Legal Reform

This article examines the impact of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) on dispute resolution law reforms in Africa and Latin America. Using the prism of regional coordinating activities, regional law reforms, and domestic law reforms in the two regions, it offers insights into the potential of UNCITRAL’s soft law instruments in shaping institutional and legal development in dispute resolution in the region. While legislative efforts indicating heightened attention to advancing dispute resolution practice in these regions have been on-going, continued scope for integrating standards of transparency and enforcement of awards exists.

The essay is divided in four parts. In part one, we present a background situational analysis of the development of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, specifically arbitration and conciliation, in the areas of investor-state and direct foreign investments generally in both regions. In the second part, we highlight the various regional UNCITRAL conferences, intersession meetings and stakeholder engagements in both Africa and Latin America in a bid to assess regional and international efforts toward reform and addressing the diverse challenges faced in both regions in the adoption and implementation of UNCITRAL soft-law instruments. In the third part, we highlight specific efforts at adopting UNCITRAL soft law in the two regions and their impact on dispute resolution developments. We deliberately emphasise here the possible impact on arbitration rules, arbitration law, transparency rules, conciliation rules, and investor-state arbitration reform. In the last part, we examine some of the challenges faced by African and Latin American States in the implementation of UNCITRAL soft law, and suggest a preliminary reform menu that could be considered by UNCITRAL and other stakeholders in ongoing efforts to reform dispute resolution systems in the two regions along the lines of UNCITRAL soft law.

To ask the question, “Does evidence law matter?,” is often to assume that some sets or groups of people believe it is important while others are challenging that view.  However, another assumption regarding the nature of this question is possible—that the question is asked because legal academics believe that evidence law both does and does not matter, and that those academics also believe that these are irreconcilable beliefs.  What is of particular interest is how legal academics reached this point and why they believe that evidence law both does and does not matter. 

Consideration of these aspects of evidence law scholarship and study reveals that evidence law can be understood as something both rational, irrational, and non-rational.  It can be perceived as permitting practitioners and scholars to both accommodate paradox and accept the conflict of an abstract rule of law imposed by “concrete” persons.  This stands at odds with progressive reform efforts which attempt to define, codify, and ultimately reconcile the inherently dichotomous nature of evidence law.  In order to achieve real progress in the area of evidentiary reform, the idea of progress will have to be abandoned.

Presented at the International Conference on Gender and "The Law": Limits, Contestations and Beyond.

Organizers: London Centre for Social Studies (LCSS), in partnership with Dokuz Eylul University, Gediz University, and Indiana University.
Dates: 4-6 June 2014
Venue: Dokuz Eylul University and Gediz University, Izmir, Turkey
URL: http://www.socialstudies.org.uk/Events/Conferences/6278/International-Conference-on-Gender-and-The-Law-Lim

The paper develops an account of the value of tradition that completes that of Samuel Scheffler and employs it to discuss whaling and bullfighting. The discussion, however, is applicable to many other practices the paper describes, and its relevance extends also beyond animal ethics. Some of the arguments discussed here for maintaining these traditions appeal to their positive aspects, such as their contribution to social or environmental harmony; other arguments focus on the impermissibility of one group criticizing another group’s practices when its own are vulnerable to comparable criticism. Reflecting on the first kind of argument, the paper responds, building on the work of G. A. Cohen and T. M. Scanlon, that the value of tradition, if any, must be conditional. Reflecting on the second, however, the paper disagrees with Cohen and Scanlon on the impermissibility of casting the first stone.

The 1961 Criminal Procedure Code has been in operation for so long with its significant gaps and vagueness. The lack of properly enshrined guiding principles both in the law and the practice made the fairness of the criminal justice administration doubtful. The 2019 Draft Criminal Procedure and Evidence Code is intended to make positive changes to the rules of procedure in order to ensure fairness of the process. Such changes are guided by fundamental principles, the presumption of innocence being the first principle, provided for in the section covering fundamental principles in the criminal procedure.
Both the substantive and procedural aspects of the principle of presumption of innocence are incorporated into the Draft Code. Thus, while there are express rules requiring the public prosecutor to prove the facts of his case, there are also rules that require the accused (and the suspect) to be treated with dignity and respect befitting a person presumed innocent. Those subjects specifically discussed here are the right to liberty, burden and standard of proof.

