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The public policy exception to The New York Convention: The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) perspective
Get PDFDespite the crucial role of public policy in the recognition and enforcement of arbitral
awards, the New York Convention 1958 lacks any explicit elucidation of this exception.
This absence of clarification has sparked concerns that public policy may be subject to
misuse or misapplied in some states, including the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
States. Some practitioners attribute the misapplication of public policy in these States to
the impact of Sharia, which is often utilised as a synonym for public policy. Hence, they
suggest that these States should minimise the role of Sharia.
The literature on public policy in the GCC States is limited. To build a thorough
understanding of public policy within these states and to evaluate their practices, a
doctrinal methodology was primarily employed for the critical analysis of both primary
and secondary sources. Uniquely, and contrary to other studies that treat GCC States as a
monolithic bloc, this thesis argues that the application of the public policy exception
varies across the GCC States. It argues further that GCC States do not follow a specific
method in applying and interpreting public policy. While practices in Saudi Arabia, Qatar,
and the UAE demonstrate broad application and interpretation of public policy, their
counterparts—Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain—show a more favourable approach towards
the enforcement of foreign arbitral awards and the application of public policy. The
misapplication of public policy is attributable to two primary factors: first, inadequate
legislation regulating arbitration, including the role of Sharia in this process; and second,
the lack of familiarity among courts and arbitration bodies with the application of public
policy.
The thesis finds that Sharia and public policy are not synonymous; however, Sharia
constitutes a part of the GCC States' public policy. Additionally, it concludes that Sharia
does not inherently hinder the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards.
Nevertheless, the unclear way GCC States adopt Sharia contributes to the misapplication
and misinterpretation of public policy. Foreign arbitral awards that breach Sharia may
still be enforceable in the GCC States, provided they do not contravene the primary
sources of Sharia, namely the Quran and Sunnah. The thesis suggests codifying Sharia or
adopting a specific school of jurisprudence as ways of ameliorating the problem. It also
urges the legislatures in the GCC States to adopt a unified arbitration law that
distinguishes and categorises public policy into, for example, domestic and international
public policy
Peripandemic outcomes of infants treated for sentinel congenital heart diseases in England and Wales
Get PDFBackground Infants with congenital heart disease (CHD) are clinically vulnerable to cardiac deteriorations and intercurrent infections. We aimed to quantify the impact of health system disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, on their clinical outcomes and whether these differed by socioeconomic and ethnic subgroups.
Methods In this population-based cohort study, we used linked electronic healthcare datasets from England and Wales to identify infants with nine sentinel CHDs born and undergoing intervention in 2018–2022. The outcomes of cardiac intervention timing, infant mortality and hospital care utilisation, were described by birth eras, and risk factors were explored using multivariable regression.
Results Of 4900 included infants, 1545 (31.5%) were born prepandemic (reference), 1175 (24.0%) in the transition period, 1375 (28.0%) during restrictions and 810 (16.5%) postrestrictions. The casemix was hypoplastic left heart syndrome (195; 3.9%), functionally univentricular heart (180; 3.7%), transposition (610; 13.5%), pulmonary atresia (290; 5.9%), atrioventricular septal defect (590; 12.1%), tetralogy of Fallot (820; 16.7%), aortic stenosis (225; 4.6%), coarctation (740; 15.1%) and ventricular septal defect (1200; 24.5%).
Compared with prepandemic, there was no evidence for delay in treatment procedures in transition, restrictions or postrestrictions eras. Infant mortality increased for those born in the transition period, adjusted OR 1.60 (95% CI 1.06, 2.42) p=0.01, but not in restrictions or postrestrictions. The days spent at home were similar with birth in transition and restrictions, but fewer for postrestrictions, adjusted days difference −2 (95% CI −4, 0), p=0.05.
Outcomes did not vary by pandemic birth era according to social characteristics. There was higher infant mortality in the deprived versus non-deprived binary category (adjusted OR 1.56 (95% CI 1.11, 2.18), p=0.004) and there were fewer days spent at home for the most versus least deprived neighbourhood quintile (adjusted difference −4 (95% CI −6, –2), p<0.001).
