Opinio Juris:Between Mental States and Institutional Objects

This chapter addresses the role of international organisations in the formation of Customary International Law from a specific viewpoint: whether international organisations, which knowingly have many instruments to shape the behaviour of States, are also capable of shaping the opinio juris of States. For instance, would an international organisation such as the United Nations be able to promote, or at least influence the formation of opinio juris that is consistent with findings and recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? To develop my argument, I organise the chapter in two main parts – a study into the concept of opinio juris, and a study into the ability of international organisations to promote opinio juris with a desired content. This work concludes by playing down the possibility that international organisations are able to coordinate international processes in a manner to shape opinio juris pursuant to desired standards

Transnational Corporations and International Human Rights Law

National courts often face many obstacles in enforcing human rights law in the private sphere. There is the difficulty in determining the effect that human rights have in private legal relationships. With regard to criminal liability, only a very limited number of states have legislation that makes the attribution of criminal responsibility to legal entities possible. As to responsibility under civil law, it can easily become an empty exercise, if the company directly involved with the violation has no means to bear the costs of remediation, since it is an established doctrine of corporate law in most jurisdictions that the owners of a company are not liable for the damage the company causes (corporate veil). Non legal barriers, notably in countries in which the rule of law is weak, include costs of the judicial process; lack of political or economic independence of the courts;obstruction of the legitimate work of human rights defenders; and difficulties in securing legal representation or a lack of adequate resources to legal prosecutors.The above dilemma creates vulnerability for local populations facing violations of human rights carried out in the context of the activities of transnational corporations, notably in developing countries. It frequently happens that the barriers for sanctioning and remedying such violations in the countries hosting the corporations are insurmountable. As a consequence, cases had been multiplying in which victims of human rights violations, allegedly committed by transnationals in developing and the least developed countries, brought suits against the companies before the domestic courts of their home states or before the courts of other developed states where those companies are also present. Turning to the parent company has not been always successful, however. These are some of the aspects of the context in which this Article is inserted.This Article is concerned with transnational corporations’ embryonic duty to respect international human rights law. Understanding how that obligation may be crystallizing and how courts address that responsibility is relevant for the enforcement of human rights at both the international and domestic levels.Professor André Nollkaemper explains that an international dispute is based on competing claims that are grounded in international law,3and many of the claims brought against transnationals in states where they are established or have legal presence are at least in part founded on international law. Accordingly, some courts have resorted to applying international legal standards when deciding such cases. Furthermore, international law provides national courts indifferent jurisdictions with a common ground and language to address the same type of problems under varying domestic laws, which directly or indirectly reflect international legal standards, allowing them to cooperate among themselves in enforcing the same legal standards, to build up an international case law and to foster the rule of law at the local and international level.This Article addresses the issue through a very specific perspective and does not attempt to be exhaustive. It assesses how transnational corporations’ duty to respect international human rights law is progressively emerging in the practice of the United Nations, and how that practice may foster and reflect the emergence of an international law obligation to respect human rights. It also reviews,albeit briefly, the main legal obstacles in the path of enforcing that obligation at the international and national levels. The terms “transnational corporations(TNCs),” “transnationals,” “corporations,” and “businesses” are equivalently employed in their broader sense so as to encompass businesses in general while focusing on the corporations with activities and interests in different jurisdictions; a TNC is considered a non-state actor (NSA

Monitoring particle impact energy using acoustic emission technique

The estimation of energy dissipated during multiple particle impact is a key aspect in evaluating the abrasive potential of particle-laden streams. A systematic investigation of particle impact energy using acoustic emission (AE) measurements is presented in this thesis with experiments carried out over a range of particle sizes, particle densities and configurations. A model of the AE impact time series is developed and validated on sparse streams where there are few particle overlaps and good control over particle kinetic energies. The approach is shown to be robust and extensible to cases where the individual particle energies cannot be distinguished. For airborne particles, a series of impact tests was carried out over a wide range of particle sizes (from 125 microns to 1500 microns) and incident velocities (from 0.9 ms-1 to 16 ms-1). Two parameters, particle diameter and particle impact speed, both of which affect the energy dissipated into the material, were investigated and correlated with AE energy. The results show that AE increases with the third power of particle diameter, i.e. the mass, and with the second power of the velocity, as would be expected. The diameter exponent was only valid up to particle sizes of around 1.5mm, an observation which was attributed to different energy dissipation mechanisms with the higher associated momentum. The velocity exponent, and the general level of the energy were lower for multiple impacts than for single impacts, and this was attributed to particle interactions in the guide tube and/or near the surface leading to an underestimate of the actual impact velocity in magnitude and direction. In order to develop a model of the stream as the cumulation of individual particle arrival events, the probability distribution of particle impact energy was obtained for a range of particle sizes and impact velocities. Two methods of time series processing were investigated to isolate the individual particles arrivals from the background noise and from particle noise associated with contact of the particles with the target after their first arrival. For the conditions where it was possible to resolve individual impacts, the probability distribution of particle arrival AE energy was determined by the best-fit lognormal probability distribution function. The mean and variance of this function was then calibrated against the known nominal mass and impact speed. A pulse shape function was devised for the target plate by inspection of the records, backed up by pencil lead tests and this, coupled with the energy distribution functions allowed the iv records to be simulated knowing the arrival rate and the nominal mass and velocity of the particles. A comparison of the AE energy between the recorded and simulated records showed that the principle of accumulating individual particle impact signatures could be applied to records even when the individual impacts could not be resolved. For particle-laden liquid, a second series of experiments was carried out to investigate the influence of particle size, free stream velocity, particle impact angle, and nominal particle concentration on the amount of energy dissipated in the target using both a slurry impingement erosion test rig and a flow loop test rig. As with airborne particles, the measured AE energy was found overall to be proportional to the incident kinetic energy of the particles. The high arrival rate involved in a slurry jet or real industrial flows poses challenges in resolving individual particle impact signatures in the AE record, hence, and so the model has been further developed and modified (extended) to account for different particle carrier-fluids and to situations where arrivals cannot necessarily be resolved. In combining the fluid mechanics of particles suspended in liquid and the model, this model of AE energy can be used as a semi-quantitative diagnostic indicator for particle impingement in industrial equipments such as pipe bends

Monitoring acoustic emission (AE) energy of abrasive particle impacts in a slurry flow loop using a statistical distribution model.

Slurry erosion has been recognized as a serious problem in many industrial applications. In slurry flows, the estimation of the amount of incident kinetic energy that transmits from particles suspended in the fluid to the containment structures is a key aspect in evaluating its abrasive potential. This work represents a systematic investigation of particle impact energy measurement using acoustic emission (AE), as indicated by a sensor mounted on the outer surface of a sharp bend, in an arrangement that had been pre-calibrated using controlled single and multiple impacts. Particle size, free stream velocity, and nominal particle concentration were varied, and the amount of energy dissipated in the carbon steel bend was assessed using a slurry impingement flow loop test rig. Silica sand particles of mean particle size 225–650μm were used for impingement on the bend with particle nominal concentrations between 1 and 5% while the free stream velocity was changed between 4.2 and 14ms−1. The measured AE energy was found, in general, to scale with the incident kinetic energy of the particles, although the high arrival rate involved in the slurry impingement flow loop poses challenges in resolving individual particle impact signatures in the AE record. The results have been reconciled with earlier work by the authors on sparse streams where there are few particle overlaps and good control over particle kinetic energies, by extending their model to account for different particle carrier-fluids and to situations where arrivals cannot necessarily be resolved. The outcome is a traceable methodology whereby a quantitative assessment of particle impingement rate can be made in practical situations