Violence Against Women (VAW) is a worldwide pervasive phenomenon. This paper, making use of a variety of primary and secondary resources, including legislation, international law instruments, official statistics, books and book chapters, and journal articles, will focus on VAW in the Palestinian context, with occasional reference to “honour” crimes, where appropriate. The paper will commence in covering the main points of convergence and divergence in the literature available on VAW and “honour” crimes.
Thereafter, the occurrence and prevalence of VAW in Palestine will be situated and analysed within the social, economic and legal dimensions of patriarchy. An in-depth, critical analysis of the impact of colonialism and neo-liberalism/ capitalism will be employed to deconstruct the factors that underpin VAW. This section will also highlight the persistence of VAW in light of the absence of alternatives for women survivors of violence and the role of the legal system. For the purposes of critically engaging with VAW, exclusive focus will be dedicated to the treatment of the penal code applied in Palestinian courts of HRV and crimes in the Palestinian society.
The last part of the paper will tackle “law” as a medium to address VAW, highlighting its importance through showcasing the impact of legal reform efforts; a temporal analysis of progress within this parameter will be employed. To further vindicate the need for comprehensive action in pursuance of gender equality, complementary strategies that feed into the “prevent” component of the due diligence standard, as well as the transformative equality concept of the gender mainstreaming model will be presented, including educational reform, economic empowerment, and rehabilitation of perpetrators. Ultimately, the paper seeks to identify possible answers for the reasons that make legal reform insufficient to eliminate VAW, and thereafter determine necessary strategies to complement legal reform.

This article examines the intense debates over the New Criminal Code of Great Qing (Da-Qing xin xinglü) in the National Assembly (Zizheng yuan) during the Qing empire's New Policy Reform (1901-11). The focus is on the conflict between those who drafted and supported the new code and those who expressed reservations, especially over reform of the laws on filial piety and fornication. The issue of reconfiguring the family and social order through law was closely related to the overarching agenda of twentieth century legal reform in China-making an empire that "ruled through the principle of filial piety" into a modern nation-state that had direct relationships with its citizens. More importantly, an analysis of the late Qing debate over family law enables this article to problematize such concepts as "Chinese" and "Western" during this crucial moment of China's empire-to-nation transformation. It showcases the paradox of China's modern-era reforms-a contradiction between imposing Western-inspired order with a largely indigenous logic and maintaining existing sociopolitical order in the name of preserving national identity.

This is the substantive introduction to an edited collection that explores questions that open up in the aftermath of legal reforms in the name of equality. It draws together equality issues such as equal marriage for same-sex couples, equal parenting rights for men and women, and the relation between race and sexuality equality arguments.

This collection presents new research, gathering under its rubric authors from England and Wales, the United States, and Canada. Under an overarching theme of kinship and care, the chapters are organized into three parts: Care and Justice under Neo-liberalism, States' Reach, and Sex and Love. The recognition of same-sex relationships - primarily conjugal ones - emerges as the prevalent site of investigation, but chapters also address care more broadly, gender relations in parenting, cohabitation, and organizing for racial equality. This gathering embodies an effort to transcend the barriers that often confine legal scholarship within law and, via specialized journals, within fields. For example, the collection sets scholars of family law in conversation with tax specialists. Disciplinarily, it juxtaposes socio-legal scholarship with the work of specialists in sociology, American studies, and women's studies. The introduction proposes a method and 'register' for researching 'after legal equality'.

Ten years have passed since the landmark Equality Act 2010 was introduced. Now, the Equality Act Review [EAR] has conducted the largest and most comprehensive review of the Act in its decade long history.

The EAR argues the Act is failing real people, as current protected characteristics are largely rooted in biology as a result of which, the socioeconomic or sociocultural identity markers that give rise to discrimination are completely overlooked.

The report puts forward significant proposals for reform including:

• Strengthening current protected characteristics such as disability, race, and religion and belief.
• Ratifying unenforced aspects of the Act such as S.1 Public Sector Equality duty, S. 14 dual discrimination.
• Introducing new protected characteristics such as socioeconomic background, homelessness, accent, weight, hair, immigration.
• Greater enforcement of the Act particularly in unregulated employment industries.

