Internationale afstamming en draagmoederschap

Bij het opstellen van een testament of het afwikkelen van een nalatenschap is het van groot belang om te weten wie de kinderen van de erflater zijn. Uiteraard is dit tevens relevant om te weten bij vragen rondom echtscheiding, met name bij de verplichting om kinderalimentatie te betalen. Waar het tot een jaar of veertig geleden, redelijk eenvoudig was om was te stellen wie de juridische kinderen waren van een man of vrouw, kan dat nu een redelijke complex vraagstuk zijn. Steeds vaker worden kinderen buiten huwelijk geboren, of met gebruik van kunstmatige inseminatie technieken. Deze problemen zijn nog complexer door het feit dat er steeds vaker internationale elementen kleven aan de zaak. Dit komt door de toegenomen mobiliteit van mannen en vrouwen wegens werk en liefde, waardoor het aantal internationale huwelijken is toegenomen. Bovendien is er een steeds groeiende markt voor internationaal draagmoederschap. Deze laatste tendens zal in dit artikel centraal staan.Effective Protection of Fundamental Rights in a pluralist worl

It all depends on who you ask: Dutch parentage law in four Acts

2007 and 2008 were eventful years for Dutch family law. The publication of two reports by the Kalsbeek Commission, with regards lesbian parentage and intercountry adoption, have paved the way for an ongoing debate on these topics. This contribution will focus on the debate surrounding both of these reports. The main question posed here is whether the Kalsbeek Commission has really been as objective as it could have been in advising the Government with regards to these areas.FdR – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit Leide

Something old, something new, something international and something askew

It has been a rather uneventful year in Dutch family law. There have been new developments, but nothing on a large scale. Nevertheless, it is interesting to provide a short overview of the important case law and (proposed) legislative changes relating to family law. New legislative proposals were introduced in the Dutch Parliament, including a Bill to vest both female spouses ex lege with parentage rights over any child conceived with the sperm of an unknown donor born during their marriage, and old legislative proposals were finally adopted, including a Bill relating to the rights and responsibility of spouses regarding their marital property. At the international level the international recovery of maintenance has undergone enormous changes, with three new instruments having been drafted in the past few years. Two of these new instruments, the European Maintenance Regulation and the Hague Maintenance Protocol entered into force in the Netherlands on the 18th June 2011. In this contribution, the major changes for Dutch law will be reviewed. Furthermore, the European Court of Human Rights held that the Dutch Supreme Court had not been efficient when hearing a case brought by a minor who had been placed in a confined institution on a custodial placement. This led to an immediate change in the Supreme Court approach to this issue. This contribution will, therefore, review some of these judicial and legislative developments providing a brief overview of the major changes to Dutch family law. The Amsterdam Stories by Nescio (1882-1961) one of the treasures of Dutch literature, which has finally been translated into English is a perhaps the best example of something old, new, and something quite possibly askew.FdR – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit Leide

National and international surrogacy: an Odyssey

FdR – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit Leide

Measurements of Scintillation Efficiency and Pulse-Shape for Low Energy Recoils in Liquid Xenon

Results of observations of low energy nuclear and electron recoil events in liquid xenon scintillator detectors are given. The relative scintillation efficiency for nuclear recoils is 0.22 +/- 0.01 in the recoil energy range 40 keV - 70 keV. Under the assumption of a single dominant decay component to the scintillation pulse-shape the log-normal mean parameter T0 of the maximum likelihood estimator of the decay time constant for 6 keV < Eee < 30 keV nuclear recoil events is equal to 21.0 ns +/- 0.5 ns. It is observed that for electron recoils T0 rises slowly with energy, having a value ~ 30 ns at Eee ~ 15 keV. Electron and nuclear recoil pulse-shapes are found to be well fitted by single exponential functions although some evidence is found for a double exponential form for the nuclear recoil pulse-shape.Comment: 11 pages, including 5 encapsulated postscript figure

Influence of Gap Extrema on the Tunneling Conductance Near an Impurity in an Anisotropic Superconductor

Changes: figures added in postscript form, Eq. (7) and various typos corrected. We examine the effect of an impurity on the nearby tunneling conductance in an anisotropically-gapped superconductor. The variation of the conductance has pronounced spatial dependence which depends strongly on the Fermi surface location of gap extrema. In particular, different gap symmetries produce profoundly different spatial features in the conductance. These effects may be detectable with an STM measurement on the surface of a high-temperature superconductor.Comment: 12 pages (revtex) + 3 figures (included - postscript), NSF-ITP-93-8

Responses of Southern Ocean seafloor habitats and communities to global and local drivers of change

Knowledge of life on the Southern Ocean seafloor has substantially grown since the beginning of this century with increasing ship-based surveys and regular monitoring sites, new technologies and greatly enhanced data sharing. However, seafloor habitats and their communities exhibit high spatial variability and heterogeneity that challenges the way in which we assess the state of the Southern Ocean benthos on larger scales. The Antarctic shelf is rich in diversity compared with deeper water areas, important for storing carbon (“blue carbon”) and provides habitat for commercial fish species. In this paper, we focus on the seafloor habitats of the Antarctic shelf, which are vulnerable to drivers of change including increasing ocean temperatures, iceberg scour, sea ice melt, ocean acidification, fishing pressures, pollution and non-indigenous species. Some of the most vulnerable areas include the West Antarctic Peninsula, which is experiencing rapid regional warming and increased iceberg-scouring, subantarctic islands and tourist destinations where human activities and environmental conditions increase the potential for the establishment of non-indigenous species and active fishing areas around South Georgia, Heard and MacDonald Islands. Vulnerable species include those in areas of regional warming with low thermal tolerance, calcifying species susceptible to increasing ocean acidity as well as slow-growing habitat-forming species that can be damaged by fishing gears e.g., sponges, bryozoan, and coral species. Management regimes can protect seafloor habitats and key species from fishing activities; some areas will need more protection than others, accounting for specific traits that make species vulnerable, slow growing and long-lived species, restricted locations with optimum physiological conditions and available food, and restricted distributions of rare species. Ecosystem-based management practices and long-term, highly protected areas may be the most effective tools in the preservation of vulnerable seafloor habitats. Here, we focus on outlining seafloor responses to drivers of change observed to date and projections for the future. We discuss the need for action to preserve seafloor habitats under climate change, fishing pressures and other anthropogenic impacts

The ZEPLIN II dark matter detector: data acquisition system and data reduction

ZEPLIN-II is a two-phase (liquid/gas) xenon dark matter detector searching for WIMP-nucleon interactions. In this paper we describe the data acquisition system used to record the data from ZEPLIN-II and the reduction procedures which parameterise the data for subsequent analysis.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure

The ZEPLIN II dark matter detector: data acquisition system and data reduction

ZEPLIN-II is a two-phase (liquid/gas) xenon dark matter detector searching for WIMP-nucleon interactions. In this paper we describe the data acquisition system used to record the data from ZEPLIN-II and the reduction procedures which parameterise the data for subsequent analysis.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure