Red and Black Day

The last day of Term 2 proved to be a very colourful event. Jarvis Liddington of Room 7 organised the Red and Black day to "raise money and cans for people in Christchurch who dont have power and water". As you can see from the photos, everyone got into the spirit and $160 and a heap of cans were collected on the day! Jarvis will be one of the children delivering the goodies to one of the schools on the east side of the city.
Well done to Jarvis for showing kindness and consideration to others. Awesome Addington Qualities!

A Few Google News Design Changes

Posted by Jasson Schrock, User Experience Designer

Beginning today in the U.S. English edition of News, you may notice a few changes in the look and feel. This is part of a Google-wide initiative to improve your experience, and today we’re happy to extend this to Google News.

For starters, we’ve cleaned up the Google News homepage a bit. With fewer visual distractions and less clutter on the page, it should be faster to find the news important to you. The editions menu and “Personalize” button at the top should be easier to see. The “Personalize” button links to your recently consolidated personalization settings including your preferences for topics and favorite sources. Throughout the site, all the features and functionality are still there, but this updated design is aligned with the new consistent look across other recently updated Google sites like Gmail, Maps and Search.

Before

After

In the coming months, you’ll continue to see more improvements to the layout and design of the site, and we’ll also expand internationally.

Helllooo!

Wow, time flies when you're having fun! It also flies when you've got builders in, when you're redecorating a house by yourself, when you're ferrying kids back and forth across country, when you're trying to finish a novel, and when you're trying not to turn your three and a half złoty Carrefour pizza into a carbonised frisbee.

Yes, this is the big 'hello, I'm still alive and still updating the blog' post, at which I'm becoming unhappily good. So rather than make grand promises of impending content updates, I'll just say, don't give up hope yet (all one of you left there), there's still life left in the old girl yet! 

(Oh, okay, one grand promise then: Next Week Na Pewno!)

Jim :)

Summer Break

Dear readers, I am taking a summer break. No posting for the coming weeks. I will be back in the second half of August. Enjoy your summer, with or without the European Convention!

Factsheet on Extraterritorial Jurisdiction

For those who like summertime puzzles, the Court has now published a factsheet on its website on "Extra-territorial jurisdiction of ECHR States". It contains the most important decisions and judgments on extraterritoriality of the ECHR of both the former Commission of Human Rights and the Court. The recent Al-Skeini and Al-Jedda judgments have been included. When reading through these very short summaries, one realises once more that the conundrum of possibilities has not found definitive answers yet. And even for those who do solve the puzzle of possible contradictions, the factsheet indicates that "This factsheet is not exhaustive and does not bind the Court".

The full list of factsheets, several of which have been added or updated in the past few months, can be found here.

Strasbourg Consortium on Freedom of Conscience and Religion

As a particular niche for Strasbourg watchers, let me refer you to a anotehr website: the Strasbourg Consortium. It is a network of academic institutions interested in the issue of freedom of conscience and religion at the European Court of Human Rights. It has regular update on news in this area. The site contains reports and a small collection of commentaries on cases, a bibliography on the topic, and updates on conferences and meetings on the freedom of conscience and religion. One can register to stay updated. A valuable resource for all Article 9 ECHR-related issues!

Shareable Google News badges for your favorite topics

Posted by Natasha Mohanty, Engineer, Google News

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

On Google News, the average reader of political news has read 20 articles about politics in the last six months. Where do you stand?

Starting today, in the U.S. edition of Google News, you can see how voracious a news reader you are by earning Google News badges as you read articles about your favorite topics. The more you read, the higher level badge you’ll receive, starting with Bronze, then moving up the ladder to Silver, Gold, Platinum and finally, Ultimate.



We have more than 500 badges available, so no matter what kind of news you’re into, there’s a badge out there for you. Here’s a taste:

Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends. Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are. You can also add custom sections by hovering on a badge and clicking “add section” to read more about your favorite topics. To get started with badges, visit Google News from a signed-in account with web history enabled and then visit this page on our Help Center for instructions.

This is just the first step—the bronze release, if you will—of Google News badges. Once we see how badges are used and shared, we look forward to taking this feature to the next level.

