Suchergebnisse

This article examines the provisions of the Law of the Republic of Lithuania on Compensation of Damage Resulting from the USSR Occupation (hereinafter -- the Law), which was adopted on 13 June 2000, in the light of customary rules of international law on state responsibility, as codified in the 2001 the UN International Law Commission's Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (hereinafter -- the ILC Draft Articles). The main aim of the article is to deal with the international legal grounds of the responsibility of the Russian Federation for the Soviet occupation of the Republic of Lithuania and, against this background, to identify the role of the Law. The ground of Russia's responsibility is an internationally wrongful act committed as the aggression against the Republic of Lithuania, which was started by the 15 June 1940 incursion by the Soviet armed forces & subsequently continued in the form of the illegal occupation of Lithuania until the restoration of Lithuania's independence on 11 March 1990, however, the illegal presence of the foreign forces on Lithuania's soil ended only in 1993. The fact of the 1940 Soviet aggression & illegal occupation of the Baltic States has been widely recognized by the international community, it was even acknowledged by the USSR & Russia in 1989-1991. Therefore there is no doubt that under international law from 1940-1990 the Republic of Lithuania had been an occupied State. That is why the illegal occupation with its consequences, as the breach of an international obligation not to resort to aggression having a continuing character, constitutes an objective element of an internationally wrongful act being the ground for Russia's responsibility. That also explains why the title of the Law refers to the occupation. Meanwhile the specific feature of subjective element is addressed in the preamble of the Law. That is the continuity of the Russian State & the corresponding identity of its international legal personality with the Soviet Union, which was claimed by Russia & generally recognized by the international community. Therefore under international law the Russian Federation is the State continuing the rights & obligations of the former USSR (ie., it is the same international legal person). Consequently, internationally wrongful acts of the latter, including the Soviet occupation of Lithuania & the other two Baltic States, should be attributable to the Russian Federation. Apart from the ground for Russia's responsibility, the issue of reparation is addressed in the article. In accordance with international law (the ILC Draft Article), the principle of full reparation should be applied to realize responsibility for an internationally wrongful act. The full reparation for the injury can be provided in the form of restitution, compensation & satisfaction, while any financially assessable damage should be covered by compensation when restitution is not practically possible. Responsibility for the Soviet occupation is the latter case. Therefore in this sense the Law concretizes the claim of Lithuania as it lays down the obligations of the Government of Lithuania to calculate the damage & seek its compensation from Russia. In conformity with the principle of full reparation, the provisions of the Law require to calculate the damage for all period of the Soviet occupation as well as to cover all types of financially assessable damage. The third main issue addressed in this article is admissibility of a claim for reparation, ie., the procedural requirements to be observed by the injured State invoking an international responsibility of other State. The main requirement, as follows from Art. 43 of the ILC Draft Articles, is that the injured State should give a timely & proper notice of its claim to the State responsible for an internationally wrongful act; the claim is admissible when it is waived by the injured State or it can be inadmissible when it is not maintained. However, a mere lapse of time without a claim is being resolved, including delay in its prosecution due to refusal of the respondent State, cannot result in loss of the right of the injured State to invoke responsibility. In this regard the Law is a unilateral act of the State of Lithuania which formulates & concretizes the claim for Russia's responsibility. The form of this act was determined by Lithuanian national rather than international law as the former requires that any compulsory rules or instructions for the Government can be laid down by the Seimas (the Parliament) only in the form of (statutory) law. As it is clear from the preamble of the Law, in continuing & consolidating the previous Lithuanian acts invoking Russia's responsibility the Law demonstrates that the claim for responsibility has been raised without any unreasonable delay a long time ago (the first time Lithuania declared about its claim for reparation in 1991) & Russia is aware of that claim from the very beginning. In such a manner the Law also proves a consistent & unchanging position of Lithuania with regard to Russia's responsibility. Therefore, the Law evidences that the claim of Lithuania remains admissible although still being unresolved & notwithstanding that Russia is rejecting it. Under international law the injured State has the right to waive its claim for responsibility of another State. National law may, however, restrict that right in setting up appropriate duties for the authorities of the injured State. In this regard it follows from the preamble of the Law that under Lithuanian constitutional law no State organ or official can declare a waiver of the claim for Russia's responsibility because the Law is based on & aims at implementation of the corresponding decision by the 14 June 1992 national referendum that demanded to seek reparation for the Soviet occupation. Therefore, the waiver can be declared only by other referendum as well as without a referendum the Seimas cannot abolish the provisions of the Law requiring to seek a compensation (such kind of action could amount to the waiver in the sense of Art. 45(a) of the ILC Draft Articles). To keep the claim for responsibility of another State admissible & valid, when it is being unresolved a long time, the injured State should do everything it can reasonably do to maintain the claim. Otherwise it can be questioned, whether the right to invoke responsibility is lost due to conduct of the injured State in the sense of Art. 45(b) of the ILC Draft Articles. Therefore, to avoid similar doubts the Law obliged the Government to seek constantly the compensation for the damage caused by the Soviet occupation. Since Russia used to reject Lithuania's initiatives to conduct negotiations on the matter & any other way of settlement is not available without Russia's consent, it can be stated that as yet, in particular due to the Law, the conduct of Lithuania has not raised any serious doubts with regard to validity of its claim for compensation. Obviously such doubts would be serious if any kind of moratorium on the claim had been announced. To sum it up, it can be concluded that the Law is based on & is consistent with the rules of international law. It also implements the international legal requirements for the proper declaration & maintenance of the claim for reparation. Therefore both under international law & under Lithuanian constitutional law the Law has been necessary to consolidate & consistently maintain the claim to Russia for the compensation of the damages caused by the Soviet occupation. Lastly, it should be noted that a proper settlement of the problem of Russia's responsibility for the Soviet occupation of Lithuania is not a question of self-interest for Lithuania & it should pursue the claim for compensation not only due to the decision by the 14 June 1992 referendum. Not accidentally Art. 1 of the ILC Draft Articles refers that "every internationally wrongful act of a State entails the international responsibility of that State." It is also not accidentally that the preamble of the 1991 Treaty between Lithuania & Russia states that mutual confidence between the people of both Parties is hard to achieve without elimination of the consequences of the Soviet annexation of Lithuania. Like for national law, rule of law & justice cannot be established without realization & inevitability of responsibility for grave breaches of international law. Therefore the realization of responsibility for the 1940 aggression against the Baltic States & its consequences would undoubtedly contribute to general prevention of such grave breaches as well as would assure that similar tragic events never happen again in the history of Lithuania. Such kind of prevention should be at the focus of attention of the whole international community rather than only Lithuania & the other two Baltic States, since a prohibition of aggression is a long-standing rule of jus cogens character & obligation erga omnes towards international community. Adapted from the source document.

