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Reimagining WHO: Leadership and Action for a New Director-General
Get PDFThree candidates to be the next WHO Director-General remain: Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, David Nabarro, and Sania Nishtar. The World Health Assembly’s ultimate choice will lead an Organization facing daunting internal and external challenges, from its own funding shortfalls to antimicrobial resistance and immense health inequities. The new Director-General must transform WHO into a 21st century institution guided by the right to health. Topping the incoming Director-General’s agenda will be a host of growing threats—risks to global health security, antimicrobial resistance, non-communicable diseases, and climate change—but also the transformative potential of the Sustainable Development Goals, including their universal health coverage target. Throughout, the next Director-General should emphasize equality, including through national health equity strategies and, more boldly still, advancing the Framework Convention on Global Health. Success in these areas will require a reinvigorated WHO, with sustainable financing, greater multi-sector engagement, enhanced accountability and transparency, and strengthened normative leadership. WHO must also evolves its governance to become far more welcoming of civil society and communities.
To build the political support for these transformative changes, the Director-General will need to focus first on gaining political support. This entails improving accountability and transparency to gain member state trust, and enabling meaningful civil society participation in WHO’s governance and standing up for the right to health to gain civil society support. Ultimately, in the face of a global environment marked by heightened nationalism and xenophobia, member states must empower the next Director-General to enable WHO to be a bulwark for health and human rights, serving as an inspiring contra-example to today’s destructive politics, demonstrating that the community of nations are indeed stronger together
Rethinking Children\u27s Advertising Policies for the Digital Age
Get PDFThis article describes major changes in how video content and advertising is delivered to consumers. Digital technologies such as broadband allow consumers to stream or download programming. Smart phones and tablets allow consumers to view screen content virtually anywhere at any time. Advertising has become personalized and integrated with other content.
Despite these major changes in the media markets, the framework for regulating advertising to children has not changed very much since the 1990s. This article argues that the existing regulatory framework must be reinvented to protect children in the digital age. It uses Google’s recently introduced YouTube Kids app (“YTK”), which is designed for use by children aged 5 and under, to illustrate a range of unfair or deceptive marketing practices – such as unboxing videos, brand channels, and influencer videos. Many of the videos available on the YTK app, would violate the FCC’s children’s television rules if they were shown on broadcast or cable television.
The article describes the relative roles and effectiveness of the FCC and FTC in preventing advertising that takes advantage of children, who because their cognitive abilities are still developing, do not distinguish advertising from other content or understand the purpose of advertising. It identifies the traditional rationales for limiting advertising to children and finds that the same or greater concerns exist today. Finally, it discusses the prospects for updating protections for children in the digital age
Best Evidence Aside: Why Trump\u27s Executive Order Makes America Less Healthy
No full textAlthough the immigration and nationality act gives the President power to suspend entry of classes of aliens to the US, he cannot discriminate on grounds of nationality or religion. The constitutional arguments based on religious freedom, establishment of religion, and equal protection appear powerful from a moral perspective, but face legal hurdles because the Order on its face does not discriminate against Muslims.
According to UNICEF, four of the countries targeted – Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Somalia – rank among the world’s most hazardous for children’s health and dignity. In Iraq alone, \u3e5 million children are in peril, with one-quarter displaced from their homes by conflict. Refugees often spend years in living conditions that exacerbate injury and disease: crowded and unsanitary spaces fan the spread of infectious diseases (cholera and tuberculosis); refugees risk sexual assaults, which may lead to sexually transmitted infections, as well as mental trauma; and they lack access to preventative services, as well as basic health care, including safe childbirth. President Trump’s order denied entry of improbable threats—a 9 year-old Somali child with congenital heart disease and a 1 year-old Sudanese boy with cancer—both seeking medical treatment.