The report draws on powerful testimonies from affected persons, to demonstrate the severity of discrimination embedded within the government. Contributors include homeless individuals who report modifying their CVs to prevent employers from recognising their residential addresses as homeless shelters, and the widow of a long-term disabled individual who has been denied bereaved widows’ allowance on the basis that her spouse had not made NI contributions.

The report launched on Wednesday 14th July  and speakers include EAR CEO, Dr Suriyah Bi, and Parliamentarians including Shadow Women and Equalities Secretary, Marsha de Cordova MP, Shadow Secretary of Justice, David Lammy MP, Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Yvette Cooper, Liam Byrne MP and Wera Hobhouse MP.

The legal norms govern the conduct of the human being but there is no adequate legislation or regulation about the artificial intelligence which is more influenced creation than human in public and private sector all over the world. It is urgent needs of world in international and national level that should be considered appropriate method to govern them in order to solve the future crisis. Our country also is to be prepared to face the problem in legal manner by way of adopting legislation.

Artificial intelligence is broad conceptual term for the technologies and makes it possible to perform like human including decision making, self-driving car, robotic surgical equipment, automated accounting and security system including software performing legal tasks. Therefore, artificial intelligence technology will need to advance creative concept for addressing issues as legal duty, legal protection and liability.

In Sri Lanka, there is an Association for Artificial intelligence which is established in 2000 for non-profit purpose to develop the techniques of the artificial intelligence. Our country is ready to promote these technical skills but there is no law to regulate properly. Section 6 of Intellectual Property Law Act No 36 of 2003 is mentioned about protection for computer programs. It is not enough to deal all the relevant matter of Artificial Intelligence.

Apart from that, there is no more legal provision. Policy makers would not be kept silent until raise the problem and start to think wider manner that would be good for the country to adopt new technology rather than depending on traditional system because the world is busy to find out new things and we have to prepare ourselves to go with them. Otherwise, Sri Lanka will not achieve anything even in technology. Therefore, the legislation for Artificial Intelligence is a present need of society, for that purpose this study will examine the legal status, legal issues, and legal protection especially in the area of Intellectual Property Rights and with the comparative analysis of other countries legislation.

This paper examines race and class schisms among South African LGBTI persons using the lens of hate crimes legislation. While much praise is given to South Africa’s constitutional framework which provides for non-discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, LGBTI persons still face unacceptably high levels of violence and victimisation. An ongoing trend of violent murders of black lesbian women in particular has mobilised advocacy by LGBTI organisations and other civil society actors to call for hate crimes legislation. This paper takes a critical look at hate crimes legislation and the potential problems of its application in a society with gross inequality and power discrepancies. This critique has as its foundation an acknowledgement that action needs to be taken to address the scourge of violence, while at the same time understanding the intersectionality of oppression and the uneven results achieved by liberal legal reform.

Ky artikull synon të analizojë zhvillimet në ushtrimin e juridiksionit gjyqësor administrativ në vendin tonë kryesisht pas viteve '90. Diskutimi i problematikave të shfaqura në zbatimin e këtij juridiksioni zë vend kryesor në këtë punim, duke konsideruar edhe projektligjin mbi gjykimin e mosmarrëveshjeve administrative qe u hartua ne vitin 2012 dhe u miratua po ate vit. Punimi mbështetet mbi premisat se qartësimi dhe zgjerimi i juridiksionit administrativ gjyqësor është tregues i forcimit të shtetit të së drejtës në të cilin pozitat e individit forcohen përkundrejt shtetit dhe ky i fundit reflekton llogaridhënie gjithnjë e më të qartë e më të madhe ndaj individit. Drejtësia administrative, pra edhe juridiksioni administrativ i gjykatës si pjesë e saj, në vendin tonë ka pësuar një sërë ndryshimesh rrënjësore pas viteve '90 të cilat janë marrë në analizë në artikull.

