Unilateral Jurisdiction to Provide Global Public Goods: A Republican Account

Failures of international cooperation with regard to protecting the environment, regulating cross-border competition, and preventing terrorism have sometimes lead states to enact unilateral measures with extraterritorial effect. A common trend among international legal scholars defending these measures is to employ the concept of ‘global public goods,’ understood as desirable, utility-advancing things that tend, for various reasons, to be undersupplied by states acting separately. On this view, unilateral measures are justified on grounds that they address ‘harms’ to ‘interests’ that cannot be contained within individual states, or because they advance supposedly universal ‘values.’ Drawing from the ‘republican’ legal and political philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as well as the Roman private law from which Kant derives inspiration, this article argues that states may do anything necessary to provide public goods for their subjects, including exercising jurisdiction over persons extraterritorially. Moreover, they need not demonstrate ‘harm’ or ‘loss,’ because global public ‘bads’ are akin not to damage-based wrongs like negligence, but to wrongs like battery, trespass, and defamation, where harm is irrelevant. The starting premise is that the dignity of ‘persons’ lies not in the satisfaction of interests, but in freedom from treatment as a ‘thing’ at the mercy of another. This gives rise to three kinds of fundamentally private legal relations—tortious, contractual, and fiduciary—all unrealizable as of right without a particular configuration of political institutions known as the ‘state.’ States are themselves persons, and are ‘public’ fiduciaries having no purpose other than to guarantee subjects their dignity. ‘Public goods’ are those things must be provided and kept free of private ownership in order for the members of a political community to be free equals. As public fiduciaries, states have both obligations and rights to provide public goods, which must not be frustrated by the arbitrary non-cooperation by other persons, state or nonstate

The European Union\u27s Human Rights Obligations Towards Distant Strangers

Section I begins by setting out certain provisions added by the Lisbon Treaty requiring the European Union to promote human rights, democracy, and the rule of law in all its “relations with the wider world.” Section II then recounts a recent interpretation of these provisions, which understands them primarily as mandating compliance with international law, and thus largely denies extraterritorial human rights obligations to protect. While the fundamentals of this “compliance” reading are correct, Section III demonstrates that the notion of international law involved here entertains an expansive view of prescriptive jurisdiction, that is, a political institution’s authority to prescribe rules binding conduct. Indeed, despite precedent from the General Court claiming otherwise, the European Union regularly creates legal effects outside its borders, and has always done so. This is reflected both in the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), as well as in EU legislation, particularly in areas such as competition, financial, and environmental regulation, all of which have profound implications for the human rights of distant strangers. Section IV argues, from a premise of human dignity as lying in autonomy, that human rights obligations arise only in relations of political authority, not mere factual power. By reference to Strasbourg case-law on extraterritorial human rights jurisdiction, it demonstrates that the creation of legal effects abroad is both necessary and sufficient to give rise to human rights obligations there, and rejects accounts of human rights jurisdiction based upon aspects of factual power, such as the “state control” and “capability” theories. If, as this paper argues, the European Union regularly governs persons overseas, this raises the specter of imperialism, which is touched upon in the conclusion

Optical spectroscopy of comets

Comets are pristine remnants of the Solar system, composed of dust and ice. They remain inactive and undetectable for most of their orbit due to low temperatures. However, as they approach the Sun, volatile materials sublimate, expelling dust and creating a visible coma. Spectroscopic observations of comets help the simultaneous study of both the gas emissions and reflected sunlight from dust particles. By implementing a long slit, the spatial variations in molecular emissions can be analysed to be further used for other computations. Additionally, spatial information aids in extracting the characteristic profile of the Af(rho) parameter, revealing insights into the behaviour of dust emissions. A sufficiently long slit would prove advantageous in extracting information about the emissions occurring at different parts of the coma or even the tail. We can gain an overall comprehensive understanding of a comet's chemical composition and dust emission by constructively utilising low-resolution spectroscopy with the help of a long slit.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Bulletin de la Soci\'et\'e Royale des Sciences de Li\`ege (2023

Linking kids and conservation: some thoughts on the vacation training programme

In urban areas the most convenient way to relate with nature, especially among urban kids is to watch ‘nature television’ or during the occasional visit to a zoo or national park. To make kids aware of nature and its conservation, ‘environmental education’ courses are included in the curricula, but the way these are taught has however been deplorable, with no connection to the real environment. Introducing students to bio-resources conservation at the secondary school level in a semi-structured but non-formal ambience with activities that promote observations, interactions and learning is needed to excite young minds towards conservation of our natural resources. Non-destructive field-based activities need to be designed and students made to observe nature, ask questions about what they see, discuss with scientists, elders and peers. Such activities also need to focus on the environment that the students are exposed to and provide opportunities for them to engage and relate with it

