No. 21: The UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers: The Ratification Non-Debate

In recognition of the need to explicitly define and uphold the rights of migrants, and in particular migrant workers and their families, the United Nations General Assembly approved the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (ICMW) on 18 December 1990 (Appendix A). The significance of the Convention has been identified as follows: Migrant workers are viewed as more than labourers or economic entities. They are social entities with families and accordingly have rights, including that of family reunification. The Convention recognizes that migrant workers and members of their families, being in countries where they are not citizens, are often unprotected. Their rights are often not addressed by the national legislation of receiving states or by their own states of origin. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the international community, through the UN, to provide measures of protection. The Convention provides, for the first time, an international definition of migrant worker, categories of migrant workers, and members of their families. It also establishes international standards of treatment that would serve to uphold basic human rights of other vulnerable migrants as well as migrant workers. Fundamental human rights are extended to all migrant workers, both documented and undocumented, with additional rights being recognised for documented migrant workers and members of their families, notably equality of treatment with nationals of states of employment in a number of legal, political, economic, social and cultural areas. The Convention seeks to play a role in preventing and eliminating the exploitation of all migrant workers and members of their families, including an end to their illegal or clandestine movements and to irregular or undocumented situations. The Convention attempts to establish minimum standards of protection for migrant workers and members of their families that are universally acknowledged. It serves as a tool with which to encourage those States lacking national standards to bring their legislation in closer harmony with recognized international standards. The decision of the UN to draft and adopt this convention was a strong statement of international consensus concerning the need for greater protection of the rights of migrant workers and their families. To date, 34 countries have ratified and a further 15 countries have signed the convention, but a study of the ratifications and signatures suggests that it is in the main developing countries and those traditionally regarded as \u27sending\u27 countries that have done so. In addition, from the African continent, there are only 13 ratifications and 8 signatures. Of these, only two countries; namely, Seychelles and Lesotho are member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). In order to better understand the relevance of the Convention to South Africa, it is necessary to examine the history of the ICMW and why other countries have been so hesitant to ratify it. Second, it is necessary to provide an overview of migrant rights in South Africa. If migrant rights are already sufficiently protected then ratification should present no obstacle to the South African government. The purpose of this policy brief is therefore to raise awareness of the Convention in South and Southern Africa and to examine the response of the South African government to ratification. SAMP will examine the position of other SADC states in future studies. The brief is organized as follows: background on the origins and content of the Convention summary of the attitudes of other states to ratification of the Convention analysis of why the South African government has not signed or ratified the Convention and identify the specific obstacles to ratification in the South African context. The brief concludes with a set of recommendations and proposed strategies to promote ratification by the South African government

New remains ofMachimosaurus hugiivon Meyer, 1837 (Crocodilia, Thalattosuchia) from the Kimmeridgian of Germany

The fourth complete skull of the marine crocodilian Machimosaurus von Meyer, 1837 is hereby described together with an associated complete mandible and disarticulated postcranial elements from the Kimmeridgian of Neuffen, Germany. Although the genus has been described fairly recently on the basis of two nearly complete skulls, their state of preservation did not allow a thorough examination of the entire skull anatomy. Here, we add new information with the description of nicely preserved cranial and mandibular elements of a single individual attributable to Machimosaurus hugii von Meyer, 1837. The diagnosis is updated for the genus and for the species M. hugii and challenges the validity of the second species M. mosae (Liénard, 1876). Moreover, previous assumption that Steneosaurus obtusidens Andrews, 1913 is a junior synonym of Machimosaurus hugii is not supported by our observations. Notably, M. hugii differs from S. obtusidens by a lower tooth count, the morphology of the dentition, the shape of the supratemporal fenestrae and the absence of an antorbital fenestra. Comparative anatomy and a phylogenetic analysis show that Machimosaurus is more closely related to the genus Steneosaurus than to Teleosaurus cadomensis (Lamouroux, 1820).doi:10.1002/mmng.20130000

Protecting the Brand: Evaluating the Cost of Security Breach from a Marketer’s Perspective

Cyberattacks have increased over the years both at the individual and firm level. Yet, the organizational budgets directed toward information security remains low. One reason is that the ramifications of information breach, such as increased consumer perception of risk and brand equity erosion remain, to the senior executives and board of directors in organizations, almost invisible. The second reason is that managers are required to justify budgets. The cost of system breach is often difficult to quantify. There are direct and enduring costs of information breach. As such, it has implications that impact not just the downtime during a data breach but loss of customers, trust, loyalty and brand equity, all of great concern to marketing managers. This paper analyzes the impact of a breach announcement on the market valuation of the company. Such an analysis using the event study methodology provides a clear indication of how the market reacts to the firm’s breach in information. The results of the study indicate that the market punishes the firm with a small but significant negative abnormal return on the announcement of the breach, and this trend persists. This result, together with the indirect or enduring costs related to brand erosion, provides a good justification to senior executives for protecting the integrity of information, and by so doing, protecting the equity of the brand

