scholarly journals Beyond the Binary: Rethinking Gender Neutrality in Indian Rape Law

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-397
Author(s):  
Harshad PATHAK

AbstractDespite expanding the definition of rape under the Indian Penal Code to include non-penile-vaginal acts of penetration, the said definition continues to conform to a gender-specific notion of rape, based on a predetermined characterization of the victim-perpetrator framework on the basis of their genders. Herein, I will critique this idea of gender specificity in Indian rape law on the grounds that it reinforces a binary notion of gender, and results in gross underinclusion. Instead, it is more appropriate to adopt a human-rights-based approach in defining the offence of rape, and negate the role of gender in identifying the victims and perpetrators of an act of rape. The argument is pillared on a state’s obligation to not discriminate on the basis of sex, the recognition of transgender rights, and an assessment of the common grounds for opposing gender neutrality in Indian rape law.

Author(s):  
Олеся Сакаева ◽  
Olesya Sakaeva

The article deals with the tendency of establishment of human-rights-based gender-specific and child-centred approach to the preventing and combating trafficking in human beings. Comparative analysis of the norms of universal and regional international acts in the field of the combating trafficking in human beings shows that norms on the victims’ protection are primarily dispositive and the features of their implementation are left to national legislators. The role of the national referral mechanisms is emphasized because these mechanisms help to prevent illegal immigrants from posing as trafficking victims. The author hopes that humanizing tendency of contemporary international law on the whole and human-rights-based approach to the combating trafficking in human beings as its part will be growing; and holistic approach will be implemented by all countries in order to make the fight against human trafficking effective.


Author(s):  
Anna Gabriel Copeland

This article examines participatory rights as human rights and considers their importance to the lives of children and young people. It argues that a broad definition of participation needs to be used which takes us from 'round tables' to understanding that young people participate in many different ways. It points out that failure to recognise and respect the many varied ways that children and young people choose to participate results in a breach of their human rights. It shows how our socio-legal system operates to permit and support these breaches of the rights of children and young people, resulting in their alienation from civic society.


1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth J Keith

The Right Honourable Sir Kenneth Keith was the fourth speaker at the NZ Institute of International Affairs Seminar. In this article he describes and reflects upon the role of courts and judges in relation to the advancement of human rights, an issue covered in K J Keith (ed) Essays on Human Rights (Sweet and Maxwell, Wellington, 1968). The article is divided into two parts. The first part discusses international lawmakers attempting to protect individual groups of people from 1648 to 1948, including religious minorities and foreign traders, slaves, aboriginal natives, victims of armed conflict, and workers. The second part discusses how from 1945 to 1948, there was a shift in international law to universal protection. The author notes that while treaties are not part of domestic law, they may have a constitutional role, be relevant in determining the common law, give content to the words of a statute, help interpret legislation which is in line with a treaty, help interpret legislation which is designed to give general effect to a treaty (but which is silent on the particular matter), and help interpret and affect the operation of legislation to which the international text has no apparent direct relation. 


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 59-69
Author(s):  
Bohdana Huriy

In the article, we analysed the state of development of cultural policies in Amalgamated Territorial Communities (ATC) of Ukraine as well as the changes that have taken place in the cultural area in Ukraine. This was due to the activities of international grant programs, foundations and legislative organizations. We described the local situation in the ATC and detected their main cultural policies' problems. We also described the main stages of forming the international grant programs' sector, foundations and donors in the aforementioned area. We have identified the most active grant programs which operate in Ukraine. We defined that their activity supports discussion about the role of the culture, influences the processes of transformation and modernization of culture, and provides the possibilities for activists and specialists from the public sector to directly and transparently influence and advocate the cultural changes. The article presented results of the sociological research "The human rights-based approach to the content and implementation of cultural policies in Ukraine at ATC level". It was conducted with representatives of the "DOBRE" program, USAID, the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, «U-LEAD with Europe», the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine, and four regional representatives’ non-public organisations. We concluded that the international grant programs, foundations, and legislative organizations support the ATC in the forming and conducting development strategies and service delivery standards, transparently conducting their activities and financial accountability, supporting the community's involvement in the main processes and changing stereotypical approaches to understanding the needs of different population categories in Ukraine's ATC. During the four years of their activity, there has been significant development of communities in terms of infrastructure and human development and community resources. In particular, it is connected with Equality and Human Rights principles, the involvement of all community actors in the processes taking place in society, and constant feedback from the public.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Natalia Dianova

In the presented scientific article, an attempt was made to study the origins of the origin of the Yedinoverie Church in the Dnipro Ukraine, the main stages of its development in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the definition of a place of common faith in the structure of the Russian Orthodox Church. Historical conditions and peculiarities of the emergence of uniformity are analyzed as a form of compromise between the Old Believers and the official Orthodox Church. The role of the Slavonic and Kherson Archbishop Nikifor (Feotoki) in the origin of the common religion and the reaction of the Holy Synod to its actions is examined. The process of creating Yedinoverie Church and the dynamics of its development in different regions of the Dnipro Ukraine is studied. In the context of the topic under consideration, scientific and interest documents are published and archived, which give an opportunity to consider certain aspects of the activities of the clergymen of the faith Edinoverie Church. The attitude of soviet power and the official Orthodox Church to the unity of faith at various stages of the period under investigation is considered. The main criteria of pressure on the Old Believers to join them in the Yedinoverie Church are clarified. It is noted that the activities of the Russian government did not bring the desired results and the number of co-religionists did not increase significantly. The reasons were the unwillingness of the Old Believers to change their spiritual priorities and the disappointment in the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church. With time, already in the first half of the XX century, the Yedinoverie Church, fulfilling its mission of associating schismatics with official Orthodoxy, became an integral part of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its church temples and monasteries gradually changed their status to Orthodox.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (9) ◽  
pp. 1136
Author(s):  
Bang-Hai Wang ◽  
Zi-Heng Ding ◽  
Zhihao Ma ◽  
Shao-Ming Fei

