European Yearbook on Human Rights 2011 Published

The newest edition of the European Yearbook on Human Rights (2011) has been published. The yearbook includes a very wide range of articles on human rights, including a number on the ECHR. This is the abstract:

In the human rights field, 2010 was a year both of continuity and reform: from the 10th anniversary of the European Charter on Fundamental Rights and the quickening pace of the EU’s accession to the European Convention on Human Rights to the reform of the Human Rights Council.

Defining and discussing key developments in human rights in Europe and in the world, the third edition of the European Yearbook on Human Rights brings together 33 contributions by renowned human rights experts that provide a much needed overview and much sought after analysis.

Edited jointly by representatives of four major European human rights research, teaching and training institutions, the Yearbook 2011 contains extensive sections on developments in the field of the three main organizations charged with securing human rights in Europe: EU, Council of Europe and OSCE. A further chapter contains contributions on the role of civil society in human rights protection and on cross-cutting topics.

Holistic in its approach, but detailed in its analyses, the European Yearbook on Human Rights 2011 provides its readers with a comprehensive overview of the human rights situation in Europe in 2010. The impressive array of authors – academics and diplomats, practitioners and human rights experts – makes the book essential reading for anyone interested in human rights in Europe and beyond.

The articles relating to the European Convention on Human Rights are:

* L’adhésion de l’Union européenne à la Convention européenne des droits de l’homme et des libertés fondamentales, by J. Jacqué (p. 143-158)
* Accession revisited: will fundamental rights protection trump the European Union's legal autonomy, by P. Gragl (p. 159-172)
* The role of interim measures indicated by the ECtHR under Rule 39 for the protection of aliens against their removal contrary to the ECHR, by A. Szklanna (p. 361-374)
* 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? by Y. Haeck, C. Burbano Herrera and L. Zwaak (p. 375-403)
* "No significant disadvantage" - first case-law on the new admissibility criterion introduced by Protocol No. 14 to the European Convention on Human Rights, by S. Baier (p. 405-413)
* Implementation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights as a tool to establish a "language of law": the case of Moldova, by I. Lupusor (p. 415-425)
* Across the universe? The extra-territorial application of the European Convention on Human Rights, by R. Lawson
(p. 427-444)
* The litigation practices of non-governmental organizations before the European Court of Human Rights: an overview, by L. van den Eynde (p. 539-548)

Google News launches redesign in UK and India

Posted by Scott Zuccarino, Product Manager

Starting today, we’ll be rolling out changes to some international versions of Google News in an effort to unify the News experience across editions. As in the U.S. version, these changes offer richer visual navigation, help you find trending and popular news more easily, give you the option to further customize your news experience, and allow you to share pieces you care about in a simpler way.

We’ve also been working to give you a closer relationship with the publishers you love, who can now highlight some of their most compelling content right on your Google News homepage.

In order to bring you the best Google News experience possible, we’ll be periodically refreshing select editions, starting with the U.K. and India. We hope you enjoy these enhancements. As always, please feel free to submit your feedback or visit our Help Center if you have more questions.

Article on ECHR Application to Northern Cyprus

The newest issue of the International Journal of Human Rights (Vol. 15, Issue 6, 2011) includes an article on Northern Cyprus and the ECHR. It was written by Leonard Hammer (affiliation not provided) and is entitled "Re-examining the extraterritorial application of the ECHR to northern Cyprus: the need for a measured approach".This is the abstract:

Extraterritorial application of the ECHR to Turkey in northern Cyprus in a whole scale manner is misplaced. Given the underlying reasoning behind the effective control standard that is linked to notions of international humanitarian law and occupied territory, and accounting for a historic understanding of the situation in northern Cyprus and how it developed, it is conceivable that Turkey should not maintain the full gamut of obligations under the ECHR.

Unfortunately, the article is somewhat shoddily edited. The famous Banković is spelled both as Bancovic and Bankovic in this article, for example. And the author Quénivet is misspelled as Quenivet ...

Welcome to Writing Theses and Articles in English!

300531 SE      Winter Semester 2011-12

Instructor:    

Dr. Brian Metscher
Dept. of Theoretical Biology, University of Vienna
Tel. 1 4277 56704      
brian.metscher@univie.ac.at
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/brian.metscher   

Assistant:    

Mag. Nele Herdina
Dept. of Theoretical Biology

and Dept. of Integrative Zoology
annanele.herdina@univie.ac.at

Main textbooks:    

A Short Guide To Writing About Biology, J. Pechenik

(6th or 7th ed., Pearson Educ.; ca. €30; check Amazon.de)
The Elements of Style, W. Strunk and E. B. White, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th edition 

(ca. 4-10 Euro; full text online at  http://www.questia.com/read/13752988?title=The%20Elements%20of%20Style,
or download a zip file here:  http://orwell.ru/Download/Style/etes_htm.zip  )

You should also have a German-English (or just English) dictionary with usage examples (LEO is not enough) 

Course structure and resources

Structure of the course:

This course will be structured around your writing projects. Our purpose here is to improve your thesis, dissertation, article, or proposal, and to improve your English-language writing skills in general.