This is a work concerned with the increasing processes of social exclusion in cities nowadays. In approaching this phenomenon, the research highlights how people interact with their institutional environments. This is also, perhaps centrally, an investigation into the possibility to engage an individual perspective to understand the transformation in urban experience, which is orienting society to new uses and forms of exclusion. Following the perspective deployed by the so-called "sociology of individuals" in French sociology or "reengagement of agency" in the Anglo-Saxon world; I claim that individuals as well as collectives are gaining increasing power to question and re-organize institutions. This re-organization, in the case of socio-urban institutions, is no guarantee for major levels in integration, cohesion, and equality. Unfortunately, social institutions are becoming hard in its exclusionary capabilities under people intervention during the last four decades. I believe that urban sociology is a field of struggle between different perspectives competing to "make sense" of social phenomena in cities. The orientation supported in this research is just one on many and it follows the roots of people and their life experiences within cities and how they influence the processes that shape the city. The last formulation is possibly not the clearest, because as we all know, references to "inhabitants" are presented in every variant of urban sociology. Nevertheless, there are not many variants focusing on peoples' capability to influence institutional environments and by this way affecting the urban condition in which they find themselves. The particular institution selected for this study is the "School". This thesis is organized around two parts: part one includes the conceptual framework, methodological approach, and historical contextualization; part two describes three case studies produced to analyse the forms of and the relations between individuals and school institution. Part one starts from a premise: within the context of declining welfare State in the case of industrialized countries, an important part of urban studies focuses on economic and spatial restructuration. Confronted with the same situation, a part of social sciences shifts to the individuals' agency and social uncertainty. This research is embedded in the last theoretical description presented above, thus, because it tries to observe urban processes from the perspective of the individual and outside of developed economies. In this sense, Latin America represents a fundamental reference because urban conditions are historically marked by weak institutional arrangements to integrating people and large levels of marginality and exclusion among population. In this scenario individuals' practices around inclusion-exclusion have an essential meaning in everyday life. Part two offers three study cases in which the relation between individuals and school institutions has been analyzed for the Metropolitan area of Santiago de Chile (MAS). Using different methodological resources an exhaustive account on three levels is presented: i) geo-referencing State intervention in public policies connected with neighborhood and schools to understand the form and extent of socio-urban exclusion in MAS, ii) narrative biographies applied to parents with children attending primary school, in order to reconstruct the familiar process of school selection and describing its impacts on the stabilization of school as an exclusionary device, and iii) autoethnography to describe in detail the temporal dimension involved in stabilizing actions which reinforces social mechanisms of urban integration-exclusion during the last three decades in Chile. A key argument advanced by this research proposes that: the way in which the idea of integration is enacted by people in their biographical careers imprints changes on the institutional orientation and by this way, contributes to the reorganization urban life. The high level of social exclusion in Santiago de Chile is not accountable without considering transformation in all socio-urban institutions, especially the school. No family considers social integration with people from a low social, economical or cultural background as relevant orientation for school selection. This particularity of the Chilean social reality is not derivable from any big capitalistic or modernization processes impacting our cities. Within the light of the thesis findings, I conclude that socio-urban institutions logics must be reassessment under the influences of people actions and representations. I also propose a consideration to major complementarities between urban studies and urban-institutions analysis. The school institutions is not just a sectorial field reserved to the researcher in education, on the contrary, it represent a key entrance to address people's experience in their institutional urban environments. The re-emergence of social and urban movements in 2010, under the "Arab Spring" or the "Chilean Student Movements", is not only a demonstration in the public space as result of major global trends. These situations are in essence, for this research, individuals gathering together and calling for recognition and autonomy inside institutional environment that tends to reject them. Similar situation was the focus of the Latin American urban sociology research, within the focus on grassroots and urban social movements at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. In both cases, socio-urban institutions, unaware of recognition requirements claimed by inhabitants, are not beyond individual or collective reach. My main concern is to show that socio-urban institutions are constantly re-shaped as a result of individual action, what makes the difference, is the spirit that we all, socially, imprint on the logics of our socio-urban institutions, moving them to inclusion or exclusion.