Within days of the first executive order, a terrorist entered a Quebec mosque and murdered six people, injuring eighteen others. This atrocity underscores a sad truth—most victims of Islamic-inspired terrorism are Muslims, and most attackers are home grown. The President is rapidly eroding two of America’s greatest values—inclusiveness and diversity, endangering America’s position as a liberal beacon of freedom globally
Global Health: A Moment of Opportunity and Peril
No full textA growing tide of nationalistic populism in Europe and the United States threatens the solidarity upon which the global health movement is based. The proposals of the U.S. President-elect threaten to undermine U.S. leadership on health, development, and the environment. This and monumental health threats such as antimicrobial resistance and climate change and persisting health inequities stand alongside historic opportunities opened by the Sustainable Development Goals. The priority that political leaders place on global health has never been greater—from the G7 and G20 to the World Health Organization and United Nations. This comes during major leadership transitions in the United Nations and World Health Organization, and the re-election of the World Bank’s president.
In this challenging landscape, the new global health leadership should prioritize global health security, including antimicrobial resistance, health system strengthening, and action on mass migration and climate change. To guide their actions, they will need to work as a team, leveraging WHO’s technical competence and normative mandate to set health norms and standards, the UN’s political clout, and the Bank’s economic strength. Human rights, including principles of equality, participation, and accountability, should be their foremost guide, such as holding a UN special session on health inequities, enhancing civil society participation, and advancing the Framework Convention on Global Health. The need for predicable and innovative financing and high ethical standards to prevent conflicts of interest can further guide global health leaders
Who Runs the Internet?
Get PDFThere is no single answer to the question of who runs the Internet. Is it the United States, often seen as the hegemon of the Internet, home to so many of the world’s leading Internet enterprises? Is it China, which erects a “Great Firewall” to assert control over the portion of the Internet available in China? Is it the European Union, which extends its power globally through its data protection regime, designating countries as “adequate” or (implicitly) “inadequate” to receive its data? Is it ICANN, the California not-for-profit organization that controls how Internet addresses are allocated? Is it the World Wide Web Consortium, which develops standards for the web’s communication’s protocols? Is it the United Nations, which periodically asserts pressure through organs like the International Telecommunications Union or through international meetings? Is it the World Trade Organization, which regulates the barriers that governments erect against international trade? Is it telecommunications providers such as AT&T and Comcast on whose wires and beams information flows? Is it Facebook, which recently connected a billion people in one day? Is it Google, where the world often begins its search for information?
In reality, all of the above, and many more, can claim a share of Internet governance. This chapter will set out an overview of how the Internet is currently governed, as well as some of the key controversies in both the procedure and substance of Internet governance
A Destination-Based Cash Flow Tax Can Be Structured to Comply with World Trade Organization Rules
Get PDFThis paper briefly outlines alternative approaches to enacting a destination-based cash flow tax that are more clearly compatible with the World Trade Organization rules than the approach that has previously been described in the literature. The first structural alternative involves expanding the universe of businesses subject to the tax by clearly defining both the base of the new U.S. business tax and its tax nexus requirement as domestic consumption, and thereafter treating foreign importers and other sellers equivalently, rather than imposing a deduction disallowance or an import tax. The second alternative involves adopting a business activities tax, and then enacting a business-level incentive for encouraging employment that is as a legal matter separate from the tax. Either approach avoids the key World Trade Organization concerns
Expanding Our Reach: Direct Client Representation vs. Policy and Advocacy Impact in a Transactional Clinic
Get PDFThe 2016 presidential election was met immediately around the country with calls to action for lawyers to provide legal representation and resources to vulnerable populations that would inevitably be affected by the incoming presidential administration. Lawyers showed up en masse, for example, at airports to offer services to travelers and families impacted by the executive order banning individuals from several predominantly Muslim countries from entering the country. Those lawyers were not alone. Calls also went out around the clinical community to use clinicians’ positions and resources in ways that further our work on behalf of communities which suddenly found themselves potential targets of a new administration. Many transactional clinicians saw the outcry as an “all hands on deck” alarm and asked themselves how they could help.
Transactional clinics, compared with other law school clinics, face unique challenges in responding to threats facing client populations. Our colleagues in other clinics offer students the opportunity to work on advocacy projects, community education initiatives, impact litigation, or other work designed to achieve outcomes beyond individual client representation. Many transactional clinics, however, are structured entirely around representing individual entrepreneurs, businesses, and charities in a range of legal issues. This focus is the result of two phenomena. First, a disproportionate number of law students plan to pursue a transactional practice after graduation compared to the number of transactional experiences available in law school. Second, all clinical experiences are time-limited, and students generally have relatively little transactional law experience to draw on, limiting the amount of work that a transactional clinic can take on during the course of a semester. Representing individual businesses or nonprofits seemingly restricts the impact of students’ work—they can only represent one or two clients per semester. Many businesses and nonprofits remain unserved.
