Reporting Obligations for Attorneys in Money Laundering Cases:Attorney-Client Privilege Under Pressure?

With the publication of the Panama Papers in 2016, law firms and attorneys came under the spotlight of international anti-money laundering efforts. It became clear that attorneys, protected by the attorney-client privilege, play a significant role in concealing the origin of illicit funds and the constructing of offshore company-schemes. The public outcry prompted legislators to hold these facilitators accountable and to prevent money-laundering activities by imposing reporting obligation on them, whenever there is the suspicion of a client being involved in illicit activities. Unsurprisingly, attorney and professional associations voiced considerable opposition to these legislative efforts claiming an erosion of the attorney client privilege and nothing less than an attack on the rule of law. This article examines the attorney-client privilege from a historical, empirical, and constitutional perspective. A brief analysis of the legal frameworks in Germany and Switzerland exemplifies how reporting obligations affect legal practice and what challenges exist for attorneys. Both countries are considered global hubs for money laundering activities. The legal concepts of holding attorneys accountable in the neighboring countries differ in some respects. In conclusion, it shows that the legal professions successfully managed to widely avoid a ‘responsibilization’

Slot-Based Transmission Protocol for Real-Time NoCs - SBT-NoC

Network on Chip (NoC) interconnects are some of the most challenging-to-analyse components of multiprocessor platforms. This is primarily due to the following two reasons: (i) NoCs contain numerous shared resources (e.g. routers, links), and (ii) the network traffic often concurrently traverses multiple of those resources. Consequently, complex contention scenarios among traffic flows might occur, some of the important implications being significant performance limitations, and difficulties when performing the real-time analysis. In this work, we propose a slot-based transmission protocol for NoCs (called SBT-NoC), and an accompanying analysis method for deriving worst-case traffic latencies. The cornerstone of SBT-NoC is a contention-less slot-based transmission, arbitrated via a protocol running on a dedicated network medium. The main advantage of SBT-NoC is that, while not requiring any sophisticated hardware support (e.g. virtual channels, a flit-level arbitration), it makes NoCs amenable to real-time analysis and guarantees bounded low latencies of high-priority time-critical flows, which is a sine qua non for the inclusion of NoCs, and multiprocessors in general, in the real-time domain. The experimental evaluation, including both synthetic workloads and a use-case of an autonomous driving vehicle application, reveals that SBT-NoC offers a plethora of configuration opportunities, which makes it applicable to a wide range of diverse traffic workloads