Of the hunter and the hunted

Ramadevara Betta in Ramanagara is home to the critically- endangered long-billed vulture. But tourism and widlife photography seem to be doing a lot of harm to the region’s birdlife. The Forest Department’s recent announcement to turn the area into a vulture sanctuary could help

Cross Sectional study of Prevalence of Dyslipidemia in treatment NAIVE PLHA (Patients Living with HIV/AIDS) and its correlation with CD4 count

INTRODUCTION : HIV infection/AIDS is a global pandemic, with cases reported from virtually every country. Some studies have found a good correlation of Lipid profile and Body Mass Index (BMI) with advanced HIV infection. MATERIALS AND METHODOLOGY : In considering the above facts, a cross sectional study (using 50 PLHA and 50 controls) was conducted in Govt. Kilpauk Medical College Hospital using various clinical and laboratory measures such as WHO clinical Staging, Anthropometry (BMI), lipid profile were done and they were compared with CD4 count of PLHA. Then it was analysed to check whether these parameters can be used as a surrogate marker for CD4 count to initiate ART and to monitor the therapy. OBSERVATIONS AND RESULTS : In our study, good number of patients had a „high risk‟ triglyceride range. Very high risk‟ cholesterol level is significantly higher among cases. PLHA had significantly lower level of LDL. HDL level was low among female cases. There is no significant correlation between the CD4 count and the Levels of various parameters of lipid profiles. Apart from the intended correlation, we also attempted to correlate various other parameters and we came to a conclusion that WHO categories correlates with CD4 count. Gender and HDL correlates well in our study population. CONCLUSIONS : Although the CD4 count is used as “gold standard” test, WHO staging can be used as a surrogate marker for CD4 count to initiate ART in resource limited settings. Lipid profile can never be used as surrogate for CD4 count

Synchronous Image-Label Diffusion Probability Model with Application to Stroke Lesion Segmentation on Non-contrast CT

Stroke lesion volume is a key radiologic measurement for assessing the prognosis of Acute Ischemic Stroke (AIS) patients, which is challenging to be automatically measured on Non-Contrast CT (NCCT) scans. Recent diffusion probabilistic models have shown potentials of being used for image segmentation. In this paper, a novel Synchronous image-label Diffusion Probability Model (SDPM) is proposed for stroke lesion segmentation on NCCT using Markov diffusion process. The proposed SDPM is fully based on a Latent Variable Model (LVM), offering a complete probabilistic elaboration. An additional net-stream, parallel with a noise prediction stream, is introduced to obtain initial noisy label estimates for efficiently inferring the final labels. By optimizing the specified variational boundaries, the trained model can infer multiple label estimates for reference given the input images with noises. The proposed model was assessed on three stroke lesion datasets including one public and two private datasets. Compared to several U-net and transformer-based segmentation methods, our proposed SDPM model is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance. The code is publicly available

Whose Lives Do We Flatten Along With “The Curve?”

Ganesh, A., Rato, J. M., Chennupati, V. M., Rojek, A., & Viswanathan, A. (2020). Public Health Responses to COVID-19: Whose Lives Do We Flatten Along With “The Curve?”. Frontiers in public health, 8, [564111]. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2020.564111The Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has received varying and evolving public health responses worldwide (1). Sweden remained largely open with health measures aimed most substantively at vulnerable groups, while South Korea implemented a large testing program, combined with extensive efforts to isolate infected people and trace/quarantine contacts. The United Kingdom (UK) considered various approaches before deciding on measures to isolate, quarantine, and promote social-distancing that were eased in mid-July (1); lockdown is now being re-implemented with a surging second wave (2). In contrast to early social-distancing measures in Canada to “flatten the curve,” American states adopted varying approaches, with many states having now relaxed their measures to differing extents (3). China adopted an aggressive approach of quarantining the affected Hubei province and isolating infected populations (4). India was under an ambitious 40-day lockdown, which was then extended until May-31 with districts designated as red/orange/green based on cumulative cases and doubling rate; red zones continued under full lockdown whereas orange/green zones had more relaxed measures (5). Gradual easing of restrictions (“unlock” 1.0 through 5.0) ensued, with lockdown measures nevertheless continuing in designated containment zones (6). Millions of people around the world still face public health measures of one form or another, raising the question: how stringent should government responses be in such pandemics (7), and how long can (or should) such measures continue?publishersversionpublishe