In the spirit of continually trying to improve Google News, we have heard loud and clear from the many of you who asked us to separate our Sci/Tech section into two distinct sections. We are happy to report that we have now done this for all English editions, with more languages coming soon. We also combined some personalization settings from the “News for you” and News Settings menu into one handy sidebar at the top right corner of the home page, so you can easily tell us what you want to read on your Google News.



We hope you’ll badge up on Google News to keep track of what you’re reading, read more of what you love and share your passions with your friends.

Working Paper on Interim Measures

My friends and colleagues Yves Haeck, Clara Burbano Herrera, and Leo Zwaak (of Ghent and Utrecht University) have just posted a working paper on SSRN on the issue of interim measures of the European Court, on which they are specialists. The paper is entitled "Strasbourg’s Interim Measures Under Fire: Does the Rising Number of State Incompliances with Interim Measures Pose a Threat to the European Court of Human Rights?" and will later appear in this year's volume (2011) of the European Yearbook on Human Rights. This is the abstract:

Being a daily working tool for the European Court of Human Rights to prevent irreparable damage to persons in a situation of extreme gravity and urgency, and thus to potential victims of violations of a right or freedom under the European Convention, ‘interim measures’ have over time acquired a growing importance in the Court’s case-law. Indeed, currently interim measures play a key role in many cases that are brought before Strasbourg. Nonetheless, States, when faced with such measures requiring them to act, sometimes refuse to abide by them. This contribution aims to give an overview of recent State incompliances. It is argued that their number, both with regard to terrorism-related and non-terrorism-related cases is steadily growing, as is the number of perpetrators, not only among the ‘new’ Member States, but also among the ‘older’ Member States and even the ‘founding fathers’ of the Council of Europe, and that this can have a negative effect on the supervisory system as a whole. Some initiatives can, however, be taken by the European Court itself and the Committee of Ministers to improve and streamline the procedure with regard to interim measures, whereby all actors in the dispute may benefit.

New Articles on ECHR

The most recent issue of the Inter-American and European Human Rights Journal is out now (vol. 3, Nos. 1-2, 2010). It includes a number of articles that directly relate to the European Convention on Human Rights. These are:

* Marc Bossuyt, 'Judges on Thin Ice: The European Court of Human Rights and the Treatment of Asylum Seekers';

* Jochen Moerman, 'A Critical Analysis of the Prohibition of Slavery and Forced Labour Under Article 4 of the European Convention of Human Rights';

* Clara Burbano Herrera, ''SOS European Court of Human Rights': Protocol No. 14 bis Urgently Reforms the Institutional Framework While Awaiting the Entry into Force of Protocol No. 14'.

Paper on Rozakis' Separate Opinions

George Letsas of University College London has posted a working paper on SSRN on the separate opinions of Greek ECtHR judge Rozakis. It's entitled 'Judge Rozakis's Separate Opinions and the Strasbourg Dilemma'. This is the abstract:

Separate opinions in the European Court of Human Rights have been pivotal for the development of the Court's jurisprudence and for shaping the Court's judicial style. The paper focuses on the separate opinions of the Vice-President of the Court, judge Christos Rozakis. It shows that judge Rozakis's separate opinions have consistently urged for substantive scrutiny of the necessity of state interference with the applicant's rights, while being critical of granting states a margin of appreciation. The paper argues that Rozakis's critique of the margin of appreciation, as found in his separate opinions, will be one of the Court's most important legacies in the years to come.

Swiss Minaret Decisions

Ever since 2009 when the Swiss people voted, through a referendum, to include in their Constitution a general ban on building minarets, it was to be expected that the European Court of Human Rights would be called upon sooner or later to express itself on the compatibility of such a ban with the ECHR. Last week produced an inconclusive intermediate step. In two almost identical admissibility decisions the Court declared a number of complaints by Swiss Muslim organisations and the former spoekesman for the Geneva mosque inadmissible. The Court concluded that none of the applicants could be seen as a victim of the ban. The cases, Ouardiri v. Switzerland and Ligue des Musulmans de Suisse and Others v. Switzerland (both in French only) read as short but detailed treatises on the victim requirement in the ECHR. The press release in English can be found here. It is also available in German.

