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SoFEA stands for Social and Financial Empowerment of Adolescents. The word means ‘Wisdom’ in Persian. The project symbolizes its namesake by enhancing knowledge level of vulnerable adolescent girls in rural Bangladesh on issues that are crucial for them to understand, not just as adolescents, but as individuals partaking in a complex society.

   

The purpose of this Guide is to provide an orientation for politicians regarding the basic elements of the rule of law. The Guide was inspired by discussions within the InterAction Council of Former Heads of State and Government. The process of preparing the material was initiated and supervised by the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Lund University, Sweden, and the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL), the Netherlands.

It is a bad week for the rule of law in South Africa when in the space of two days President Zuma and the Judicial Service Commission both reveal that they have scant regard for their respective duties to uphold the rule of law. The president is clearly bound by a Supreme Court of Appeal judgment that requires the National Prosecuting Authority to make a redacted record of what was under consideration by it when it was decided to stop the prosecution of the president on over 700 charges of corruption in 2009.

Ensuring the rule of law means people have access to justice. In a recent report, HiiL and its network of rule of law experts and innovators reviewed the state of the art. Legal needs research has shown that civil justice and administrative justice are delivered by a great many providers of services: public courts and private legal services; formal procedures and informal ones; traditional processes and innovative approaches. Together, these services provide access to justice, but providers of such services face some major challenges.

For those of us in the direct line of Hurricane Sandy, it seems appropriate to highlight recent developments in international disaster law.

The rights of migrant workers have become one of the defining human rights issues in Southeast Asia, as the number of workers on the move has risen dramatically in recent decades.

Corporate governance has become a catchword in many legal systems, the more so today than ever before. Corporate and accounting frauds coupled with general dissatisfaction by shareholders on the ways corporate executives control and manage companies in which they have invested have accentuated the need for mechanisms which will make the management of companies more transparent. The need for such transparency reached a crescendo after the Enron Scandal in the US, which led to major financial losses to investors.

I would like to explore a new rule of law with you. A funny one. One that could confront you in the future (but you won’t know that until that future is there).

As a young child growing up in the Caribbean I enjoyed the benefits of the rule of law without any consciousness or awareness of its existence.  I enjoyed all the joys and happiness of a young boy and was able to roam freely much of the time without any care or worry about my safety and well-being. I had a sense of always feeling safe except, for the occasional sting of a bee or wasp, or being bitten by an eel or pricked by the thorns of a sea urchin on the rugged sea bed of a volcanic island.

Recognizing that legal aid “is an essential element of a fair, humane and efficient criminal justice system that is based on the rule of law,” the United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice adopted the first international instrument on legal aid on April 27, 2012. The Principles and Guidelines on Access to Legal Aid in Criminal Justice Systems (“Principles and Guidelines”) aim to ensure that states adopt measures and establish systems that provide persons accused of crimes with prompt and effective legal aid services.

Last summer I addressed the World Justice Forum on the importance of effective environmental governance; this was part of a robust conversation about the rule of law and its role in governance.  This conversation has been steadily gaining momentum over the last year and has led to an explicit recognition of the core elements of effective environmental governance, as well as growing momentum for initiatives to enhance cooperation to strengthen environmental governance in countries around the world.

Disappointed by the paucity of open and free discussion at the World Justice Forum in Barcelona last year, I greatly welcome this WJP blog and its online rule-of-law community. Discourse on the rule of law is absolutely vital if answers are to be found to the pressing conundrum of how to properly spread and strengthen the rule of law. Furthermore, it is essential that that discourse take place both within the rule-of-law industry itself and between the law and multi-disciplinary, civil society.

Polaris Project Japan has been working to help victims of sex trafficking in Japan for the past eight years. The people served are primarily women and children, both foreign and Japanese nationals. While there are laws on the books regulating labor conditions, preventing child abuse, and prohibiting prostitution (although its definition is extremely narrow), Japan does not yet have laws to tackle this new type of slavery. Oftentimes, the victims are arrested for breaking prostitution laws or overstaying work visas.

In my corner of the bush, the term ‘rule of law’ is acquiring popular coinage. Like its predecessors, “human rights and democracy”, “corruption and good governance” and “transparency and accountability”, “rule of law” is now the new fashion phrase taken from a foreign language. I haven’t heard the term translated and used in more than a couple of the 140 odd local languages in daily use in the region.  Perhaps its mystique, power and appeal are locked in its un-translated foreignness.

Rule of law is, at its core, founded in respect of our fellow human beings.

On June 18 of 2012 the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal (TCP) in Bolivia issued a ruling[i] which many had hoped would resolve an ongoing situation of violent social conflict which has questioned the State’s position on the rights of indigenous peoples for close to a decade.  The issue under debate is the construction of a road through the indigenous territory known as the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park –TIPNIS, inhabited since before the Spanish colonization by the Chimán, Yuracaré and Mojeño-Trinitario indigeno

Cyber space is the domain generated from the interconnection between computers and telecommunication networks in order to store, modify, and exchange data via networked systems and associated physical infrastructures without regard to physical geography. Therefore, its security largely depends on the data and the ICTs’ security.