Group 2 will meets each Tuesday from 14:30 s.t. to 16:00 in the COSB seminar room (UZA I, 2. Ebene, Spange 2).  
Group 1 meets on Tuesdays from 17:00 s.t. to 18:30 in the UZA I conference room (near the Althanstrasse entrance, next to the offices at the top of the escalator).

Evaluation is by continuous assessment, i.e. no exams. Your mark is based on attendance and participation, which will be documented by attendance records, completion of assigned exercises, and my assessment of your participation in the course.



Other resources:    

The American Heritage Guide to English Usage: online at  http://www.bartleby.com/64/  

EndNote, a commercial software package, is available through the ZID.
Online tutorials for learning about EndNote:  http://www.endnote.com/training/

Other citation managers, some of which are supposed to be useable with OpenOffice:
Zotero, which is also a Firefox plugin and now works with MS Word:  http://www.zotero.org/
JabRef:   http://jabref.sourceforge.net/index.php                
Using JabRef with OpenOffice:   http://jabref.sourceforge.net/help/OpenOfficeHelp.php 
BibTex:  http://www.bibtex.org/

The Nature Publishing Group's SciTable site has a resource for scientific communication:
     http://www.nature.com/scitable/ebooks/english-communication-for-scientists-14053993

Here is the UniVie webpage about student stipends:  http://stipendien.univie.ac.at/

The Art of Grantsmanship is a nice guide to writing grant proposals. Starting on page 7 is a helpful outline of proposal contents.

M.S.S. Judgment Echoes in Luxemburg

At the beginning of this year, the European Court of Human Rights issued its important M.S.S. v. Belgium and Greece judgment, on the asylum seekers transfer system within the European Union (see my earlier report here). In summary, the Court held that asylum conditions in Greece were so bad that not only Greece had violated the ECHR, but also Belgium by transferring an asylum seeker back to Greece. It seemed a matter of time until this would influence EU law and/or practice. Last week, one of the first indications in this respect surfaced: Advocate General Trstenjak of the Court of Justice of the European Union gave an opinion in preliminary ruling procedures in joined cases from the United Kingdom and Ireland. The opinion advices the Court of Justice to apply reasoning in its later decision in these cases which very much echo the M.S.S. case. Importantly, the opinion in effect argues for similar (although not exactly the same) obligations in this regard flowing from the European Union's Charter on Fundamental Rights. The A-G explicitly refers to and uses the M.S.S. judgment in her arguments. The A-G concludes that:

A Member State in which an asylum application has been lodged is obliged to exercise its right to examine that asylum application under Article 3(2) of Regulation No 343/2003 where transfer to the Member State primarily responsible under Article 3(1) in conjunction with the provisions contained in Chapter III of Regulation No 343/2003 would expose the asylum seeker to a serious risk of violation of his fundamental rights as enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Serious risks of infringements of individual provisions of Council Directive 2003/9/EC of 27 January 2003 laying down minimum standards for the reception of asylum seekers, Council Directive 2004/83/EC of 29 April 2004 on minimum standards for the qualification and status of third-country nationals or stateless persons as refugees or as persons who otherwise need international protection and the content of the protection granted and Council Directive 2005/85/EC of 1 December 2005 on minimum standards on procedures in Member States for granting and withdrawing refugee status in the Member State primarily responsible which do not also constitute a violation of the fundamental rights of the asylum seeker to be transferred are not sufficient, on the other hand, to create an obligation on the part of the transferring Member State to exercise the right to assume responsibility for the examination itself under Article 3(2) of Regulation No 343/2003.

And that:

The obligation to interpret Regulation No 343/2003 [the asylum regulation at stake, A.B.] in a manner consistent with fundamental rights precludes the operation of a conclusive presumption according to which the Member State primarily responsible for examining an asylum application will observe the asylum seeker’s fundamental rights under European Union law and all the minimum standards laid down in Directives 2003/9, 2004/83 and 2005/85. The Member States are not barred, on the other hand, from proceeding from the rebuttable presumption, in applying Regulation No 343/2003, that the asylum seeker’s human rights and fundamental rights will be observed in the Member State primarily responsible for his asylum application.