The Court held that the applications amounted to an actio popularis, which the Strasbourg system does not allow for. The applicants were not direct victims nor indirect (such as for example the family of a deceased person can sometimes be). They had not shown, according to the Court, that they were themselves affected by the ban - none had argued to plan to build a minaret. Nor could they be seen as potential victims in the Court's view. The notion of 'potential victim' is only exceptionally used in Strasbourg. A classic example is the Dudgeon case of 1981: a homosexual man in Northern Ireland complained about legislation criminalising acts between male adults. Even though he had not been convicted himself, the Court in that case held that the legislation forced him to change his behavior and therefore affected him. In all cases the Court requires some kind of link between the applicant and the prejudice he or she claims to have suffered. The Court's application of this principle to the particular case may not be entirely surprising, but is not uncontested. It distinguished Mr Ouardiri's case for example from cases criminalising homosexual behavior not only on the ground that the minaret ban does not criminalise behavior but also on the ground that it is not prone to influence the applicant's behavior who remains free to exercise his islamic religion. Nolens volens, the Court here indirectly makes an assessment of what falls within the scope of exercising one's islamic religion: having a minaret from which the muezzin calls the faithful to the mosque to pray does not fall within that ambit apparently. This may be a defensible assessment, but it is a stance nonetheless. Another point is that the discrimination aspect is barely touched upon as a result of the angle from which the Court approached the cases. Let us suppose that the Swiss would have voted for a ban on Muslims or non-whites to marry other Swiss (again without criminalising, but just making it practically impossible). Would the Court then still declare applications inadmissible until an applicant had professed direct plans to marry? Difficult issues ...

One may note, by the way, that the decision was taken by a majority of votes. Apparently the seven judges of the second section of the Court could not agree. It's a pity all the more that admissibility decisions never include separate opinions.

Obviously the issue may return to Strasbourg, once there will be an applicant whose concrete request to build a (mosque with) minaret was formally refused by the Swiss authorities. But the whole battle may be fought in Swiss courts themselves. To be continued, no doubt!

Walking The Walk - Part 1

Hail, friends. I'm writing to you today on Friday, when according to all my stated plans, I should have done this on Wednesday. Well, sometimes I forget or get swamped with work and I do miss a post, as you might have noticed lately. But that's okay; this is just a blog, and as informative and useful a tool as I'd like it to be for you, at the end of the day it's a purely frivolous addition to your translating diet.

But, there are some things that as language professionals (I love that term, it almost makes us sound dangerous), we need to bring a more fastidious approach to. Deadlines, invoicing, fulfilling promises of cooperation and keeping appointments when we make them. Filing taxes, paying bills - these are but a few examples of the staples of a translator's life, especially if you're freelance and working from home as many of us do.

Recently, I've had a few experiences with student translators, and with some older, experienced agency staff that have made me think again about Personal Responsibility. Yes, with capital letters nawet! I don't want to be a drag, but it's an important thing and one that I always mention in my lectures to student translators and so on. It's also something that it never hurts to be reminded of, no matter what your age or experience.


What do I usually have to say about it? (Forgive me, I'm a Gemini, talking is one of my favourite things ;). As it applies to translators, I usually break it down into three categories: discipline, ethics, behaviour, and attitude. These are all mental, abstract things that obviously you can't learn from a book, but as they apply to being a translator, by the end of your formal academic training you'll have the foundations of them anyway. Even so, if you then go straight into freelancing, you'll have little direct physical contact with other people in your field - as opposed to if you went into a translating office and had to work with them every day.
  
There's a lot to be said for going that route, but it's largely another topic and one that we covered briefly back here. What's good about it though is that you quickly learn about doing your work on time and with a minimum of fuss. One problem with working from home is that it's easier to whip up all sorts of drama and shenanigans in your head when there's a problem. It's easier to mis-read the tone of an email, especially if it's not written in the native language of the writer. In short,  you can potentially get into all sorts of mess by not having your colleagues right there with you. I know this because I've done it both ways - from home, and in an office. (After a few years of working with people of different nationalities, you'll also come to understand their cultural quirks and you'll see some of the patterns behind the national stereotypes that float around). 