We show the properties and characterization of coherence witnesses. We show methods for constructing coherence witnesses for an arbitrary coherent state. We investigate the problem of finding common coherence witnesses for certain class of states. We show that finitely many different witnesses W1,W2,⋯,Wn can detect some common coherent states if and only if ∑i=1ntiWi is still a witnesses for any nonnegative numbers ti(i=1,2,⋯,n). We show coherent states play the role of high-level witnesses. Thus, the common state problem is changed into the question of when different high-level witnesses (coherent states) can detect the same coherence witnesses. Moreover, we show a coherent state and its robust state have no common coherence witness and give a general way to construct optimal coherence witnesses for any comparable states.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
I.A. Aleshkova

The review examines the doctrinal approaches to the characterization of justice that have emerged at the national level. Based on the analysis of modern research on the development and improvement of the judicial system, this review examines the main trends and patterns in the development of the judiciary and justice. The review presents three monographs in which scholars emphasize that the effectiveness of justice is the most important aspect of a democratic society and the proper level of observance of fundamental human rights and freedoms. Scientists and practitioners constantly refer to the multifaceted definition of the concept of «justice», characterizing it from various sides and forms of implementation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 17-33
Author(s):  
Bharat H. Desai ◽  
Balraj K. Sidhu

This study examines the role of international courts and tribunals (ICTs) as important agents for the peaceful settlement of international disputes through the instrumentality of law. The rapid upswing in the number of specialised international courts and tribunals (in areas such as trade, human rights, law of the sea, criminal justice and environment) can be perceived as an attempt by sovereign States to maintain the viability of ICTs in light of perplexity in international relations, growing recognition of peaceful co-existence, quest for institutionalised cooperation and emergence of some of the “common concerns of humankind”, as well as the “duty to cooperate”. The article has sought to make sense of the emergence of ICTs as the “New Environmental Sentinels” and what it portends for our common future. Do we need a specialised international environmental court?


Author(s):  
Gregory Stump

Paradigm Function Morphology (PFM) is an evolving approach to modeling morphological systems in a precise and enlightening way. The fundamental insight of PFM is that words have both content and form and that in the context of an appropriately organized lexicon, a language’s morphology deduces a complex word’s form from its content. PFM is therefore a realizational theory: a language’s grammar and lexicon are assumed to provide a precise characterization of a word’s content, from which the language’s morphology then projects the corresponding form. Morphemes per se have no role in this theory; by contrast, paradigms have the essential role of defining the content that is realized by a language’s morphology. At the core of PFM is the notion of a paradigm function, a formal representation of the relation between a word’s content and its form; the definition of a language’s paradigm function is therefore the definition of its inflectional morphology. Recent elaborations of this idea assume a distinction between content paradigms and form paradigms, which makes it possible to account for a fact that is otherwise irreconcilable with current morphological theory—the fact that the set of morphosyntactic properties that determines a word’s syntax and semantics often differs from the set of properties (some of them morphomic) that determines a word’s inflectional form. Another recent innovation is the assumption that affixes and rules of morphology may be complex in the sense that they may be factored into smaller affixes and rules; the evidence favoring this assumption is manifold.


2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 427-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Niveau ◽  
J. Materi

AbstractPurposeTo extensively review the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) case law concerning psychiatric commitment, and to estimate the role of this supranational jurisprudence in the practice of contemporary psychiatry.MethodUsing keywords to search the ECHR computerized database “HUDOC”, we reviewed all cases concerning psychiatric commitment registered between September 1953 and December 31, 2004. Four groups were identified: applications declared inadmissible; applications accepted but not judged by the Court; pending cases; and cases judged by the Court.ResultsOf the almost 118,000 decisions taken by the ECHR in this time frame, we found 108 situations concerning psychiatric commitment. Forty-one of these applications were considered by the Court to be inadmissible. Twenty-four other cases were considered admissible but not judged by the ECHR. Three admissible cases were still pending at the end of 2004. The ECHR judged 40 cases, and found in 35 of them that one or several rights as guaranteed by the Convention had been violated.DiscussionThe ECHR protects the human rights of persons subjected to involuntary psychiatric commitment by creating supranational law in the following areas: definition of “unsoundness of mind”; conditions of lawfulness of detention; right to a review of detention by a Court; right to information; right to respect for private and family life; and conditions of confinement, which address inhuman and degrading treatment. The respective number of applications submitted to the ECHR did not depend on when the Convention had entered into force in that country.ConclusionThe possibility of an individual to access the ECHR depends on the degree of democracy in his country and on the access to legal assistance through non-governmental organizations or individual intervening parties.


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