I'm Not for Sale: Teaching About Human Trafficking

Even though slavery is illegal in all countries, it is still practiced in the form of human trafficking. In fact, there are about twenty-five million men, women, and children who are victims of human trafficking, a 150-billion-dollar industry that affects every country across the globe. Modern communications, such as the Internet and cell phones, exacerbate the problem of human trafficking and law enforcement faces enormous challenges in detecting, arresting, and prosecuting human traffickers. Victims, fifty percent of whom are children, are sold into prostitution, forced marriages, and forced labor in sweatshops, agriculture, and mining. Additionally, some victims are forced into armed conflicts as children; others are killed and their organs are harvested and sold on the black market. It is estimated that 50,000 victims are brought into the United States annually. Human trafficking is a moral outrage, as well as a violation of American and international law. Social studies education must teach about this egregious human rights violation and encourage students to become involved in stopping this modern-day slavery. By incorporating lessons into their curricula, all teachers can help produce young citizens dedicated to protecting human rights for all people.     

Spatial approaches to measure subnational inequality: Implications for Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations expressed an interest in reducing subnational (i.e., province and state level) inequality. We propose using a spatial decomposition of the Gini coefficient (SDGC) to track changes in subnational inequality. Typically, agencies do not track summary measures of subnational clustering of development indicators. Tracking changes in the SDGC can help measure and reduce regional inequality. To illustrate the use of the SDGC, we first present data for 93 nations to obtain cross‐sectional variation. Next, to illustrate how the SDGC trends over time, changes in the Human Development Index in Mongolia are compared to Russia and China. The SDGC can show improvement, decline and persistent clustering of subnational level inequality. The SDGC is a useful measure for the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.     

Deaf access to justice in Northern Ireland: rethinking ‘Reasonable Adjustment’ in the Disability Discrimination Act

Abstract

This article provides findings of a qualitative study exploring the interactions of eight Deaf participants and one hearing ally with the justice system in Northern Ireland, where the Disability Discrimination Act requires solicitors to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ in order to provide effective access to Deaf clients. Three thematic categories emerged: (a) barriers to accessing justice, (b) work Deaf people do for access, and (c) the need to educate solicitors about access. A central strain ran through these themes: the idea that ‘reasonable adjustment’ must reflect the value of sign language interpreters in facilitating effective communication access for all the parties.     

NGOs, Global Governance and the UN: NGOs as “Guardians of the Reform of the International System”

The role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the United Nations (UN), as well as in world politics in general, is increasingly gaining the attention of scholars of international law, political science and social anthropology. Using extensive earlier research on NGO-UN relations and on the concept of global governance, it is concluded that although NGOs are becoming increasingly influential actors on the international arena, several problems impede their influence from growing within the UN. Once the inefficiencies of NGOs participation in United Nations’ bodies and institutions have been described, we propose some modalities of reform of this Organization, with the purpose of improving the involvement of world civil society in UN decision-making processes, and increasing its democratic profile. Finally, the study suggests several areas that require future research and more in-depth study in order to make predictions about how NGO-UN relations will evolve in the coming decades.

现代国际法中的集体安全制度

国际社会从各国实行的单独安全保障机制过渡到集体安全保障机制,《联合国宪章》建立了现行有效的全世界范围内的集体安全机制。分析《联合国宪章》所建立的集体安全机制目前面临的诸多挑战,并从加强国际法立法、解释,完善《联合国宪章》等方面提出加强集体安全机制的若干措施。     

LGBTQI-identified human rights defenders: courage in the face of adversity at the United Nations

The role of LGBTQI human rights defenders in the international arena at the United Nations (UN) is a particularly risky and insecure one, especially for those who themselves identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, two spirit, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI). This article focuses on the anecdotal experiences of LGBTQI-identified human rights defenders and their work at the UN, observed and noted during a research study examining the degree of recognition and legitimacy LGBTQIs have at the UN. Much courage is required on the part of LGBTQI-identified human rights defenders who, while defending others in their communities, themselves face opposition from those within the UN who hold traditional, religious, and culturally based values, as well as a result of state sovereignty and state-sanctioned criminalisation of their gender and sexual diversity.     

Impact of a continuing professional development intervention on midwifery academics’ awareness of cultural safety

Background

Cultural safety in higher education learning and teaching environments is paramount to positive educational outcomes for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander (hereafter called First Peoples) students. There is a lack of research evaluating the impact of continuing professional development on midwifery academics' awareness of cultural safety.

First‐Price Auctions With General Information Structures: Implications for Bidding and Revenue

We explore the impact of private information in sealed‐bid first‐price auctions. For a given symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over values, we characterize the lowest winning‐bid distribution that can arise across all information structures and equilibria. The information and equilibrium attaining this minimum leave bidders indifferent between their equilibrium bids and all higher bids. Our results provide lower bounds for bids and revenue with asymmetric distributions over values. We also report further characterizations of revenue and bidder surplus including upper bounds on revenue. Our work has implications for the identification of value distributions from data on winning bids and for the informationally robust comparison of alternative auction mechanisms.     

In Whose Interest? The UN's Strategic Rapprochement with Business in the Sustainable Development Agenda

Following the Rio+20 conference and in anticipation of the end of the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations is at the centre of debates on the future of sustainable development. In these debates, the UN Secretariat has positioned transnational corporations as essential and legitimate actors for new sustainable development goals. This policy does not follow a direct mandate from member states. Rather, the UN's rapprochement with business in the ‘Post-2015’ process should be seen as an example of independent decision-making by the organization within the constraints of the current world order. This strategy dates back to the late 1990s and is meant to increase the UN's authority and legitimacy and expand its mandate by making it more relevant to powerful actors in the international arena. The article questions whether the organization's strategy vis-à-vis business is producing the anticipated effects, or rather reveals institutional dysfunction.     

Jewish power and powerlessness: Prague Zionists and the Paris Peace Conference

This article explores how perceptions of Jewish power shaped the negotiations between Czechoslovak leaders and Jewish minority representatives at the time of the Paris Peace Conference. In the aftermath of the First World War, Prague-based Zionists embarked on a mission to convince Czechoslovak elites that attacks on Jews were detrimental to the internal stability of the new state and to Czechoslovak interests abroad. As Edvard Bene?, the head of the Czechoslovak delegation in Paris, worked to cultivate an image of the new state as more “Western” and “civilised” than other successor states – a strategy meant to garner international support for Czechoslovak territorial demands and its projected absorption of large minority populations – Jewish activists encouraged his uncertainty with regard to Jews' influence on Western audiences and statesmen. They did so in order to convince him to accept their demands for special protection clauses for the new country's Jews. The paper thus shows that the unprecedented victimisation of Jews and the upsurge in antisemitism during and after the war coexisted with a new bold and public Jewish activism. Yet, Jewish leaders did not in the end have the ability to convince Bene? and his colleagues to give in to international Jewish demands for special protection. Instead, they sought to cultivate a strategic alliance between the state's Czech elite and the Jewish minority which centred on the claim that Czechoslovakia was a particularly welcoming and tolerant place for Jews, an image that would evolve into a significant component of the myth of Czechoslovakia as an island of democracy in Eastern Europe.