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

Automated Verification of Design Patterns with LePUS3

Specification and [visual] modelling languages are expected to combine strong abstraction mechanisms with rigour, scalability, and parsimony. LePUS3 is a visual, object-oriented design description language axiomatized in a decidable subset of the first-order predicate logic. We demonstrate how LePUS3 is used to formally specify a structural design pattern and prove (‗verify‘) whether any JavaTM 1.4 program satisfies that specification. We also show how LePUS3 specifications (charts) are composed and how they are verified fully automatically in the Two-Tier Programming Toolkit

A portfolio approach to massively parallel Bayesian optimization

One way to reduce the time of conducting optimization studies is to evaluate designs in parallel rather than just one-at-a-time. For expensive-to-evaluate black-boxes, batch versions of Bayesian optimization have been proposed. They work by building a surrogate model of the black-box that can be used to select the designs to evaluate efficiently via an infill criterion. Still, with higher levels of parallelization becoming available, the strategies that work for a few tens of parallel evaluations become limiting, in particular due to the complexity of selecting more evaluations. It is even more crucial when the black-box is noisy, necessitating more evaluations as well as repeating experiments. Here we propose a scalable strategy that can keep up with massive batching natively, focused on the exploration/exploitation trade-off and a portfolio allocation. We compare the approach with related methods on deterministic and noisy functions, for mono and multiobjective optimization tasks. These experiments show similar or better performance than existing methods, while being orders of magnitude faster

State-of-the-art in managing reliability in mega railway projects.:A systematic literature review

Mega Railway Projects (MRPs) are expensive and account for an increasing per-centage of many a nation’s annual infrastructure expenditure. These MRPs fre-quently exceed their budget and schedule. The challenge of achieving reliability or availability targets stands out as a contributing factor to these overruns. A robust and targeted Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability (RAM) process, which covers systems and subsystems that comprise the railway, that is imbedded in the project from the outset and that is managed throughout the life cycle of the project, is crucial for success. However, a RAM process for MRPs is not readily available. While BS EN 50126-11sets out the required RAM related tasks there is no guidance on how these tasks are to be undertaken or managed. This omission is likely to increase the challenge faced by RAM or Systems engineers as they put forth their case for ring-fenced funds and labour at the outset of an MRP. It is therefore important that RAM on an MRP is reviewed so that next steps in devel-oping robust RAM process plan guidelines can be determined. The authors of this paper discuss why RAM is undertaken and the conceptualisation of RAM along with its fundamental features. Its application on railways focusing on RAM techni-ques and BS EN 50126-1 is outlined. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is under-taken to show the state-of-the-art by using a meta and content analysis within the context of railway systems, RAM techniques, RAM standards and Reliability levels. Furthermore, a set of Derived RAM requirements (DRR) based on BS EN 50126-1 are derived to determine the critical areas of RAM and are thus recommended for further development by researchers or RAM practitioner

CSM-472: The 'Gang of Four' Companion

This document demonstrates how the informal specifications of the design patterns the 'Gang of Four' seminal catalogue [Gamma et al 1995] can be specified formally using the LePUS3 and Class-Z object-oriented Architecture Description Languages

CSM-474: LePUS3 and Class-Z Reference Manual

This document formally defines the elements in the syntax and the semantics of LePUS3 and the Class-Z specification languages. It was designed to satisfy the rigid requirements of mathematical logic, and it is therefore unsuitable for learning LePUS3 and Class-Z. More suitable for this purpose will be the book "Object-Oriented Modelling" [Eden under preparation]. A legend offering a key to the language's symbols is also available