Queer Cases Make Bad Law

The Refugee Convention, now adopted by 147 states, is the primary instrument governing refugee status under international law. The Convention sets a binding and nonamendable definition of which persons are entitled to recognition as refugees, and thus to enjoy the surrogate or substitute national protection of an asylum state. The core of the article 1A(2) definition provides that a refugee is a person who has a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group.” A person is thus a refugee, and entitled to the non-refoulement and other protections of the Refugee Convention, only if there is a risk of the applicant “being persecuted,” meaning that a form of serious harm is threatened which bespeaks a failure of state protection. Moreover, that risk of being persecuted must be causally connected to one of the five enumerated forms of civil or political status. It must also be “well-founded” in the sense that there is a real chance that the risk of being persecuted for a Convention reason will, in fact, accrue if the applicant is sent home. In most respects, the Refugee Convention has effectively accommodated claims based on sexual orientation. A gay claimant will only be a refugee if he apprehends a form of harm that amounts to a risk of “being persecuted.” The Convention’s use of the passive voice “being persecuted,” rather than simply “persecution,” signals the need to demonstrate a predicament of risk that cannot or will not be dependably rectified by the applicant’s own country. As the Australian Federal Court held in Kord, the “use of the passive voice conveys a compound notion, concerned both with the conduct of the persecutor and the effect that conduct has on the person being persecuted.” That is, because the Convention is concerned with protection against a condition or predicament— being persecuted—consideration must be given to both the nature of the risk and the nature of the state response (if any), since it is the combination of the two that gives rise to the predicament of “being persecuted.” As senior courts have agreed, it is therefore necessary to show the “sustained or systemic violation of basic human rights demonstrative of a failure of state protection.

Story Logic

My project is a heterogeneous collection of short fictions whose concerns, methods, or influences are, variously, metafictional, feminist, generic (in the sense of “genre fiction”), theatrical, and realist. Through five stories I explore the relationships between reader and character, author and character, and reader and author. I am interested in the ways in which the individuals in these relationships affect each other, and in turn, how the stories are affected by these relationships. Each story in this collection addresses the nebulous quality and logic of storytelling. Some characters in this collection are at the mercy of their own confining narrative structure, as is the case in the fairy tale vignettes in “Cautionary Tales”, while other characters find that they are able to move beyond the limitations that initially restricted them, as we see in “Summer”, a coming of age story about a girl whose passage into adulthood has been hindered by her own tendency to fabricate details about her own life. In other pieces I play with perspective and explore the objectification that can occur through certain skewed points of view, as is the case in “These Foolish Things” and “Dead Letters”. And finally, in “Nomination” I explore the intricate, intimate practice of naming and the author-character relationship it creates between the name giver and the person receiving the name. Through this collection I aim to encourage the reader to examine his or her own position and complicity in the fates of the protagonists in these stories. By playing with and twisting familiar narrative shapes, established tropes and the expectations of the reader, I hope to explore how the delicate relationships between author, character and reader affect the shape a story takes and the logic it follows

Urokinase-type plasminogen activator and arthritis progression: contrasting roles in systemic and monoarticular arthritis models

INTRODUCTION: Urokinase-type plasminogen activator (u-PA) has been implicated in tissue destruction/remodeling. The absence of u-PA results in resistance of mice to systemic immune complex-driven arthritis models; monoarticular arthritis models involving an intra-articular (i.a.) antigen injection, on the other hand, develop more severe arthritis in its absence. The aims of the current study are to investigate further these contrasting roles that u-PA can play in the pathogenesis of inflammatory arthritis and to determine whether u-PA is required for the cartilage and bone destruction associated with disease progression. METHODS: To determine how the different pathogenic mechanisms leading to arthritis development in the different models may explain the contrasting requirement for u-PA, the systemic, polyarticular, immune complex-driven K/BxN arthritis model was modified to include an i.a. injection of saline as a local trauma in u-PA-/- mice. This modified model and the antigen-induced arthritis (AIA) model were also used in u-PA-/- mice to determine the requirement for u-PA in joint destruction. Disease severity was determined by clinical and histologic scoring. Fibrin(ogen) staining and the matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-generated neoepitope DIPEN staining were performed by immunohistochemistry. Gene expression of inflammatory and destructive mediators was measured in joint tissue by quantitative PCR. RESULTS: In our modified arthritis model, u-PA-/- mice went from being resistant to arthritis development following K/BxN serum transfer to being susceptible following the addition of an i.a. injection of saline. u-PA-/- mice also developed more sustained AIA compared with C57BL/6 mice, including reduced proteoglycan levels and increased bone erosions, fibrin(ogen) deposition and DIPEN expression. Synovial gene expression of the proinflammatory mediators (TNF and IL-1β), aggrecanases (ADAMTS-4 and -5) and MMPs (MMP3 and MMP13) were all sustained over time following AIA induction in u-PA-/- mice compared with C57BL/6 mice. CONCLUSIONS: We propose that u-PA has a protective role in arthritis models with 'wound healing-like' processes following local trauma, possibly through u-PA/plasmin-mediated fibrinolysis, but a deleterious role in systemic models that are critically dependent on immune complex formation and complement activation. Given that cartilage proteoglycan loss and bone erosions were present and sustained in u-PA-/- mice with monoarticular arthritis, it is unlikely that u-PA/plasmin-mediated proteolysis is contributing directly to this tissue destruction/remodeling

Rome and Capua from Republic to Empire

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:D192370 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Treating like alike : the principle of non-discrimination as a tool to mandate the equal treatment of refugees and beneficiaries of complementary protection

TypescriptThesis (LLM) -- University of Melbourne, Melbourne Law School, 2009Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-131