The European Free Trade Association – 50 Years of Existence

The European Free Trade Association (EFTA) is an intergovernmental organization set up for the promotion of free trade and economic integration to the benefit of its four Member States: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. The Association is responsible for the management of: The EFTA Convention, which forms the legal basis of the organization and governs free trade relations between the EFTA States; EFTA’s worldwide network of free trade and partnership agreements; and The European Economic Area (EEA) Agreement, which enables three of the four EFTA Member States (Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway) to participate in the EU’s Internal Market. The purpose of this paper is to present the evolution of EFTA, during the 50 years of existence, whose history, since it was established in 1960, is part of the political and economic history of Europe after the Second World War.Intergovernmental organization, convention, treaty, member state, free trade

Community Foundations: Learning from a Collective Experience: Process of Systematization

The report of a community foundation strengthening program involving eight Mexican community foundations: Tecate CF, Frontera Norte CF, Matamoros CF, Oaxaca CF, Puebla CF, Fundación Comunidad, Fundación del Empresariado Chihuahuense (FECHAC), and Fundación Internacional de la Comunidad (FIC). The report is also available in Spanish

MULTIDISCIPLINARY VALENCES OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE

AbstractInternational Trade Law is a juridical subject presenting certain particularities since theanalysis of the institutions of international trade law cannot be separated from theeconomical, political, social, geostrategic aspects, from the ones related to the sustainabledevelopment, even to the declaration of certain spaces as the common patrimony of humanity,as it is, at the same time, a subject having a continuous and ample evolution. Internationaltrade constitutes the object of this juridical matter containing norms of intern law, byorganizing and regulating the foreign trade of every state, conflict norms applicable to thejuridical reports of foreign trade and norms of international public law applicable to thecommercial relations between the states. In this light, international trade law is aninterdisciplinary juridical subject with different regulations. This paper wants to present themultidisciplinary valences of international trade law, in report to the juridical normsconstituting the content of this subject

Short Presentation of the World Trade Organization and of its Role in International Economical Relations

World Trade Organization – one of the most important international economical organizations, based on the principles of the General Agreement for Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – represents the international institutional frame of the multilateral trade system fulfilled when finishing the Uruguay Round in 1994 whose basic objective was to determine the progressive disappearance, by concessions, by means of the negotiation rounds, of all the tariff and non-tariff obstacles in the trade of merchandises, services and in the field of the intellectual property rights. The current paper wants to accomplish a presentation of the World Trade Organization and of its role in the international economical relations from the perspective of presenting its way of organizing and functioning, the relations with other international organizations, and also the advantages offered by the instituted system by creating this international organization.World Trade Organization, world trade, globalisation, international organization

Vitiated Types of International Negotiations

Being, above all, a peaceful method – negotiations represent, by their suppleness and features, a universal means to regulate any type of disputes between the states, to avoid the violent solutions, their essence being actually the debate based on arguments for all the respective problems. Even if, in the negotiations method, we have to find all the principles that fund the relations between the states, there are certain special types of negotiations that occur in certain given situations and the represent serious deviations from the vitiated types of the international law principles, determining the appearance of the vitiated types of international negotiations. Considering the facts that were mentioned, a general analysis of these vitiated types of international negotiations by means of the international legislative frame and by reporting to certain concrete situations in the international reality.peaceful solving of the disputes, negotiations, force in the international relations

Juridical Regulations Specific to the International Private Law

In the current conditions in which the activity of the physical and juridical persons develops not only in the internal frame of a state, inside its frontiers, but also in the international life’s frame, we can notice the birth of some juridical reports where the parties are represented by physical and/or juridical persons and where one or more elements are foreign. Therefore, next to the juridical reports appeared after the juridical, technical, cultural, scientific international relations, where the appliance of the internal law does not seem to be sufficient for the respective juridical report. In this context, such a report may be regulated either by means of the conflict regulations, that indicate the law able to lead the juridical report with foreign origin element, immediate to the report with foreign element, so that we can appreciate that the international private law is featured by the existence of two methods for solving the law problems: one of them specific to the international private law that establishes the solving rule of the law problems: one of them specific to the international private law, that establishes the solving rule of the laws’ conflict, the main matter of international private law, by means of the specific regulations, namely the conflict regulations and another one that is common to all the juridical subjects, that appeals to the substantial regulations. Starting from these premises, the current study wants to accomplish an analysis of the most important aspects related to the conflict regulations – regulations that are specific to the international private law.juridical regulation, conflict regulation, international private law, law, conflict.