In celebration of the 25th (Jubilee) anniversary of the Law Reform and Development Commission of Namibia (LRDC), a number of scholars, both budding and experienced, gathered to think through questions that warrant legal and legislative intervention in Namibia. But more importantly, this platform afforded a golden opportunity to reflect on the role of the LRDC as a catalyst for legislative review, reform and development that will ultimately effect change for the benefit of the people. This is something we did through different contributions highlighting various aspects of the law reform and development agenda. In fact, some contributions have provided much needed scope for the LRDC to intervene in areas that require attention but that we did not think about. This book boasts a rich variety of topics but invariably, given the current socio-economic climate in the country, the balance tipped in favor of business and economic facets of Namibian law. This broad focus is important as the collision between the law and economics has not seen sufficient light in the Namibian literature landscape. It is our fervent hope that this will be a growing trend in the Namibian legal scholarship. Although legal publications are on the increase, books on business or commercial law are scarce. Works like this one aim at encouraging more publications and research on business law that assists in the betterment of the living conditions of all members of our society in Namibia.

Personal laws are statutory and customary laws applicable to particular religious or cultural groups within a national jurisdiction. They govern family relations in such matters as marriage and divorce, maintenance and succession. Personal laws remain prevalent in Asia and especially in South Asia and South-East Asia, including in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. Almost invariably, personal laws entrench inequalities with regard to women in two respects. Firstly, they sanction unequal rights of men and women within a given cultural or religious group. For example, they may permit women narrower grounds of divorce than men. Secondly, the application of personal laws results in unequal rights amongst women themselves, contingent on their religion or ethnicity. Hence, in a given jurisdiction, Muslim women may be entitled to smaller maintenance payments than Christian or Hindu women. This article highlights the discriminatory nature of personal laws and indicates a path for reform that is consonant with prevailing political conditions and minority group interests.

This project evaluates the effect of feminist activism to challenge discriminatory articles in the 2004 Family Law and 2003 Penal Code. The Moroccan women’s movement has been divided between competing feminist and anti-feminist coalitions regarding how best to promote gender equality and women’s rights in Moroccan society. Much of the friction between these coalitions can be explained by Sabatier’s Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), which delineates between coalitions based on conflicting core beliefs, policy core beliefs, and secondary beliefs. Whereas the feminists embrace the UN human rights discourse and concentrate on breaking down patriarchal hierarchies and male privilege, anti-feminists subscribe to complementary gender roles and the preeminence of religious legal references. This polarization limits the potential of feminist associations to effectively lobby the government for progressive legislative reforms. This project identifies two possible solutions to this dilemma. First, coalitions can inform and be informed by each other leading to policy-oriented learning. Second, the late Moroccan feminist scholar Fatima Mernissi and subsequent Islamic exegetes propose a potential synthesis of the dominant debates, an emancipatory progressive Muslim feminist discourse with an Islamic reference.

Using a feminist intersectional approach and ACF, I interview stakeholders from across the Moroccan political and social spectrum: women’s rights, human rights, youth, Amazigh, and single mother associations to incorporate a broad cross section of marginalized groups in Moroccan society. I conclude that the 2004 Family Law, although revolutionary at the time, as well as the antiquated 2003 Penal Code, systematically disadvantage women and leave them vulnerable to various forms of violence. In addition, certain articles in the law, though explicitly indiscriminate, are implemented in a way that systematically disadvantages women.

Furthermore, the legal codes are undergirded by complex, contested, and constructed patriarchal cultural norms and conservative religious interpretations that purport to protect women, yet instead, systematically disadvantage them and leave them vulnerable to precarious socioeconomic changes and various forms of violence. Finally, this project is broadly prescriptive in that Morocco is in many ways a regional leader in the advancement of women’s rights among Muslim-majority countries. Therefore, the case study identifies and details the most effective strategies, tools, and institutional mechanisms devised by Moroccan feminists to reform and implement discriminatory laws for potential appropriation by activists and advocates in other countries.