Determination of the role of oxygen in acute myocardial infarction

Background: Oxygen therapy has been used routinely in patients with suspected acute myocardial infarction (AMI) for more than a hundred years. Even today, supplemental oxygen is widely recommended in guidelines and implemented in clinical practice, despite limited data supporting a beneficial clinical effect. The overall objective of the present thesis was to clarify the role of routine oxygen therapy in AMI. After testing logistics, feasibility and safety in a pilot study, a nationwide registry-based randomized clinical trial (RRCT) concept was used to evaluate hard clinical endpoints. In a subgroup of patients, biomarkers were used to get insights on aspects of underlying pathophysiology. Methods and results: Study I was a pilot study at Södersjukhuset. One hundred twenty-nine normoxemic patients with suspected AMI were randomized 1:1 to either oxygen therapy at 6 L/min delivered by open face mask for 12 hours or ambient air. A total of 81 (63%) patients were diagnosed with AMI. No unexpected logistical or notable medical problems occurred. Oxygen therapy for 12 hours was well tolerated. Study II was a nationwide, multicenter, prospective, registry-based randomized clinical trial (RRCT) using a public quality registry for coronary care (SWEDEHEART) for trial procedures and evaluating the primary outcome – all-cause mortality at one year – through national health registries. Patients with suspected AMI and oxygen saturation of 90% or above were randomly assigned to either supplemental oxygen at 6 L/min for 6-12 hours delivered by open face mask or ambient air. A total of 6,629 patients were enrolled from April 2013 through December 2015. No patients were lost to follow-up. The primary endpoint death from any cause at 1-year occurred in 5.0% (166 of 3,311) of patients in the oxygen group compared to 5.1% (168 of 3,318) in the ambient-air group (hazard ratio 0.97; 95% confidence interval, 0.79 – 1.21; p=0.8). The results were consistent across all predefined subgroups. Study III was a prespecified two-center substudy to study II. One hundred forty-four patients were consecutively recruited after randomization and blood samples were secured at randomization and 5-7 hours after. Ninety-two inflammatory biomarkers, using proximity extension assay technology, were analyzed to evaluate the effect of oxygen on the systemic inflammatory response to AMI. The inflammatory response did not differ between the two treatment groups, neither did plasma troponin T levels. After adjustment for increase in troponin T over time, age, and sex, the release of inflammation-related biomarkers was still similar in the groups. Summary and conclusions: In summary, study I found the design of the DETO2X-AMI-trial to be robust and feasible. Implemented inclusion criteria identified patients with acute cardiac disease with a high proportion of acute myocardial infarctions among the study population. Study II demonstrated that the routine use of supplemental oxygen in patients with suspected AMI without hypoxemia at presentation did not reduce 1-year all-cause mortality. Neither did it affect the incidence of rehospitalization with myocardial infarction or the size of myocardial injury as assessed by highly sensitive cardiac troponin T. Study III showed that the use of supplemental oxygen did not have any impact on the early release of systemic inflammatory markers. In conclusion, we were able to build up a study system and nationwide network based on the SWEDEHEART registry. Thereby, we managed to recruit many eligible patients within a short time frame, delivering high quality data at relatively low cost. Normoxemic patients with suspected AMI did not benefit from routine oxygen therapy when assessing 1-year all-cause mortality. Although our findings do not support the general use of oxygen in the normoxemic patient with suspected AMI, there nevertheless remains the risk to develop hypoxemia which must be detected and treated immediately. Furthermore, even though we could not demonstrate deleterious effects of routine oxygen treatment, there might be a dose-dependent relationship and inadvertent hyperoxemia should be avoided

Characterization of cochlear implant artifacts in electrically evoked auditory steady-state responses

AbstractObjectiveElectrically evoked auditory steady-state responses (EASSRs) are neural potentials measured in the electroencephalogram (EEG) in response to periodic pulse trains presented, for example, through a cochlear implant (CI). EASSRs could potentially be used for objective CI fitting. However, EEG signals are contaminated with electrical CI artifacts. In this paper, we characterized the CI artifacts for monopolar mode stimulation and evaluated at which pulse rate, linear interpolation over the signal part contaminated with CI artifact is successful.MethodsCI artifacts were characterized by means of their amplitude growth functions and duration.ResultsCI artifact durations were between 0.7 and 1.7ms, at contralateral recording electrodes. At ipsilateral recording electrodes, CI artifact durations are range from 0.7 to larger than 2ms.ConclusionAt contralateral recording electrodes, the artifact was shorter than the interpulse interval across subjects for 500pps, which was not always the case for 900pps.SignificanceCI artifact-free EASSRs are crucial for reliable CI fitting and neuroscience research. The CI artifact has been characterized and linear interpolation allows to remove it at contralateral recording electrodes for stimulation at 500pps

A Comparative Perspective on the Protection of Hate Crime Victims in the European Union

Hate crime victims involved in a criminal procedure experience difficulties that are different from problems encountered by other victims. In trying to meet the specific procedural needs of hate crime victims many EU Member States have introduced protective measures and services in criminal proceedings, but the adopted approaches are widely disparate. By reporting the results of an EU-wide comparative survey into hate crime victims within national criminal procedures the authors aim to: (1) make an inventory of the national (legal) definitions of hate crime and the protection measures available (on paper) for hate crime victims; and (2) critically discuss certain national choices, inter alia by juxtaposing the procedural measures to the procedural needs of hate crime victims to see if there are any lacunae from a victimological perspective. The authors conclude that the Member States should consider expanding their current corpus of protection measures in order to address some of the victims’ most urgent needs