Thus, before sending back, a determination should be made whether a serious risk of violation of fundamental rights exists, starting from the rebuttable presumption that such rights will be guaranteed. Thus, in principle mutual trust still exists, unless there are indications otherwise, but the trust is not a blindfold anymore. States are not required to actively establish in advance whether the asylum's seeker's rigths are fully guaranteed, but they are under an obligation to take into account (and act accordingly) indications of serious risks of violations.

Let us see whether the Court of Justice of the European Union will follow this opinion!

The full press release can be found here.

Hat tip to FRA!

Recognizing publishers’ standout content in Google News

Posted by David Smydra, Product Specialist and Justin Kosslyn, Product Manager

Every day, news organizations and journalists around the world dedicate significant time and resources toward some of the most critical types of coverage: exceptional original reporting, deep investigative work, scoops and exclusives, and various special projects that quite clearly stand out. Today, during a Google News workshop at the Online News Association conference in Boston, we introduced a new content tag for the US edition that will help us better feature this “standout” content and give even more credit where credit is due.

If you put the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show the article with a ‘Featured’ label on the Google News homepage and News Search results. The syntax for this new tag is as follows:

<link rel="standout" href=“http://www.example.com/scoop_article_2.html” />

You can use the tag to point to your own content or to point to other sources with standout stories. Because the Standout tag belongs in the HTML header of your articles, it will only be seen by automated systems like Google News, not by direct readers of your articles themselves. 

Standout Content tags work best when news publishers recognize not just their own quality content, but also the original journalistic contributions of others when your stories draw from the standout efforts of other publications. Linking out to other sites is well recognized as a best practice on the web, and we believe that citing others’ standout content is important for earning trust as you also promote your own standout work. 

At this point, we ask news organizations to use the Standout tag to cite their own content at most seven times in each calendar week. If a site exceeds that limit, it may find that its tags are less recognized, or ignored altogether. A news organization may cite standout stories from other news sources any number of times each week.

To be clear, Standout tags are just one signal among the many signals that algorithmically determine prominence on Google News. We recognize the importance of giving credit where credit is due, and believe this tag can be a step in the right direction -- but it will only succeed if the publisher community helps it succeed. We have experimented in the past with other metatags, and have applied feedback from those efforts to this initiative. As we monitor how the Standout tag is applied, we'll look forward to sharing further observations or updates.

To learn more about how the Standout tag works and how you can implement it on your site, visit our Help Center article.

New ECHR Articles

A few new academic articles and papers concerning the ECHR have become available online. The first is an article on human trafficking entitled 'Complementary Protection for Victims of Human Trafficking under the European Convention on Human Rights' published by Vladislava Stoyanova in the Goettingen Journal of International Law (Vol. 3, No. 2, 2011). This is the abstract:

The international legal framework regulating the problem of human trafficking contains the presumption that the return of victims of human trafficking to their countries of origin is the standard resolution for their cases. However, victims might have legitimate reasons for not wanting to go back. For those victims, resort to the legal framework of the European Convention on Human Rights could be a solution. I elaborate on the protection capacity of Article 3 when upon return victims face dangers of re-trafficking, retaliation, rejection by family and/or community and when upon return to the country of origin victims could be subjected to degrading treatment due to unavailability of social and medical assistance. In light of the Rantsev v. Cyprus and Russia case, I develop an argument under Article 4 that states cannot send victims to those countries which do not meet the positive obligations standard as established in the case. Article 8 could be relevant: first, when the level of feared harm in the country of origin does not reach the severity of Article 3 but is sufficiently grave to be in breach of the right to private life and engage the non-refoulement principle, and second, when the victim has developed social ties within the receiving state and the removal will lead to their disruption.

The second is an article on network neutrality on the internet and Article 10 ECHR by Jasper P. Sluijs, entitled 'From Competition to Freedom of Expression: Introducing Art. 10 ECHR in the European Network Neutrality Debate'. This is the abstract:

Network neutrality concerns a heated debate on the role of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as a potential gate keeper for Internet access of end-users and online content providers. In line with standard practice in European telecommunications policy the European regulatory response to the issue of network neutrality has been framed mainly in economic terms. At the same time, European civil society organizations have interpreted network neutrality in terms of fundamental rights, particularly freedom of expression. Moreover, while the amended regulatory framework for telecommunications now includes explicit references to fundamental rights, it remains unclear if and how fundamental rights should be applied to network neutrality disputes. This article relates network neutrality to the rich body of Art. 10 ECHR case law, and asks to what extent this jurisprudence is of relevance to network neutrality discussions. The findings of this research reveal that the claim that network management by ISPs would violate end-users’ freedom of expression is less straightforward than often assumed. Moreover, the opposite case in which network neutrality regulation violates ISPs’ freedom of expression is less far-fetched than it may seem. These conclusions are meant to move the European discussion on network neutrality and fundamental rights beyond rhetoric, towards a more substantial and analytical approach.

