The Right to Relate: A Lecture on the Importance of “Orientation” in Comparative Sexual Orientation Law

The right to establish and develop relationships with other human beings was first articulated—as an aspect of the right to respect for private life— by the European Commission of Human Rights in 1976. Since then such a right has been recognized in similar words by national and international courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court (Roberts v. United States Jaycees), the European Court of Human Rights (Niemietz v. Germany), the Constitutional Court of South Africa (National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality v. Minister of Justice), and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Fernández Ortega v. Mexico). This lecture traces the origins of this right, linking it to the meaning of the word orientation and to the basic psychological need for love, affection, and belongingness. It proposes to speak of the right to relate and argues that this right can be seen as the common theme in all issues of sexual orientation law (ranging from decriminalization and anti-discrimination to the recognition of refugees and of same-sex parenting). This right can be used as the common denominator in the comparative study of all those laws in the world that are anti-homosexual or that are same-sex-friendly. The right to establish (same-sex) relationships implies both a right to come out and a right to come together. The right to develop (same-sex) relationships is being made operational through legal respect, legal protection, legal recognition, legal formalization, and legal recognition of foreign formalization

Islamic Learning in Arabic-Afrikaans Between Malay Model and Ottoman Reform

Through the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century the Muslim community of Cape Town produced a large number of texts in various fields of Islamic learning, written in Afrikaans, a creolized variety of the language the Dutch traders had brought to South Africa. The Cape Muslim community had its origin in South Asia and Southeast Asia; most of its founding members had been transported by force by the Dutch colonial authorities. Malay was the language in which they had been educated, and for some time it remained in use as the written language. For oral instruction, the Cape Muslim community soon shifted to Afrikaans. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman scholar Abu Bakr Effendi introduced the use of Afrikaans in Arabic script, replacing Malay as written language. In this paper I deal with the shift from Malay to Afrikaans and the relationship between Malay heritage and Ottoman reform in the Cape community

“Altoona was his, and fairly won”: President Lincoln and the Altoona Governors’ Conference, September 1862

This article explores the long-forgotten Altoona Conference of 1862, when nearly a dozen Union governors met at the Civil War\u27s darkest hour to discuss war strategy and, ultimately, reaffirm their support for the Union cause. This article examines and questions the conventional view of the conference as a challenge to President Lincoln\u27s efficacy as the nation\u27s leader. Rather, the article suggests that Lincoln may have actually welcomed the conference and had his own designs for how it might bolster his political objectives

Nucleon Electromagnetic Form Factors

A review of data on the nucleon electromagnetic form factors in the space-like region is presented. Recent results from experiments using polarized beams and polarized targets or nucleon recoil polarimeters have yielded a significant improvement on the precision of the data obtained with the traditional Rosenbluth separation. Future plans for extended measurements are outlined.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, Talk presented at the Bates25 Symposiu

Citizenship and the Politics of Civic Driven Change

Nation states are premised on the legitimizing presence of a polity comprised of citizens. The politics of this relationship is central to discourse on how societies evolve. Yet in the discipline of international development studies the topic remains peripheral. Reasons can be found in conceptual confusion, in selectivity in donor thinking and policies towards civil society and in the growth-driven political economy of NGO-ism. Remedies for the political lacunae are being sought through a concerted focus on people's rights, citizenship and qualities of leadership that all show valuable progress. This chapter will examine a comprehensive complement to such efforts referred to as civic driven change (CDC). Originating in a grounded empirical approach, the constituent principles and elements of CDC offer a lens that can both sharpen and deepen insights and advance analysis of civic agency in socio-political processes. As an ontologically grounded normative proposition, CDC allows exposure and examination of 'uncivil' forces stemming from contending claims on citizenship. These factors are typically ignored or denied in an historical harmony model of societal change. A CDC narrative is illustrated by reference to contemporary examples of citizen action that play out at multiple sites of governance

An acoustic imaging method for layered non-reciprocal media

Given the increasing interest for non-reciprocal materials, we propose a novel acoustic imaging method for layered non-reciprocal media. The method we propose is a modification of the Marchenko imaging method, which handles multiple scattering between the layer interfaces in a data-driven way. We start by reviewing the basic equations for wave propagation in a non-reciprocal medium. Next, we discuss Green's functions, focusing functions, and their mutual relations, for a non-reciprocal horizontally layered medium. These relations form the basis for deriving the modified Marchenko method, which retrieves the wave field inside the non-reciprocal medium from reflection measurements at the boundary of the medium. With a numerical example we show that the proposed method is capable of imaging the layer interfaces at their correct positions, without artefacts caused by multiple scattering.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figure

Catch Shares in Action: Peruvian Anchoveta Northern-Central Stock Individual Vessel Quota Program

The Peruvian Anchoveta Northern-Central Stock Individual Vessel Quota Program is a catch share program that manages the largest volume fishery in the world. The goals of the program were focused on the economic improvement of the fishery through reduction of fleet capacity and lengthening of the fishing season. Additional biological and social goals were identified and seen as vital to ensure program success. Key design elements include restrictions on transferability to help limit consolidation and an industrysponsored social fund to assist with crew retirement and labor transition. To reflect the short-lived nature of anchoveta, management is structured into two fishing seasons per year. Each year, a five million metric ton reserve of anchoveta biomass is set aside to promote long term stock health

Effectiveness of poverty reduction in the EU: A descriptive analysis

The European Union coordinates and encourages Member State actions to combat poverty, and to reform their social protection systems on the basis of policy exchanges and mutual learning (‘best practices’). Some EU countries are more effective in poverty reduction than others. What can explain these variations in effectiveness? This paper analyses the effectiveness of welfare state policies and especially social transfers in EU-countries in alleviating poverty. To indicate whether European economic integration may have had any impact on poverty reduction, we also include several non-EU15 countries as a benchmark into our analysis. We analyze on a cross-country basis the relationship between poverty rates and social effort, as measured by social expenditure ratios. We also correct these expenditure ratios for the impact of the tax system and for private social arrangements, using OECD methodology. Next, we compare poverty rates at the levels of market and disposable incomes, that is before and after transfers, in order to analyze the effect of tax and transfer policies in reducing poverty, i.e. to determine the target efficiency of social transfers. We perform several tests with the most recent data (LIS, OECD SOCX, and Eurostat: ECHP/EU-SILC). Our results are less clear cut than earlier findings. We still find a quite strong negative relationship between the level of social expenditure and poverty among OECD countries. However, for EU-countries this relationship is weaker and there are substantial differences within the EU15. After correcting for the impact of taxes and for private social arrangements, the linkage between social effort and poverty levels becomes even weaker. Also, we do not find a strong relationship between levels of social spending and antipoverty effects of social transfers and taxes. At the program level, family programs and child support alleviate poverty to a large extent