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The important, interesting, or just downright quirky news from TOL’s coverage region. Today: Dardanians record historic win; Romanian garbage fears; Russian journalist faces drug charges; Albania’s political deadlock grows; and why Eastern Europeans shouldn’t play with matches.
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Commemorations of the fall of the communist regime in 1989 came and went last year, but some felt that society gave short shrift to the sacrifices of thousands of political prisoners.
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Our news roundup: cyberattacks in Czechia; Chernobyl smog in Kyiv; Russian dual citizenship; pandemic in Belarus; and inheriting the presidency in Tajikistan.
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The paper analyses Art. 12 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its implications for the position of persons with mental disabilities. The new concept of legal capacity contained in Art. 12 should ensure that fundamental human rights of these persons are no longer “a dead letter on paper”. However, once the Convention came into force, the implementation of this provision has proved to be problematic for States Parties. Diane Kingston, former Vice-Chairperson of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, best expressed the scale of the problem in October 2015 when she emphasized that no country had until that point fully met the requirements contained in Art.12. Given that the Convention is a document that prescribes the fundamental human rights, the statement that no national legislation is consistent with its key provision is confusing and worrying. Therefore, a special attention should be paid to Art. 12 and its implementation in practice.
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This paper deals with the recent normative modifications introduced in the European Union by the Directive 2011/83/EU (aimed to realise a full harmonisation of member states’ rules in some aspects of consumer and contractual law), and consequently in Italy, through the Legislative Decree No. 21/2014 (which transposed the supranational source). As it is known, the principal legal instruments used in the last years by the EU to protect the weak parties are the ‘information duties’ and the ‘right of withdrawal’. The new rules try to strengthen them, but the implementation of the European Directive in Italy gives rise to many arguable points and perplexities.
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Today’s news headlines: North Macedonian rights breakthrough reversed; dispute over Chisinau airport; Georgia and the U.S; Poland’s new Supreme Court head; and Slovenia emerges from lockdown.
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The scientific paper outlines the application experience while addressing the questions relating to the relevant legal basis use for a natural person’s personal data processing in the framework of the employment relationship realization. Ising SoLoMo concept products and applications in the framework of the employment (or in a wider context ‘industrial’) relationship realization comes as a prerequisite for the legal basis identification. Each relationship is subject to specific control and inspection procedures, as defined in the legislation of the Slovak republic. In this respect, the scientific paper uses application experience mainly from the author’s legal practice.
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Od kraja ratova na teritorijama bivše SFRJ u 90-im godinama je bilo napisano i rečeno dosta toga o tranzicijskoj pravdi i o problematici ne-suočavanja sa prošlošću u postjugoslovenskoj situaciji. Ali ne-suočavanje sa prošlošću, pogotovo sa zločinima, samo je jedan simptom ustrajavanja dubljeg problema koji je kreirao okolnosti u kojima su kolektivni zločini tek postali mogući – okolnosti koje i nakon rata mogu ustrajavati i dalje. Ovaj tekst je pokušaj promišljanja tog problema kroz tematiziranje onoga što uz pomoć Hannah Arendt zovem “nevolje posttotalitarnog doba” i “organizovana nevinost” i koje pokušavam da objasnim kroz primer procesa uspostavljanja postjugoslovenskih nacionalnih država.
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Despite the lack of specific provisions in the European Convention on Human Rights regarding gender-based violence, the European Court of Human Rights has developed a substantial body of case-law in this area. It has been done through the interpretation and application of a number of provisions in the European Convention on Human Rights that are relevant to gender-based violence. This paper provides a review of the approach of the European Court of Human Rights in cases concerning gender-based violence. Namely, it is evident that a remarkable spate of cases dealing with gender-based violence is considered by the European Court of Human Rights, which provides very solid protection in this field. However, it seems that certain aspects of the case-law on gender-based violence are somewhat inconsistent. In this sense, having in mind that the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights are the main guidelines for the States in fulfilling their obligations arising from the Convention, it is very important for the Court to fully clarify its approach in this regard.
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The review of: Anna Magdalena Kosińska, Prawa kulturalne obywateli państw trzecich w prawie Unii Europejskiej; Wydawnictwo Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego Jana Pawła II, Lublin 2018; ISBN 978-83-8061-515-1
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How can we explain variation in the organization of LGBT activism in postcommunist Europe, both across countries and over time? Much of the extant scholarship has analyzed the comparative politics of homosexuality in the region in terms of transnational norm diffusion occurring within the context of EU accession and integration. Thus, it emphasizes the empowerment of domestic gay rights groups either through maximizing the leverage of their external allies or through increasing their linkage with transnational advocacy networks. This paper argues that the effectiveness of these diffusion mechanisms is strongly constrained by the collective action problems faced by gay rights activists in societies with a legacy of civil society underdevelopment, such as in postcommunist Europe. We argue that hard-right backlash is a critical domestic factor that can help overcome these collective action problems, enabling gay rights activists to find resonant frames, build internal solidarity, and win allies—even when social movement resources are minimal. The research focuses on a close comparison of Poland and the Czech Republic since 1989 and draws on field interviews and original sources to process-trace the resonance of LGBT rights frames and how activism is organized. By building organizationally robust activism, postcommunist gay rights movements lay claim to full membership in the political community, exercise civil rights as LGBT citizens (not merely as private ones), and expand the sphere of “sexual citizenship.”
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The accession of post-communist states into the Council of Europe system enlarged greatly the territory of effective protection of human rights in Europe and at the same time compelled the European Court of Human Rights to address the current effects of past violations of human rights by communist regimes. It gave the Court an opportunity to establish a legal standard of how to deal with matters such as the public presence of communist symbols and insignia, de-registration of neo-Communist parties, and the relevance of past membership in the Communist parties for an exercise of electoral rights in a newly democratized state. This opportunity was at the same time a challenge, and the Court was less than successful in meeting this challenge, despite the fact that it had already established the relevant legal standards when deciding about the cases triggered by the Nazi past. Without making it explicit, and without articulating openly the relevant differences, the Court has not established any equivalence between legal treatments of the aftermath of the two types of criminal regimes in the European recent past. The article discusses three recent cases belonging to these categories and concludes that there is a clear contrast between the Court’s treatment of “post-ommunist” cases and the same Court’s earlier treatment of equivalent “post-Nazi” cases; the article offers some explanations for the discrepancy which reflects a broader dualism in European collective memory of the past.
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What is the contribution of Eastern European scholarship to the study of human rights and transitional justice? This essay takes stock of the most significant empirical and theoretical contributions of the study of Eastern Europe, specifically the study of the difficult case of the former Yugoslavia, to the scholarship on transitional justice. I identify three main challenges the scholarship on the former Yugoslavia has presented to the larger field of transitional justice: the political challenge of multiple overlapping transitions, the inability of international institutions to effect domestic social change, and the dangers of politicization of past violence remembrance.
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Three different international courts have determined that genocide took place in Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1992-1995: the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Yet paradoxically, there has been virtually no punishment of this genocide, while the punishment of lesser war crimes of the Bosnian war has been very limited. The ICTY has convicted only one individual, a lowly deputy corps commander, of a genocide-related offence. The ICJ acquitted Serbia, the state that planned and launched the assault upon Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1992, of genocide and related offences, finding it guilty only of failure to prevent and punish genocide. Although Serb forces were responsible for the overwhelming majority of war crimes, the ICTY prosecution has disproportionately targeted non-Serbs in its indictments and, among Serbs, has disproportionately targeted Bosnian Serbs, with no official of Serbia or Yugoslavia yet convicted of war crimes in Bosnia. This article argues that the meagre results of the international judicial processes vis-à-vis the crimes of the Bosnian war must be sought in the structural failings, poor decision making, and political influences that affected the international courts. It argues that the international courts have failed either to deliver justice to the victims of the war crimes or to promote reconciliation among the peoples of the former Yugoslavia and suggests measures that could be taken to rectify the situation.