Duffy Rhubarb Huge Hit!!!

Today we were visited by Mary Kippenberger and Peter Charlton-Jones who spend their time travelling the globe telling stories, singing songs, debating, and presenting drama and music workshops. Together they are "Rhubarb"!

At our school they sang and told stories that involved lots of the children, (and some startled adults), dressing up and acting out the parts. The children and adults present were spell bound and there were some fantastic performances from our new school actors.

Rhubarb are Duffy "Role Models" visiting school assemblies around the country. It was a fantastic assembly and thoroughly enjoyed by everyone. Thank you 'Rhubarb' and thank you Duffy.

Gareth Parr from Agility Logistics (our Duffy sponsor) was also present at the assembly and helped 'Rhubarb' present some of the Duffy books. Gareth was also pulled into the stories and dressed up beautifully as a bad wolf. A huge thank you to Gareth and Agility Logistics for their generous sponsorship of our school.

Article on Pilot Judgments most downloaded on SSRN

Usually it's difficult to assess how many people read one's academic work. But the online open access database SSRN offers the possibility to see at least how many people download articles and thus show initial curiosity in a certain article. I am happy to note that my article 'The Pilot Judgment Procedure at the European Court of Human Rights: Possibilities and Challenges' which originally appeared in the Greek law journal Nomiko Vima is now the most downloaded article concerning the ECHR on SSRN. Thanks to all readers!

Conductive Ed Veges

On Friday, a few of the Green Team members planted some lettuce plants out the front of the Room 5 classrooms. Also planted out were coreopsis plants which will give a nice patch of yellow flowers later in the summer. The children added compost to the soil and watered everything in.

"Now the room 5 children can just reach out from their classroom to have salad in their lunch" said Michael.

Scarecrow Update

Thank you to the children in Rooms 2,3,4, 7 and Conductive Education for their wonderful entries into Hornby Mitre 10’s recent competition.

First place went to Lady Gaga from Chisnilwood Intermediate.

Second place was Betty and Bert from Burwood.

Although none of our amazing entries earned a placing, Hornby Mitre 10 have donated a wonderful pile of gardening gear to our school.
A big thank you to Mitre 10, and well done to all those involved in putting our lovely scarecrows together, and taking the time to vote. Our entries looked fantastic!!!

New Book in French on Interim Measures

A group of lawyers from the 'Young Brussels Bar' has published an edited collection of essays on interim measures at the European Court of Human Rights. The book is entitled 'Les mesures provisoires devant la Cour européenne des droits de l'homme. Un référé à Strasbourg?'. The contributors are Frédéric Krenc, Anna Austin, Claire Dubois-Hamdi, Philippe Frumer, Anne Gillet, Stéphanie Grisard, Frédéric Krenc, Emmanuelle Neraudau, Isablle Niedlispacher, Sylvie Saroléa, Sandrine Watthée, and Yves Winisdoerffer. The full table of contents can be found here. This is the abstract:

La Cour européenne des droits de l’homme peut être saisie de demandes de mesures provisoires. Cette procédure est de plus en plus usitée, alors que la Cour éprouve les pires difficultés pour juguler le développement exponentiel de sa charge contentieuse ordinaire.

Cette procédure reste cependant encore relativement méconnue. elle est, dans certains cas, mal utilisée.

Il faut dire que les mesures provisoires sont assez peu réglementées – elles sont même ignorées par le texte de la Convention européenne des droits de l’homme – et la jurisprudence de la Cour en ce domaine n’est malheureusement pas publiée.

C’est dans ce contexte que la Conférence du jeune barreau de Bruxelles a, en collaboration avec l’institut des droits de l’homme du barreau de Bruxelles, pris l’initiative de consacrer un colloque relativement à ces mesures.

Ce colloque, dont le présent ouvrage comprend les actes, s’est tenu le 18 mars 2011 à Bruxelles et a réuni, autour d’une même table, un panel d’experts composés d’académiques, d’avocats mais aussi d’agents du gouvernement et de membres éminents de la Cour, lesquels ont pu échanger leurs expertises et leurs pratiques, faire part de leurs critiques et formuler d’utiles recommandations.