From a legal and social point of view, violence within the family and intimate relationships was condoned for a long time in Finland. Even though modernisation and calls for equality altered attitudes towards larger disapproval, Finnish legislation lacked provisions which would have justified state intervention in cases of domestic violence. Before 1994 husbands could not be convicted for raping their wives, and before 2004 assaults in private spaces led to prosecution law only if the victim demanded so. The lack of legal regulation reflected an understanding of violence in the private sphere and intimate relationships as a private matter. Inadequate regulation left domestic violence mainly outside legal control and the victims without the protection of physical autonomy. The legal regulation of violence in the private sphere began to change rapidly in the mid-1990s. This revision process led to considerable change in the way the state and the legal system reacted to violence in the family and in intimate relationships and regarded its victims. This study analyses this particular turn in legal regulation as an interaction of legal culture and social change in Finland. This turn coincided with a more comprehensive embracement of human rights thinking than before in the early 1990s in Finland. The research data consists of two sets of data. Primary data includes all legislative documents of legal revisions considering violence in the private sphere and intimate relationships during 1968 2004. Secondary data consists of news articles and material relating to campaigns and initiatives against violence in intimate relationships during the same time. The secondary data helps in perceiving the wider context of legal change; it demonstrates the interaction between the Finnish legal system and the surrounding society. Primary data has been analysed using a method which combines argumentative analysis and criminalisation theory. The method was formed in order to trace the justifications and reasons given for defining the boundaries legislation while taking into account the legal constraints binding the legislator. A growing emphasis on human rights in legislative processes has directed a growing amount of attention to the status of the victims when evaluating whether the legislation in question will produce just outcomes. This study shows how the application of human rights obligations forces the actors in the legal system to place themselves into the victim s position, and to admit the inequality and deficiency of legal regulation concerning the private sphere. The victim s perspective challenges many traditional views of liberalist justice and offender-orientated criminal policy, which hinders the adoption of the victim s perspective as a part of the justice system. At first change proceeded merely because of the binding force of the international human rights agreements and the pressure brought on by social actors. This lead to a situation where the focus was on fulfilling externally imposed and formally conceived demands, and the outcomes did not really improve the situation of the victims of violence. This is why the decisions of the lawmakers did not improve the position of the victim until the late 1990 s. The Finnish system of fundamental rights was reformed in 1995, which obliged the legal system to direct more effective regulation towards violence in the private sphere. This led, together with external pressure, to more tangible forms of interference in cases of violence and in protecting victims in the early 21st century. Despite this, the study suggests that acknowledging the perspective of the victim is still not built in to the legal system; external pressure is required in order for it to be adequately noticed. This is demonstrated in past legislative change, which has taken place in a piecemeal manner, and this continues to be the case concerning both the need for external pressure and the manner legislation is altered. Acknowledging the victim s point of view has made legal regulation more equal and has improved greatly the position of the intimate partnership violence victim, but on the other hand it has not led to more repressive criminal policy in Finland.

Mere weeks after Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, a nationwide debate broke out concerning constitutionalism and the development of rule of law within China. This debate, which would last for nearly a year, pitted a reform-oriented pro-constitutionalist side against a more leftist anti-constitutionalist side. It spread from the pages of newspapers and magazines to online social media, and was only brought to an end through an Internet crackdown. This debate provides a useful angle through which to analyse the leadership's perception of political reform and the architecture of the public order. This paper surveys the voices and venues of the debate itself, discusses the influence of the transitional period on the pro-constitutionalist side, and analyses the leadership's response.

This thesis focuses on assessing good governance and legal reform, especially under the World Bank projects which have been introduced to Indonesia after the financial crisis in 1997, and analyzes its impact on human rights.

This thesis attempts to deconstruct mainstream discourse and practice of good governance in Indonesia and criticize its connection with donor-driven legal reform issues which are importantly assessed by using a human rights perspective. By deconstructing the presence and absence of the World Bank’s projects of good governance and legal reform in Indonesia, it will picture legisprudence and its legal dynamic between text and context, particularly in assessing legislation-based human rights violations. This study uses a critical legal studies method, and focuses on labor legal reform as a neo-liberal project. Interviews and several focus group discussions were used by involving about 40 people, and it was conducted in Jakarta, Surabaya and Sidoarjo.

The findings of this study indicate that the World Bank projects on good governance systematically hegemonized and softly hijacked state and non-state institutions in Indonesia, particularly through bridge institutions which mystified the power asymmetry. These institutions have reproduced ‘truth’ and ‘imperatives projects’ under loan conditionalities, especially under a legal framework for development and its doctrine of rule of law. By analyzing three waves of labor legal reform in Indonesia post crisis (1997-2006), the World Bank has dominated the discourse of good governance and its legal reform.