As a student, you have a certain leeway built into your deadlines. Of course, you have to get your work back on time, and it has to be the best and has to conform to all sorts of formatting rules etc etc itd itp. Later on, if you do Master's or Post-Grad degrees, the schedules become even looser, esp. with wandering professors who sometimes forget they have students who need consultation and so on. 

But this all changes the moment you take a job from a client. They choose you to do their translation, and a price is agreed - that's your money - and a deadline. The deadline comes from the fact that they have a whole life which you know nothing about, and for whatever reason their translation needs to be available from that time onwards. Of course, this is largely based on doing direct deals with clients; with agencies it's a different story because very often they'll push you like a donkey to finish the work a.s.a.p., and then two weeks later casually say, 'Oh, there are all kinds of problems with this text, you naughty translator. Please check all this stuff.' And you think, 'Shit, if I had a week to do it, how come they had two to check it?' Yeah, it sucks, but that's the business - and another part of personal responsibility is not freaking out when you are presented with your own mistakes - whether they're valid or not. But I digress.

It all changes in this situation (as compared to being a student writing a thesis or papers etc) because now you are being paid for your work. And of course, any time money is involved, especially hundreds of clams for big, long, important documents, everyone becomes very, very sensitive. And whilst you're working with new clients or agents, and you're still not sure if you can trust them to give you a proper ST or even pay you afterwards without a load of song and dance, and they're still not sure that you're the right one of the eleventy billion translators to entrust with their work - then you have to be The Big Guy for everyone involved. Your responsibility now is to your client (doing the best job you can), yourself (doing the best job you can and getting paid for it), and to the gas/electricity/landlord/ZUS/shoe shop (paying your bills and being a responsible human being generally).


 Okay, enough already. Pompous Englishman, telling us the obvious! Yeah, well, sometimes the obvious is not as obvious as it should be. And if you can endure another few seconds of my terrible over-bearing sermon before I disappear to prepare the fun stuff for Sunday, it is my own belief that humility is the greatest asset a human being can have. From it, all other virtues flow. The lack of humility is represented by Ego - and ego in a translator (or proofreader!) is a veeeeery dangerous thing...

Enough, I'm gone already! :D

Jim :)

Long Awaited Al-Skeini and Al-Jedda Judgments Delivered

Today, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered its long awaited judgments in the cases of Al-Skeini and others v. the United Kingdom and Al-Jedda v. the United Kingdom. The first case concerned civilians killed during British security operations in Iraq. The second case was about the the internment of an Iraqi for more than three years in a detention centre in Basrah which was run by British forces.

In a nutshell, the Court held that both situations fell within the United Kingdom's jurisdiction, and it found violations of the procedural duties under the right to life in the first case (on which the Court did hold that it had to applied realistically, considering the breakdown of almost everything in post-Saddam Iraq)and of the right to liberty in the second one.

An important set of cases in many respects: on human rights obligations of armed forces, on the extraterritorial reach of the ECHR, on the relationship with UN Security Council decisions and on the attribution of responsiblity under international law. In Al-Jedda for example, the Court distinguished the Iraqi situation from the one in Kosovo holding that "the Court considers that the United Nations Security Council had neither effective control nor ultimate authority and control over the acts and omissions of troops within the Multi-National Force." Thus it held the UK to account (contrary to cases against other European countries in the Kosovo situation). Food for thought and for a lot of academic and politico-military discussion to follow, no doubt!

Once again, let me point to an, as ever, well-phrased concurring opinion of Judge Bonello, of which I will only cite the very last part here:

37. I confess to be quite unimpressed by the pleadings of the United Kingdom Government to the effect that exporting the European Convention on Human Rights to Iraq would have amounted to “human rights imperialism”. It ill behoves a State that imposed its military imperialism over another sovereign State without the frailest imprimatur from the international community, to resent the charge of having exported human rights imperialism to the vanquished enemy. It is like wearing with conceit your badge of international law banditry, but then recoiling in shock at being suspected of human rights promotion.

38. Personally, I would have respected better these virginal blushes of some statesmen had they worn them the other way round. Being bountiful with military imperialism but bashful of the stigma of human rights imperialism, sounds to me like not resisting sufficiently the urge to frequent the lower neighbourhoods of political inconstancy. For my part, I believe that those who export war ought to see to the parallel export of guarantees against the atrocities of war. And then, if necessary, bear with some fortitude the opprobrium of being labelled human rights imperialists.

