Suchergebnisse

Authors: Remans, R.; Jones, S.; Quiros, C.; Smith, A.G.; Attwood, S.; Werneck, F.; Negra, C.; Hoogendoorn, C.; Menza, G.; Villani, C.; China, R.; Tutwiler, A. ; The Agrobiodiversity Index is an innovative tool that measures the current state of agrobiodiversity in markets and consumption, in agricultural production, and in genetic resource management, and the extent to which commitments and actions at country, company and project level support sustainable use and conservation of agrobiodiversity. Status indicators are scored based on spatial global data sets and national data sets accessed through global databases at United Nations agencies. Action indicators are scored based on country reports, such as those from the World Information and Early Warning System on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (WIEWS) and in the State of the World Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture, both compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), as well as other spatial datasets. Commitment indicators are scored based a text-mining tool that analyzes policies, strategies and other national legislation, retrieved from the FAO's legislation and policies database, FAOLEX. The Agrobiodiversity Index has 22 indicators, comprising 3 commitment indicators, 4 action indicators and 15 status indicators.

International law — to use Bentham's innovation of 1789, which has found favor with the public, instead of the older, more expressive term, law of nations—has been variously denounced and praised as international morality or ethics; international courtesy or convention in the social sense of the word; comity as distinguished from rule of law; or merely and finally as the foreign policy, such as the Monroe Doctrine, which at a particular time happens to catch the fancy of nations. If admitted as law in general or as possessing some of the elements of ordinary municipal law, the principle that pinches is declared not to be law and to have no binding force whatever, because there is no supreme court of nations in which the dispute may be litigated and no sheriff to execute the decree, supposing that one had actually been delivered. But the judgment of a municipal court is not self-executing, as, for instance, when President Jackson stamped his foot, saying: "John Marshall has made the decision; now let him execute it!" The executive officer of the court, the sheriff or marshal, did not enforce it, and that, forsooth, changed the nature of the transaction! Suppose the sheriff meets resistance in performing the mandate of the court, the armed force of the nation may be called upon and in final result the nation is in the field.

Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping "ideational turn" in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage "life cycle" of emergence, "norm cascades," and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

Article 55 of the United Nations Charter commits the member States to promote "universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion," recognising thus for the first time the individual as a subject of international law. This would have certainly been a very welcome step—yet we can hardly overlook the fact that very little has been done during the years since 1945, to enable the individual to enjoy this right, guaranteed by the Charter. The "Bill of Rights," promised in 1946, is far from being completed and ripe for ratification. Rescinding a decision of its fifth session in favour of the inclusion of economic, social and cultural rights in the Draft Covenant of Human Rights, the General Assembly voted during its sixth session in favour of the drafting of two Covenants, one to guarantee civil and political rights and the other economic, social and cultural rights. The drafts of these two documents in the form they emerged from the ninth session of the UN Commission on Human Rights (April 7 to May 30, 1953) do not provide possibilities for the individual to petition an international authority in case of an alleged violation of the Covenant's provisions—in spite of the opinion expressed by the General Assembly at its third session in 1948, that "the right of petition is an essential human right."