The absence of this discourse is the issue of state obligation under a human rights framework which is shifted to good governance. Good governance favors a market friendly strategy, or in the case of labor, so called ‘labor market flexibility’. Labor market flexibility hugely impacts the deprivation of labor rights, especially on the issue of outsourcing, liberal minimum wage, long-term contract workers, and restraining the role of the state in labor dispute mechanism. In the legisprudence perspective, legal reforms are found as tools to legitimize systematic human rights violations through legislation projects. This thesis deconstructs a ‘market friendly human rights paradigm’ under the flag of good governance and legal reform.

Thesis was selected to be published into a book, published by OHRSD-Mahidol: Bangkok, 2007

In Michael Ng and Yun Zhao, eds., Chinese Legal Reform and the Global Legal Order: Adoption and Adaption (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press)
Abstract:
Over the past century, China has undertaken a series of legal reforms in order to establish a “modern” legal system. Despite the efforts of several generations of reformers, many commentators and scholars continue to find the Chinese legal system lacking in what they consider indispensable to a modern legal system or modern rule of law. They have often attributed this unsatisfactory outcome of China’s century-long legal transformation to incommensurability between Chinese tradition and modern values and institutions as represented by those of the industrialized Western countries since the nineteenth century. Underlying this view is a widespread assumption that there exist natural boundaries between “traditional” and “modern” law and between Chinese and Western law. To better understand the history of Chinese legal modernity, this essay argues that it is important to examine the question of how and why the Chinese legal system was labelled as traditional (and hence presumably incompatible with modern or Western law) in the first place.
As the first stage of China’s efforts to restructure its legal institutions after Western models (often through Japanese interlocutors), the late Qing legal reform of 1902-11 provides a valuable example of how Chinese law was turned into the traditional, inferior other of both Western and modern law. To understand the relevant processes and implications, we need to explore at least three questions: (1) How was Chinese law Orientalized or self-Orientalized and made incompatible with modern law? (2) How did the Chinese negotiate with the Euroamericentric notions of tradition and modernity? (3) How did the late Qing legal reform project contest or contribute to the traditionalization (chuantong hua) of Chinese law? By reexamining the changing sentiments and debates among the late Qing literati and officials during the last four decades of the Qing including the New Policy period of 1902-1911, this essay shows that the traditionalization of indigenous Chinese legal culture was both a cause and product of the legal reform movement over the past century. It also calls for more attention to the frequently overlooked symbolic epistemic violence that accompanied the Euroamericentric discourses of modern law and civilization and conditioned the Chinese legal reforms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I believe that instead of debating whether China has succeeded in “modernizing” its legal system, it would be more fruitful to understand the historical specificities and complexities of Chinese experiences and to problematize the normative assumptions of the dominant discourse of legal modernity.
I first trace how the dominant narrative of modern law came to affect late Qing understanding of Chinese and Western law and culture in the 1870s through the 1890s. Next, I re-examine debates in the Qing legal reform of 1902-11 to analyze how a Chinese legal tradition was constructed in contradistinction to Western or modern law. I offer some brief observations in the last section. Besides studying the issues mentioned earlier, this essay illustrates how real or constructed differences between Chinese and Western law were represented, politicized and institutionalized through the discourse of legal reform and modernity in the Sino-foreign contact zones during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This study looks into some of the reasons why women face obstacles to economic empowerment and tries to make recommendations on what reforms could be brought, whether legal, regulatory, or policy. It is a combination of analytical research and an empirical survey of individual stakeholders from a diversity of backgrounds. The study looks into two broad categories: business activities and inheritance. Various business practices serve as obstacles to women entrepreneurs and thus need to be revised. Furthermore, inheritance is an important way in which women can gain access to real property, which they could then use to seek a loan. However, the widespread practice in Afghanistan is to prevent a female from accessing her inheritance rights. Both the topics of business activities and inheritance are widely canvassed and recommendations are put forward on how the economic condition of women can be improved.

