Suchergebnisse

The negative outcome of the referenda on the European Constitution in France and the Netherlands raises challenging questions about the nature of constitution-making. How does one begin a democracy? Does it matter who writes the constitution? The present essay addresses the distinction between the constituent and the constituted power, seen through the eyes of three thinkers: Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Sieyes and Rogers M. Smith. It looks at Arendt's notion of beginning, Sieyes's idea of the nation as the constitutent power behind government, and Smith's proposal of a people constituted through political contestation. References.

Preliminary Material /Jonas Grimheden and Rolf Ring -- Group Accommodation and the Challenges of Education: Multicultural or Intercultural or a Combination of the Two? /Asbjørn Eide -- The Importance of an Education in Human Rights /M. Arthur Diakité -- The Education of Police in Human Rights a Framework for Human Rights Programmes Forpolice /Ralph Crawshaw -- Human Rights Education in China /LI Baodong -- Human Rights Education and Research in China: the Contribution of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute /Sun Shiyan -- Human Rights Education in the Netherlands /Cees Flinterman and Stacey Nitchov -- The Protection of Civilian Educational Institutions During the Active Hostilities of International Armed Conflict in International Humanitarian Law /David a. G. Lewis -- The Self-reflective Human Rights Promoter /Jonas Grimheden -- Hugo Grotius and the Roots of Human Rights Law /Ove Bring -- Human Rights before International Criminal Courts /Vojin Dimitrijevic and Marko Milanovic -- Never Again? Rwanda and the World /Lennart Aspegren -- The Contested Notion of Freedom of Opinion /Herdís Thorgeirsdóttir -- From Protective Passports to Protected Entry Procedures? the Legacy of Raoul Wallenberg in the Contemporary Asylum Debate /Gregor Noll -- Implementing International Human Rights Law on Behalf of Asylum Seekers and Refugees: the Record of the Nordic Countries /Robin Lööf and Brian Gorlick -- The Legal Position of Asylum-seekers in Austria /Lauri Hannikainen -- Refugees in Swedish Private International Law /Michael Bogdan -- Civil Freedoms and Rights in the Swedish Constitution of 1974: the Process and the Rationale /Carl-Gustaf Andrén -- Various Interpretations of Human Rights for Women Challenges at United Nations Conferences /Elisabeth Gerle -- Implementation of International Conventions as a Socio­Legal Enterprise: Examples from the Convention on the Rights of the Child /Håkan Hydén -- List of Contributors /Jonas Grimheden and Rolf Ring.

The purpose of this dissertation is to map and analyze the spatial and temporal variation in women's political representation at both the national and local level. In the dissertation it is argued that women's political representation is the outcome of the interplay between structures, institutions and actors. The perspective is a comparative one, in which quantitative analyses and more qualitative case-studies complement each other. When analysing spatial variation a mainly quantitative approach is taken, while the case-study approach is applied to the temporal variation. The first empirical chapter examines whether female representation in the lower houses of the world's parliaments co-varies with other indicators of the political situation of women in order to ensure the validity of the analysis. In the second empirical chapter female representation in parliaments of the world during the post-war period is analyzed. In the third empirical chapter the focus narrows down to women's political representation in Western Europe during the post-war period, where both the national and local level is analysed. The fourth empirical chapter consists of case studies of six countries. Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands feature high female representation; France, Greece and Ireland low female representation. In the fifth empirical chapter women's political representation at the local level in Norway and Sweden is analysed during the post-war period. In the sixth empirical chapter the temporal variation in female representation in a number of Swedish municipalities is analysed, from the introduction of female suffrage in 1921 until 2002. The result is that both structures, institutions and actors are necessary to explain the spatial and temporal variation in female representation. There is no direct link between structures and female representation. The structure does affect the actors and co-varies with the institutions, but successful actors as entrepreneurs might boost female representation. Actors are important. The increase in female representation cannot be seen as an automatic process taking care of itself. Conscious actors are necessary both to affect and to monitor the development. An unfavourable structural context might be compensated for by actors and institutions which favour female representation.