Conclusions Specialist care for infants with CHD during the pandemic, in terms of pathway procedure timing and healthcare contacts, was not compromised. Increased healthcare utilisation postpandemic and heath inequality based on socioeconomic status require further evaluation
Changes in family life and the quest for personal freedoms 1918-1960
No full textThis course explores changes in family life and the quest for personal freedoms from 1918-60. The content includes the emergence of the modern nuclear family, the welfare and politics of the family and the influences of the Second World War and post-war reconstruction on the family
The female finance penalty: why are women less successful in academic finance than related fields?
Get PDFWe study the publication patterns of male and female finance scholars, contrasting them with their counterparts in the related fields of accounting, economics and general management by analysing a large sample of more than 400,000 journal outputs spanning over two decades. We show that, in particularly stark contrast to accounting and management publications, women are vastly under-represented as authors of finance ones. Further, our results demonstrate that work produced by female finance academics is published in lower-rated journals and garners fewer citations, a phenomenon we refer to as the ‘female finance penalty’. We find that the topics on which women in academic finance work and the methodological approaches they use are highly associated with this penalty. In particular, we show that female finance authors are more likely to engage in interdisciplinary and qualitative work, and to investigate topics that are linked with lower research success. Moreover, when it comes to journal placement, we find that female-authored work in finance is ‘penalised’ more for its interdisciplinarity than that authored by men. Finally, we show that female finance authors are less likely to be affiliated to US-based or highly ranked institutions – factors that typically increase both publication success and future citation – and when they are, there is some evidence that their citation rates are less likely to benefit from these affiliations than those of their male colleagues
An improved secure and efficient e-voting scheme based on blockchain systems
Get PDFWith the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technology, e-voting has been widely used in all aspects of people’s lives. However, there is a common problem in the vast majority of e-voting solutions: the inability to complete vote counting without a trusted third-party organization, which may lead to security risks. When designing an e-voting system, ensuring the trustworthiness of the voting results as well as protecting the privacy of the voters are always the most important issues. To address this challenge, we propose improved secure and efficient (ISE)-Voting, an ISE e-voting scheme for blockchain-assisted IoT devices. Our proposed ISE-Voting achieves voter privacy anonymity, distributed vote counting, and public verifiability of counting results in e-voting systems by using secret-sharing and identity-based ring signatures in the blockchain system. In addition, we introduce a cloud service provider (CSP), which is used to share the computational pressure of the system and assist ISE-Voting to complete the final counting. According to the experimental analysis and results, our scheme is not only able to meet the basic security goals of satisfying correctness, anonymity, unforgeability and verifiability, and provide 128-bit identity security for the voters in the post-quantum environment. Moreover, it can complete the distributed counting of voters’ ballots within an effective time, which provides a feasible solution for future e-voting system
Global warming drives a threefold increase in persistence and 1°C rise in intensity of marine heatwaves
Get PDFMarine heatwaves are extreme climatic events consisting of persistent periods of warm ocean waters that have profound impacts on marine life. These episodes are becoming more intense, longer and more frequent in response to anthropogenic global warming. Here we provide a comprehensive and quantitative assessment on the role of global warming on marine heatwaves. To do so, we construct a counterfactual version of observed global sea surface temperatures since 1940, corresponding to a stationary climate without the effect of longterm increasing global temperatures, and use it to calculate the contribution of global air temperature rise on the intensity and persistence of marine heatwaves. We determine that global warming is responsible for nearly half of these extreme events and that, on a global average, it has led to a three-fold increase in the number of days per year that the oceans experience extreme surface heat conditions. We also show that global warming is responsible for an increase of 1◦C in the maximum intensity of the events. Our findings highlight the detrimental role that human-induced global warming plays on marine heatwaves. This study supports the need for mitigation and adaptation strategies to address these threats to marine ecosystems