Guaranteeing the Right to Defense in Light of the Provisions of International Treaties Specialized in Human Rights and ECHR Jurisprudence

The right to defense as a social value is necessary for any social environment, and the arising of its elements during various stages of civilization has witnessed a visible progress, considering that nowadays the acknowledgement of the right to defense is a common denominator in all procedural systems of democratic states; and this also derives from the fact that states are covenanters to international documents expressly consecrating this right. This article aims to examine the provisions of main international instruments guaranteeing the right to defense and to present relevant aspects of the ECHR jurisprudence meant to express the requirement of compliance with the essential guarantees implied by that right.human rights, the right to defense, ECHR, procedural guarantees

Juridical System of the Honorific Consular Offices

The consular activity as an important component of the states activity develops according to the stipulations of the Vienna Convention regarding the consular relations in 1963, of the European Convention regarding the consular functions adopted in 1967 by the European Council, of the bilateral conventions contracted in the consular field and of the inside legislation of the states by means of certain specialized institutions, namely the career or honorific consular offices and the consular sections in frame of the diplomatic missions. Even if there are essential differences regarding the exertion of the consular functions and the granting of the consular immunities and privileges between the career consulates and the honorific ones, the state practice relieved that both of them have important contributions to the development of the economical, commercial and cultural-scientific relations between the states. Besides, the reason of settling the career or honorific consular offices has been determined by the necessity to organize and develop economical and especially commercial relations between the states and to provide protection to the natural persons and the juridical entities of a state that were placed and developed activity on the territory of another state. The current study wants to accomplish an analysis of the juridical system applicable to the honorific consular offices in a treatment comparative to the status of the career consular offices and by reporting both to the international, national legislation and to other states incident in the field.consular offices, honorific consul, consular relations, consular immunities and privileges

Deep Learning in Neuronal and Neuromorphic Systems

The ever-increasing compute and energy requirements in the field of deep learning have caused a rising interest in the development of novel, more energy-efficient computing paradigms to support the advancement of artificial intelligence systems. Neuromorphic architectures are promising candidates, as they aim to mimic the functional mechanisms, and thereby inherit the efficiency, of their archetype: the brain. However, even though neuromorphics and deep learning are, at their roots, inspired by the brain, they are not directly compatible with each other. In this thesis, we aim at bridging this gap by realizing error backpropagation, the central algorithm behind deep learning, on neuromorphic platforms. We start by introducing the Yin-Yang classification dataset, a tool for neuromorphic and algorithmic prototyping, as a prerequisite for the other work presented. This novel dataset is designed to not require excessive hardware or computing resources to be solved. At the same time, it is challenging enough to be useful for debugging and testing by revealing potential algorithmic or implementation flaws. We then explore two different approaches of implementing error backpropagation on neuromorphic systems. Our first solution provides an exact algorithm for error backpropagation on the first spike times of leaky integrate-andfire neurons, one of the most common neuron models implemented in neuromorphic chips. The neuromorphic feasibility is demonstrated by the deployment on the BrainScaleS-2 chip and yields competitive results both with respect to task performance as well as efficiency. The second approach is based on a biologically plausible variant of error backpropagation realized by a dendritc microcircuit model. We assess this model with respect to its practical feasibility, extend it to improve learning performance and address the obstacles for neuromorphic implementation: We introduce the Latent Equilibrium mechanism to solve the relaxation problem introduced by slow neuron dynamics. Our Phaseless Alignment Learning method allows us to learn feedback weights in the network and thus avoid the weight transport problem. And finally, we explore two methods to port the rate-based model onto an event-based neuromorphic system. The presented work showcases two ways of uniting the powerful and flexible learning mechanisms of deep learning with energy-efficient neuromorphic systems, thus illustrating the potential of a convergence of artificial intelligence and neuromorphic engineering research