Where are Islamic finance indices pointing towards?: Lessons from experimental ‘pockets’ of Islamic financial regulation on international stock markets

© 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited. Purpose: This paper aims to survey the screening practices and regulatory arrangements that can be gleaned from the experience of Islamic financial indices on international stock markets. Such indices can be regarded as experiments in the demarcation of “pockets” of Sharī‘ah-compliant securities exchange, in the context of non-Sharī‘ah-compliant stock markets. They offer valuable regulatory precedent, with a view to the development of a transnational domain of Islamic financial transactions. Design/methodology/approach: The paper leverages the experience of Islamic financial indices for charting the fault lines between the foundational principles of Islamic finance, and those of interest-based investment commonly accepted on international financial markets. It subsequently reviews the most salient regulatory arrangements in place for discriminating between permissible and forbidden securities and modes of trading, as implemented on Islamic financial indices. These include selection criteria for index inclusion, and Sharī‘ah committees with ex ante and ex post supervisory duties. Findings: The paper makes a case for viewing Islamic finance indices on international capital markets as capacity-building experiments for the regulation of transnational Islamic financial flows. Originality/value: The study rejuvenates the pragmatic approach towards the development of Islamic capital markets, by suggesting that incremental organisational innovations, as developed in connection with Islamic financial indices, can build institutional capacity towards an economy that abides by Islamic values

Supporting Organisational Justice through a Legal Framework for Performance Appraisal in the United Arab Emirates: Management Case and Comparison with the French System

© 2020 ADAPT University Press. All rights reserved. The article outlines the regime for performance appraisal, as it applies to organisations operating in an emerging economy like the United Arab of Emirates (UAE). To this end, the management literature on performance appraisal is reviewed, as a strategy to pursue organisational justice and productivity in an equitable work environment. An analysis is also supplied of the regulatory framework of a civil law system with which many Arab jurisdictions bear historical vicinity-that of France-to ascertain a possible frontier of further legislative development. The paper situates performance appraisal-and the need for regulation-in the context of managerial strategies to enhance organisational justice, in order to align the goals of companies and their employees. The existing regime for performance appraisal in the UAE reveals a less than comprehensive legislative infrastructure, compared to that of France. For this reason, the paper advances suggestions for its further development

The Conflict of International Agreements in Air Law: A Reasonable Plea for Conventional Uniform Rules

This note surveys the roots of a phenomenon called “conflict of international agreements”, which forms a distinctive source of legal uncertainty in trans-border disputes, with a particularly high incidence in the field of air law. The authors suggest that the conflict of international agreements should be understood as an added layer of legal complexity in trans-border air law disputes, beyond the customary questions around applicable law and jurisdictional competence that are commonplace in private international law. The first part of this study maps the main factors that have led to the emergence of this peculiar conflict in the domain of air law. Among them are the following: the fact that national air law legislations have typically been developed by catching up with prior international regulatory initiatives (to the point of inserting, in national provisions, named references to specific treaties); the development of international air law through different generations of treaties with non-overlapping memberships; the possibility for different degrees of membership within the same treaty, and the succession of states. All these factors contribute to the possibility that a judge, tasked with a trans-border air law dispute, might first need to determine the international agreement under which the dispute falls, to settle preliminary questions of applicable law or jurisdiction. Or that he or she might end up—after following the trail of foreign legislation when settling a conflict of laws—having to apply treaties that might not be compatible with the international obligations of his or her jurisdiction of belonging. The second part of this study then looks at a sample of existing strategies for resolving such uncertainty, by looking at the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the jurisprudence of the French Conseil d’État, and doctrinal commentary. As a result, the study finds that the horizontality of international law and the difficulty posed by non-overlapping treaty memberships (so that different rules apply to different sets of states) is, at present, insurmountable. This leaves the possibility open, for instance, that a competent court might have to choose between (i) deferring to private international law norms that might lead to the application of incompatible treaties binding in a foreign legal system, and (ii) applying the different treaties ratified by the state of the competent court. This is what case-by-case decision-making at the point of adjudication might entail, in the absence of a renewed impetus for harmonisation. It is on this basis that the authors conclude with a reasoned plea for new initiatives aiming at greater uniformity in international air law

The place of UAE’s food security in the national legislation and its role in supporting global food security

AbstractThis research analyzed the place of UAE’s food security in the national legislation and its role in supporting global food security. Besides, it examined the significant role played by the United Arab Emirates in achieving global food security. The researcher touched on the UAE’s plan to strengthen the food security system, reviewed the national legislation related to food and evaluated the extent to which the UAE’s plan in this regard is consistent with the international agreements. The descriptive method was used and the findings showed the UAE’s legislator did not ignore the need to achieve a state of local and global food security. It was also found that UAE’s government has established certain initiatives to support global food security. These include Global Food Technology Challenge initiative, the Emirates Council for Food Security in 2019, and the Emirates Food Bank. Furthermore, the UAE government has launched the National Strategy for Food Security 2051. Significantly, the UAE has acceded to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora by virtue of Federal Decree No. 86 of 1989, the Convention on Biological Diversity which the United Arab Emirates accessed under Federal Decree No. 107 of 1999, and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture