the dispute resolution process. Governments agree to the multilateral rules in the first place. Governments decide which market access barriers to pursue and how aggressively. Governments determine how to comply with a WTO judgment that goes against them. Furthermore, this article contends that by exaggerating the constraint imposed upon national governments by the WTO, consumer and environmental advocates run the risk of actually discouraging the very environmental and public health regulations they favor. Copyright (c) 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.