1,721,064 research outputs found
Constitutional protection of human and minority rights in Ethiopia: myth v. reality
No full text© 2014 Dr. Getachew Assefa WoldemariamThe 1995 Constitution of Ethiopia was framed by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and other predominantly ethnic-based organizations in 1991. The EPRDF and its ethnic allies considered pre-1991 Ethiopia a ‘prison of nationalities’ and argued that the rights violations and socio-political crises that plagued it during the past century resulted from this problem. The framers held that a federal reconfiguration of Ethiopia and the creation of a legal-political order in which rights and freedoms, including the self-determination of all the constituent ethnic minorities, become the paramount principles were the solutions to the rights violations and the crises.
The framers claimed that the Constitution provided the legal and institutional structures capable of adequately protecting the rights and freedoms of individuals and ethnic minorities. The claims rested on three structures of the Constitution: the ethnic federal/self-determination arrangement; the constitutional review system; and the Bill of Rights.
As part of the ethnic federal/self-determination structure, the Constitution divided the country into nine states and declared that each ethnic minority placed within these states had an unconditional right to self-determination, including the right to a full measure of self-government, and unilateral secession. Arguing that the House of the Federation (HoF), a federal non-legislative upper House comprising the representatives of the ethnic minorities, best protects human and minority rights in Ethiopia, the Constitution’s framers conferred an exclusive constitutional review power on this body. They also presented the Bill of Rights as guaranteeing adequate standards of rights and freedoms.
Based on a socio-legal study and doctrinal analysis of these structures, and by drawing on international human rights law and comparable constitutional practices, the thesis argues that the claims made for the Constitution do not hold. The constitutional declaration that every nation, nationality or people has an unconditional right to self-determination, a full measure of self-government in a territory it inhabits, and equitable representation in state and federal governments, remain largely ineffective. There are more than 75 minorities only six of which are given states of their own. Further, the grant of state-level self-government to the six, and its denial to others, was not clearly justified. Similarly, local self-governments were established only for about half of the minorities without a state allocation. The rest are exposed to domination by the self-governing minorities. The thesis further shows that the Constitution fails to entrench the principle of shared-rule among the minorities at the national and sub-national levels, leaving the main cause of destabilization and rights-violation unresolved. It demonstrates that the ethnic federal arrangement not only failed to resolve the existing minority problems but also generated new ones.
The thesis argues that the constitutional review system is ineffective. The HoF (and its aide, the Council of Constitutional Inquiry) lacks the requisite competence, independence and impartiality to protect the constitutional rights of citizens and minorities adequately. By examining the constitutional-legal structures pertaining to these bodies and their practice over the last seventeen years, the thesis demonstrates that the adopted constitutional review system fails to effectively protect rights.
Finally, by closely examining the limitation clauses of the Constitution, the rights gaps in it; and the provisions governing derogations from rights during public emergencies against relevant protective standards of international human rights law and comparable domestic human rights instruments, this thesis argues that, contrary to the claims made for it, the Constitution fails to live up to minimum international human rights standards
A Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Protective Mailers in the Postal Industry
No full textIn 2010, Purolator and Canada Post were seeking an alternative to low density polyethylene (LDPE) parcel packaging due to its inability to be recycled. A study was required to determine if the disposal stage was in fact the most detrimental. A comparative Life Cycle Assessment was conducted evaluating a generic 8” x 12” LDPE bubble mailer, versus a product marketed as environmentally-friendly, a generic 8” x 12” Kraft paper and newsprint filled padded mailer. General Life Cycle Inventory data from U.S. LCI and ecoinvent were customized with primary data from Associated Bag Company and product measurements. SimaPro software calculated the Life Cycle Impact Assessment. Results showed the upstream stages and the use stages as significant for both products. Based on the results of this study, it is recommended that both products are eventually replaced with lighter, rapidly renewable materials
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Informal Settlement in Lagos State: A Framework for Investigating Housing Quality
No full textAjegunle is one of the most popular areas in Lagos, Nigeria. Known for its high concentration of poverty and sprawling informal settlements, this area served as the site of analysis for this study. More specifically, the housing conditions within an informal settlement area of Ajegunle was analyzed in order to assess the quality and durability of the housing structures, the quality of the living conditions in the immediate environment of the neighborhood, and the overall quality of life of the inhabitants in the Ajegunle area. The aforementioned areas were assessed using the guidelines of the UN Habitat (2015), which presents conditions to determine areas of informal settlement. The factors include absence or limited: access to improved water; access to improved sanitation facilities; sufficient living space; adequate structural quality or durability; and security of living tenure. Based on the findings of this study, Ajegunle is an informal settlement area, since it meets the aforementioned criteria listed by UN Habitat (2015). In order to mitigate these conditions, the federal and local governments, with the assistance of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) will need to enact enduring measures that can improve the quality of living of residents in these areas
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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