Legal reform has been a prominent point on the agenda since Xi Jinping took over the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the Third Plenum of the Party’s 18th National Congress in 2013, Xi proposed comprehensively pursuing four strategic political goals under the slogan “Four Comprehensives” (sige quanmian 四個全面). Two of the political goals, namely, to comprehensively strengthen discipline of the Party” (quanmian congyan zhidang 全面從嚴治黨) and to comprehensively rule the country according to the law” (quanmian yifa zhiguo 全面依法治國), set the grounds for the latest round of legal reform. The Central Leading Group for Deepening Overall Reform (Zhongyang quanmian shenhua gaige lingdao xiaozu 中央全面深化改革領導小組) was set up to carry out the “Four Comprehensives.” Deepening judicial reform in the direction of building a just and efficient judiciary that the citizens can trust is regarded as an integral part of the plan to comprehensively rule the country according to the law. In fact, 13 out of the 19 plenary sessions of the Leading Group involved the topic of judicial reform from 2014 to 2015. The call for “ruling the country according to the law” can be dated back to September 1997, when Jiang Zemin at the 15th CCP’s National Congress addressed the need to construct the socialist state in accordance with the law (jianshe shehuizhuyi fazhi guojia 建設社會主義法治國家). In recent years, the Chinese term fazhi 法治has re-emerged frequently in public discourse. Yet, observers of Chinese politics realise that the concept of fazhi by the Xi administration might not be best captured by the notion of “rule of law,” but would be better interpreted as “rule by law.” This article is intended to chart the details and implications of legal reform in the broader context of the pursuit of law-based governance and discusses the notion of fazhi under Xi’s leadership.

Turkey takes the lead in terms of violations of the European Convention on Human Rights (hereafter ECHR). The ECtHR condemns Turkey in most of the cases for the violation of article 6 providing the “Right to a Fair Trial”. After analyzing the European Court of Human Rights (hereafter ECtHR) decisions, it is established that the most problematic element in the context of the right to a fair trial is the “reasonable time”. The concept of “reasonable time” provided by article 6 of the ECHR - and reinforced by the ECtHR decisions - applies to civil, administrative and criminal cases.

In this study, the “reasonable time” violations are examined. Firstly, the paper discusses the reasons for which both civil and criminal cases are prolonged and the reasonable time is exceeded. The criterion we take as reference in this review is mainly the ECtHR jurisprudence. Secondly the paper discusses the reforms conceived in Turkish domestic law in order to overcome this problem, and how successful they have been so far in resolving this issue.

The women’s movement in Morocco has been divided by competing frameworks regarding how best to achieve women’s rights and improve women’s status within Moroccan society. Through in-depth interviews with leaders across the spectrum of the Moroccan women’s movement and by focusing on the two legal codes that provide the most promise for and combat discrimination against Moroccan women—the 2004 Family Code and the 2003 Penal Code—this article delineates how competing frameworks within the women’s movement evaluate public policy prescribed by the laws’ most controversial articles. Much of the friction between these competing frameworks can be explained by Sabatier’s Advocacy Coalition Framework, which divides advocacy alignments according to opposing and often conflicting core beliefs, policy core beliefs,
and policy prescriptions. Only by first understanding the competing frameworks within the movement and analyzing how they interpret policy evaluations and future prescriptions can the united women’s movement serve as a catalyst for Moroccan women’s advancement as a whole.

Ce texte rappelle qu’une réforme des règles relatives à la filiation visant à faire une place à deux parents de même sexe ne pourrait simplement refléter les pratiques sociales; au contraire, elle les influencerait aussi de différentes manières. En s’appuyant sur les recherches et les débats qui ont été principalement publiés en anglais, il compare les régimes mis en place au Royaume-Uni et au Québec afin de reconnaître la maternité des couples lesbiens dès la naissance d’un enfant né de la procréation assisté, sans passer par l’adoption. Ensuite, il compare les portraits de la maternité lesbienne qui s’en dégage avec ceux qui nous sont fournis par la recherche empirique sociologique. Ces comparaisons donneront lieu à des réflexions quant aux problèmes méthodologiques que soulèvent l’effort de rapprocher le droit et les pratiques sociales.

This text is a reminder that law reform in order to recognize two parents of the same sex cannot simply reflect social practice, but will influence it in different ways. Based on research and debates published principally in English, the text compares the regimes enacted in the United Kingdom and in Quebec to grant parental status respecting the children born of assisted procreation to lesbian couples. Then it compares the portraits of lesbian motherhood implicit in those regimes with those provided by sociological empirical research. These comparisons inspire reflections on the methodological difficulties engendered by efforts to draw together law and social practice.

