Meteorites: International law and regulations

International audienceAlthough meteorites are now considered as scientific objects, they still bear a strong and powerful symbolic meaning due to their extraterrestrial provenance. The present article focuses on their legal status, in other words the collection of rules, very diverse in nature, which are applicable to them. Despite a growing international market, the question of meteorites is often ignored or regarded as a detail in international relations and is rarely taken explicitly into account in negotiations and treaties. This relative neglect explains why a non-State player, the Meteoritical Society, has taken methodological initiatives into meteoritic science and has effectively become a regulator of meteorite naming and acceptance, with a global scope. We show that to understand the legal status of meteorites, it is necessary to consider them under the prism of public international law, transnational law, and national law. We conclude that, despite the universality of meteorites as extraterrestrial objects, the variability of legal rules applicable to meteorites depending onto which territory they fall or where they are found. We note, however, that there is a trend toward regulatory uniformity in the scientific analysis of meteorites, which frames the practices of researchers and regulates traders' activities. Finally, we contend that a meteorite remains a badly defined legal object, because it can be viewed under many angles: as an object susceptible to private appropriation, as a "common thing" (res communis), or as an element of national heritage

Overlap and Mutual Distinctions Between Clinical Recovery and Personal Recovery in People With Schizophrenia in a One-Year Study

International audienceRecovery is a multidimensional construct that can be defined either from a clinical perspective or from a consumer-focused one, as a self-broadening process aimed at living a meaningful life beyond mental illness. We aimed to longitudinally examine the overlap and mutual distinctions between clinical and personal recovery. Of 1239 people with schizophrenia consecutively recruited from the FondaMental Advanced Centers of Expertise for SZ network, the 507 present at one-year did not differ from those lost to follow-up. Clinical recovery was defined as the combination of clinical remission and functional remission. Personal recovery was defined as being in the rebuilding or in the growth stage of the Stages of Recovery Instrument (STORI). Full recovery was defined as the combination of clinical recovery and personal recovery. First, we examined the factors at baseline associated with each aspect of recovery. Then, we conducted multivariable models on the correlates of stable clinical recovery, stable personal recovery, and stable full recovery after one year. At baseline, clinical recovery and personal recovery were characterized by distinct patterns of outcome (i.e. better objective outcomes but no difference in subjective outcomes for clinical recovery, the opposite pattern for personal recovery, and better overall outcomes for full recovery). We found that clinical recovery and personal recovery predicted each other over time (baseline personal recovery for stable clinical recovery at one year; P = .026, OR = 4.94 [1.30-23.0]; baseline clinical recovery for stable personal recovery at one year; P = .016, OR = 3.64 [1.31-11.2]). In short, given the interaction but also the degree of difference between clinical recovery and personal recovery, psychosocial treatment should target, beyond clinical recovery, subjective aspects such as personal recovery and depression to reach full recovery