Mary Anning’s legacy to French vertebrate palaeontology

peer reviewedThe real nature of marine reptile fossils found in England in between the 1700s to the beginning of the 1900s remained enigmatic, until Mary Anning's incredible fossil discoveries and their subsequent study by eminent English and French scientists. In 1820, Georges Cuvier acquired several ichthyosaur specimens found by Mary Anning, now kept or displayed in the Palaeontology Gallery of the MNHN in Paris. Four years later, Cuvier obtained a plesiosaur specimen from Mary Anning, only the second ever discovered. Cuvier was fascinated by these fossils and their study allowed him to apply his comparative anatomical method and to support his catastrophist theory. We re-examined these important specimens from an historical point of view and herein describe them taxonomically for the first time since Cuvier’s works. The Paris specimens belong to two different ichthyosaur genera (Ichthyosaurus and Leptonectes) and one plesiosaur genus (Plesiosaurus)

Acquisition of visual priors and induced hallucinations in chronic schizophrenia

Prominent theories suggest that symptoms of schizophrenia stem from learning deficiencies resulting in distorted internal models of the world. To test these theories further, we used a visual statistical learning task known to induce rapid implicit learning of the stimulus statistics. In this task, participants are presented with a field of coherently moving dots and are asked to report the presented direction of the dots (estimation task), and whether they saw any dots or not (detection task). Two of the directions were more frequently presented than the others. In controls, the implicit acquisition of the stimuli statistics influences their perception in two ways: (i) motion directions are perceived as being more similar to the most frequently presented directions than they really are (estimation biases); and (ii) in the absence of stimuli, participants sometimes report perceiving the most frequently presented directions (a form of hallucinations). Such behaviour is consistent with probabilistic inference, i.e. combining learnt perceptual priors with sensory evidence. We investigated whether patients with chronic, stable, treated schizophrenia (n = 20) differ from controls (n = 23) in the acquisition of the perceptual priors and/or their influence on perception. We found that although patients were slower than controls, they showed comparable acquisition of perceptual priors, approximating the stimulus statistics. This suggests that patients have no statistical learning deficits in our task. This may reflect our patients’ relative wellbeing on antipsychotic medication. Intriguingly, however, patients experienced significantly fewer (P = 0.016) hallucinations of the most frequently presented directions than controls when the stimulus was absent or when it was very weak (prior-based lapse estimations). This suggests that prior expectations had less influence on patients’ perception than on controls when stimuli were absent or below perceptual threshold

Calcium Isotopic Evidence for Vulnerable Marine Ecosystem Structure Prior to the K/Pg Extinction

International audienceThe collapse of marine ecosystems during the end-Cretaceous mass extinction involved the base of the food chain [1] up to ubiquitous vertebrate apex predators [2–5]. Large marine reptiles became suddenly extinct at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary, whereas other contemporaneous groups such as bothremydid turtles or dyrosaurid crocodylomorphs, although affected at the familial, genus, or species level, survived into post-crisis environments of the Paleocene [5–9] and could have found refuge in freshwater habitats [10–12]. A recent hypothesis proposes that the extinction of plesiosaurians and mosasaurids could have been caused by an important drop in sea level [13]. Mosasaurids are unusually diverse and locally abundant in the Maastrichtian phosphatic deposits of Morocco, and with large sharks and one species of elasmosaurid plesiosaurian recognized so far, contribute to an overabundance of apex predators [3, 7, 14, 15]. For this reason, high local diversity of marine reptiles exhibiting different body masses and a wealth of tooth morphologies hints at complex trophic interactions within this latest Cretaceous marine ecosystem. Using calcium isotopes, we investigated the trophic structure of this extinct assemblage. Our results are consistent with a calcium isotope pattern observed in modern marine ecosystems and show that plesiosaurians and mosasaurids indiscriminately fall in the tertiary piscivore group. This suggests that marine reptile apex predators relied onto a single dietary calcium source, compatible with the vulnerable wasp-waist food webs of the modern world [16]. This inferred peculiar ecosystem structure may help explain plesiosaurian and mosasaurid extinction following the end-Cretaceous biological crisis

Palaeoenvironmental significance of Toarcian black shales and event deposits from southern Beaujolais, France

New sedimentological, biostratigraphical and geochemical data recording the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event (T-OAE) are reported from a marginal marine succession in southern Beaujolais, France. The serpentinum and bifrons ammonite zones record black shales with high (1-10 wt%) total organic carbon contents (TOC) and dysoxia-tolerant benthic fauna typical of the ‘Schistes Carton' facies well documented in contemporaneous nearby basins. The base of the serpentinum ammonite zone, however, differs from coeval strata of most adjacent basinal series in that it presents several massive storm beds particularly enriched in juvenile ammonites and the dysoxia-tolerant, miniaturized gastropod Coelodiscus. This storm-dominated interval records a marked negative 5‰ carbonate and organic carbon isotope excursion being time-equivalent with that recording storm- and mass flow-deposits in sections of the Lusitanian Basin, Portugal, pointing to the existence of a major tempestite/turbidite event over tropical areas during the T-OAE. Although several explanations remain possible at present, we favour climatically induced changes in platform morphology and storm activity as the main drivers of these sedimentological features. In addition, we show that recent weathering, most probably due to infiltration of O2-rich meteoric water, resulted in the preferential removal of 12C-enriched organic carbon, dramatic TOC loss and total destruction of the lamination of the black shale sequence over most of the studied exposure. These latter observations imply that extreme caution should be applied when interpreting the palaeoenvironmental significance of sediments lacking TOC enrichment and lamination from outcrops with limited surface exposure

Actes de la conférence Traitement Automatique de la Langue Naturelle, TALN 2018: Volume 2 : Démonstrations, articles des Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs, ateliers DeFT

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