"* Preface *:

What makes laws endure or change? When a law changes, how does a tradition of legal interpretation justify the innovation in light of its legal precedents and foundational texts? What is the function of the reasons given for laws? What relationship does law bear to social values? These interrelated questions fall under the heading of philosophy of law, yet it is mainly through the study of history that they can be probed. Answering these questions in different cultural and historical settings is a prerequisite for developing a general theory of law, for it makes distinguishing universal elements from culturally-specific parameters possible. In particular, a culturally specific feature of Islamic law is its religious character. One may ask, therefore, whether the fact that Muslim legal traditions invoke sacred authority makes an essential difference to the way the questions posed above are answered. In other words, does sacred law operate in a fundamentally different way from secular law? This book explores these questions through a study of the largest legal tradition in Islam, namely the Hanafi school of law.

The book begins by creating a general model of juristic decision making that describes any legal tradition, Islamic or not, in terms of a number of parameters. It does not presuppose that all legal traditions are identical, for the parameters in the model may vary from one tradition to another.  [continued]"""""""

On September 23rd , 2013, the Draft Bill on the Reform of the Spanish Criminal Code was submitted to Parliament. Among other changes, two new forms of murder are willing to be introduced, consisting in killing another human being (i) to facilitate the commission of another offence or (ii) to prevent its discovery. This paper addresses three groups of problems posed by each of these two new qualifying circumstances: problems of interpretation, problems of justification and, lastly, problems of double incrimination. The conclusion is reached that the planned reform is unnecessary both from a dogmatic and political point of view. Its application would furthermore be extremely diffi cult, making it all in all desirable for these two new forms of murder to be withdrawn from the Draft.

The indigenous people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh have been subjected to decades of land dispossession by various state and non-state actors. The indigenous peoples’ claims to land are under attack from Bengali settlers, state agencies such as the Forest Department of the Government of Bangladesh, and non-state actors such as private national and multinational companies which have found interest in appropriating land for development projects. The motives behind such actions have often been financial, political and even military. In this paper, I look into steps that can be taken to contain this dispossession by granting the indigenous people legal rights to their land through collective land titling based on customary law. While the titling procedure is underway, I argue, it is important to institute a robust requirement of consultation with the indigenous people through the Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) framework before any development projects can be undertaken in the region.

In South Africa, popular notions of the township family house derive from an interplay of customary norms and the racialised history of administration and urban government-particularly exclusion from urban property rights. They also represent an insistence on the materialisation of kinship through fixed property, and on the home as transcending individual ownership or market asset. Focusing on the metropolitan area of South Gauteng, this paper argues that township family houses require understanding and recognising in terms of urban customary rules, and addressing in the context of competing rights, custom, and the place of the law in formalising these. Urban custom, too often neglected in scholarship, warrants constitutional recognition. The paper contends that there is, in fact, acknowledgment in state administration and judicial decisions of the customary force of the family house, as collective and cross-generational. Yet this is always through practical norms rather than official ones, as sympathetic state representatives navigate the lack of legislation that would enable formal recognition. In our concluding discussion, we reflect on a constitutional basis for recognising the family house, noting that even issues of constitutional compliance are better attended to within the law rather than in its gaps.

The Invention of Transitional Justice: When a Law Reform Movement Becomes a Profession
Truth commissions refer to various judicial mechanisms and they have become emblematic of “transitional justice,” the most identifiable compo-nent of a set of pacification tools. The article shows that commissions were first grounded in local arrangements, as judicial proceedings were thought to be out of reach. Their justification in the name of restorative justice cen-tered on victims developed only later with the juridicization of the mecha-nism. Finally, the article shows that the legitimacy “transitional justice” has acquired owes much to its appropriation by different groups and to the professionalization of an international milieu of activist experts.

This article presents an outline of the several aspects related to the introduction of the saiban-in system. First, I will give an overview of the history of citizen participation in the administration of criminal justice in Japan and of the path that led to the introduction of the saiban-in system. Second, I will describe the structure of the saiban-in system itself and its structure within the contours of the Japanese criminal justice system. Finally, I will assess its criticism and the likely impact of the institution in the broader framework of the recent legal reforms concerning the administration of justice in Japan.