Every clinic faces trade-offs between directly representing individual clients and taking on projects with broader policy and advocacy goals. For transactional clinics, that trade-off is between giving students hardto- obtain transactional experience through representing individual entrepreneurs and organizations and allowing students to assist a wider group through other initiatives. Balancing these trade-offs is particularly important for clinicians interested in leveraging student resources to make their clinics agents of change in a community.
This commentary explores different options for accomplishing these broader goals, trade-offs that these options pose, and how clinicians navigate those challenges. The following summarizes ideas and challenges, and suggests ways to balance trade-offs and further integrate change-making into clinic design. In the wake of the 2016 election, transactional clinicians will undoubtedly increasingly design clinic work around impact. This commentary aims to help those clinicians in that effort
Judges as Bullies
Get PDFIt can’t be easy being a judge. The responsibility is enormous: to protect and maintain the rule of law; determine facts and law; resolve disputes large and small; and, in criminal matters, decide whether a fellow citizen remains free or not. In essence, we look to judges to articulate the meaning of “justice”—no doubt knowing all the while, as Clarence Darrow famously noted, “There is no such thing as justice, in or out of court.”
I like and respect some judges, but not as many as I should. While some judges have the requisite ability and temperament for the bench—knowledge of the law, independence, fairness, patience, courage, compassion, and humility—too many do not. Too many are mean-spirited and arrogant, going out of their way to insult, ridicule, and demean those who come before them. In short, they are bullies.
Bullies on the bench may be an inevitable result of our politicized process of judicial selection, especially on the state level, where most judges are elected. Politics doesn’t usually bring out the best judges or the best in judges. Becoming a bully may also be an occupational hazard. When your daily life consists of sitting in an elevated position in judicial robes, with people bowing and scraping before you, it likely goes to your head. As Steven Lubet says, judges are the “maximum boss” and “[e]veryone else is a supplicant.”
This Essay is not about the judges I like and respect, but the ones who have become (or perhaps always were) bullies. Because I am a criminal defense lawyer who has practiced almost entirely in state criminal courts, my stories tend to come from those courts. It might also be that judges are at their worst when they preside over criminal matters
Prefaces and Postscripts: Walzer’s \u3cem\u3eJust and Unjust Wars\u3c/em\u3e at Age 40
Get PDFThis paper was written as a keynote address for a conference on Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust War on the 40th anniversary of its publication. It discusses the significance of the book, and examines the updating prefaces Walzer wrote to the five editions of the book and his methodological postscript to the fifth edition. The paper contrasts Walzer’s philosophical method with that of analytic just war theory, arguing that Walzer’s use of historical cases and the analytic use of imaginary “toy” cases serve different philosophical ends. Noting that Just and Unjust Wars appeared the same year as the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, I examine the parallels between Walzer’s views and those in AP I, especially between Walzer’s reformulation of the doctrine of double effect and AP I’s requirement that militaries take all feasible steps to insure that attacks do not inflict excessive unintended harm on civilians. Next I examine the role that human rights plays in the course of Walzer’s argument, including the awkward fit between individual human rights and his theory of jus ad bellum. The final sections compare the legalism of analytic philosophy’s analysis of rights-forfeiture with Walzer’s humanism, and warn that contemporary populism places that humanism in peril
Calling All the Statesmen: The (not) Mubarak Trial
Get PDFI read the decision that exonerated ex-Minister of Interior of Egypt and his assistants from the charge of giving orders to kill demonstrators textually. Shortcomings known to lawyers and journalists who were following the case about failure of performance on the part either of prosecutors, lawyers, or the judge overseeing the trial are not considered in my reading. You might call it a close reading—specifically, a reading of the rationalizing language used by the judge writing the decision to explain his verdict