39. I, for one, advertise my diversity. At my age, it may no longer be elegant to have dreams. But that of being branded in perpetuity a human rights imperialist, I acknowledge sounds to me particularly seductive.

Press releases on the two cases can be found on the website of the Court.

Please also read the - as ever - insightful comments of Marko Milanovic on EjilTalk!

New Academic Articles on ECHR

Please find below a new batch of ECHR-related readings for the summer:

* J. Lapitskaya, 'ECHR, Russia, and Chechyna: two is not company and three is definitely a crowd', New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, vol. 43, No. 2 (2010/2011) pp. 479-548.

* J. Chevalier-Watts, 'The phenomena of enforced disappearances in Turkey and Chechnya: Strasbourg’s noble cause?' Human Rights Review, vol. 11, no. 4 (2010) pp. 469-489.

The paper critically reviews the challenges facing the European Court of Human Rights when hearing claims being brought under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights in relation to the phenomena of enforced disappearances as a result of the internal armed conflicts of Turkey and Chechnya. The paper traces the phenomenal and, oftentimes, controversial evolution of the associated jurisprudence and provides evidence of judicial disparities and inconsistencies that are not easily rationalised. Such inconsistencies suggest that whilst Strasbourg’s intention may be to ensure accountability in the face of adversity and human atrocities, its noble cause may be based on judicially unsubstantial foundations.

And in the same issue :

* R. Nigro, 'The margin of appreciation doctrine and the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights on the islamic veil', pp. 531-564.

In its judicial activity, the European Court of Human Rights increasingly resorts to the margin of appreciation doctrine as a means of granting States the discretionary power to adopt, both positive steps to comply with the European Convention on Human Rights and steps which, although interfering with some of the rights and freedoms sanctioned by it, are considered to be justifiable because they are necessary to preserve public order and/or to protect the rights and freedoms of others in a democratic society. However, the margin of appreciation doctrine does not appear in the text of the European Convention or in its drafting history.1 This is the reason why, on several occasions, legal scholarship has examined the legal basis of such doctrine and questioned the consequences of the use the European Court makes of it within the protection of the human rights system. Manifold theories have thus been put forward justifying the Court’s recourse to the discretionary power of States. As we shall illustrate, these theories offer only a partial, yet insufficiently clear, explanation of the margin of appreciation doctrine. This is apparent in the European Court’ case-law on the Islamic veil—lastly in the recent admissibility decisions of 30 June 2009 in Aktas v. France, Bayrak v. France, Gamaleddyn v. France and Ghazal v. France—in which the power granted to some State authorities to ban the headscarf, seems to have been used by the Strasbourg judges to set general principles, in a manner and for purposes that are incompatible with the discretionary powers of States. Before analysing the margin of appreciation doctrine in the European Court’s jurisprudence on the Islamic veil, we should briefly analyse the most significant judgments through which the Court has set the enforcement criteria of the margin of appreciation; and the main theories in legal academic literature, in order to better understand how the approach followed in the case-law on the Islamic veil draws away from both the previous jurisprudence of the Court and the scholars’ contributions and comments on the subject.

For more recent human rights articles, see the newest 'current contents' selection of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM).

Nicholas Bratza Elected Court President

Yesterday, the European Court of Human Rights elected Sir Nicholas Bratza as its new president. When the term of the current president, the French judge Costa, ends at the beginning of November, Bratza will succeed him in that position. The 66-year old Bratza is by far one of the most experienced judges in Strasbourg. He has been a juge at the Court ever since it became a fulltime Court in 1998. and before that, he had served as a member of the European Commission of Human Rights between 1993 and 1998. Bratza was section president between 1998 and 2000 and has been in that function for the second time ever since 2001. Since 2007 he has also been vice-president of the Court. He was elected in the position of president by his fellow judges in a secret ballot.

Bratza in many ways is a true European, with a Serbian father (famous violinist Milan Bratza) and an English mother. Several newspapers yesterday and today pointed to the fact that there might be political considerations for electing the British judge as president. After all, the United Kingdom is probably the country where debates about the Court are currently most vehement. Although it may be a nice coincidence that the external face of the Court is British, I think experience and seniority weighed more heavily in the minds of the judges when they had to cast their vote. With his extensive experience, Sir Nicholas is simply one of the judges with the largest institutional memory. With an ever-expanding case-load, that is a very welcome thing in order to ensure coherence and to avoid reinventing the wheel all the time.

Re-reading an old interview with Bratza in the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph in 2003, one sees that the Telegraph had some foresight as it claimed that Bratza "stands a good chance of becoming president in the future - if he is prepared to give up some of his casework for the more high-profile responsibilities of the most senior judge, such as lobbying member states to support essential reforms." An Op-Ed in the Guardian of last February also argued Bratza's case.

The Week in Review - Julythe 3rd, 2011

Well well, not only did I totally black out on Wednesday and forget to do anything, but I wake up and find it's July already! Strangely, about thirty people I know all have birthdays in July, with most of them falling in the first two weeks. I always think of them as the Martial Law baby-boomers since they were all born early to mid eighties. So happy birthday all you July birthday people!

Speaking of the book of Face, we had quite an interesting and fun week over on The Bad Article's page there. On Monday, I stumbled bleary-eyed across a link to one of those fashionable 'Facebook Fail' type sites, with an amusingly pedantic slant which we can all enjoy. Haf a luk hear and C wot U fink.

Early Tuesday I tripped over an old friend, enables to. Check this out:

The availability of consumables in the form of solid wires and modern welding equipment enables to undertake tests of welding materials for operation at higher temperatures.

enables to is a broken phrase that can't be used without a personal pronoun. In the generic sense that we most often encounter it, enables one to would work best. If context or conscience won't allow you to do that though, then also consider allow(s) to/for followed by an infinitive verb with an 'of':
The availability of consumables in the form of solid wires and modern welding equipment enables one to undertake tests of welding materials for operation at higher temperatures.

The availability of consumables in the form of solid wires and modern welding equipment allows for undertaking of tests of welding materials for operation at higher temperatures.
Thanks to Adam Ł. for pointing out the medicinal flavour of infinitive+of, and also for some interesting points which I encourage you to read for yourselves.

Wednesday then saw enables to's best friend, allowed to, stick it's foot out and trip me with This also allowed to avoid the formation of unfavourable geometric structures on the surface. At the time I warned of a possible conspiracy, and asked you if you knew what it was. Niestety, no one replied, and I say niestety because now I'll be buggered if I can remember what my point was with that ambiguous question... I suspect it was something to do with some kind of verb usage without a personal pronoun being wrong and against nature etc.

Oh well, moving cautiously onwards around various potholes and broken stones, Wednesday afternoon broke the stunning revelation that one of punctuation's most divisive issues had just been resolved by Oxford in one swift, brutal move: the Oxford Comma is No More! (Lots of fun links on that page, check them out too).

Thursday brushed rudely by, sneaking an opportunistic hand into my coat pocket, and finding nothing (ha!) instead left a crumpled note there amongst the fluff:
In 1973, new machines were installed. In the next years, the company increased its production by 50%. Written in blood underneath was this correction:  In 1973, new machines were installed. In the following years, the company increased its production by 50%. I have to say I agree with this. It's a very common mistake - very common. Although my own explanation at the time was also wrong, the right way of thinking about it is that one can not say 'in the next (time word)' without an intervening quantifier. For example: In the next days, I will be leaving for Rome MUST be In the next few days, I will be leaving for Rome. (uwaga uwaga! In the next several days... is BAD. In the next few days ... is okay. Confusingly, For the next several days is okay though).

Finally, Thursday bowled me over on the corner, kicked me in the grapes and ran off at speed, but not before it shouted a horrible recurring also mistake at me, the gory details of which I leave for you to interpret here. Fortunately, Adam and Sabina were around to help me to my feet and dust me off. Take note of this also character, because I'm preparing an article on it which will come the week after next; next week we'll have our over-due Doty piece!

Until then,

Jim,
Ward 3,
City Hospital,
Dept. of Trips, Stumbles and Falls.