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This article explores the history of HIV activism in Poland from the socialist period through the early 1990s transformation as a means of examining the reconfiguration of rights, obligations, and responsibility as Poland redefined itself as a market democracy. Drawing on archival materials, in-depth qualitative interviews with current and former HIV activists, and participant observation at HIV prevention organizations in Warsaw, Poland, I sketch the ways in which the socialist system’s failures to protect the health of its subjects led to the terms through which state-citizen engagement was defined in the postsocialist period. Uncertainties and anxieties surrounding who was responsible for protecting the health and well-being of citizens in the newly democratic Poland gave rise to a series of violent protests centered on HIV prevention and care for people living with HIV/AIDS. Resolution of these political and social crises involved defining democracy in postsocialist Poland through claims to moral authority, in alliance with the Catholic Church, and an obligation by multiple stakeholders to disseminate technical/scientific knowledge. By comparing the responses to the epidemic by diverse institutions, including the government, the Catholic Church, and the fledgling gay rights movement, this analysis reveals the ways in which democracy in postsocialist Poland tightly links science, democratic reform, and moral/religious authority while at the same time excluding sexual minorities from engaging in political activism centered on rights to health and inclusion in the new democracy.
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The birth of documents has historically occurred when writing was born as a way of communication in society, as an objective requirement of social development and as a need for the functioning and solution of various human problems. The first documents are found early, sometime in the third millennium BC in the slave-owning states of the ancient East, then later in ancient Greece and Rome. While in the Albanian territories we find documents and archives in very early periods, since the ancient Illyrian cities, such as stone inscriptions, various chronicles or documents which protected the interests of slave owners and were kept mainly in libraries. Meanwhile, when it comes to archives and archival service in today's territory of Kosovo during the time of the Illyrians, namely the Dardan tribe, which was located in the territory of today's Kosovo and not only, we have no written evidence that speaks of archives and for staff who have manipulated written documents. We find such traces in various inscriptions, in stone inscriptions, in cemetery monuments, stelae, inscriptions dedicated to the gods, votes, on stones, etc. The first concrete efforts in terms of archives and archival service in Kosovo were made after the Second World War, the establishment of the new communist government within the former Socialist People's Federation of Yugoslavia, of which Kosovo was an administrative part, specifically in in 1951 when the Provincial State Archive was established.
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The collapse of communism reshaped European debates on minority rights. By the 1980s, the different institutionalizations of turn-of-the-century perspectives created an ideational divide between East and West. Since 1989, Western norms have not simply transferred East, as intellectuals and politicians in the region challenged and reinterpreted the norms in novel ways. Fifteen years later, European minority norms are elaborated in much greater detail than ever before, but consensus on core issues remains elusive. The article first explores the roots of this ideational divide and how recent trafficking of ideas between East and West Europeans has caused both to reexamine their core assumptions on the rights of minority communities, particularly with regards to individualism, collective autonomy, and justice. The second part examines how these controversies over norm interpretation appear in minority policy debates in Eastern Europe, including minority autonomy, education, and the Hungarian Status Law.
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The COVID-19 pandemic challenged countries around the world to preserve public health which entailed limitations of human rights. We have seen around the world that these limitations were adopted in way that was not in accordance with the proportionality principle, which led to misuse of the state of emergency in general and the interventionism of unseen proportions. The goal of this paper is to present how Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a country in transition, faced the COVID-19 pandemic and give an overview of the events that represent human rights and freedoms violations and abuses associated with the state of emergency.
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The article focuses on the legacy of political dissent in communist countries and its impact on post-communist political and legal transformations. The first part describes the nature of communist politics and the legal system founded on the principle of ‘socialist legality.’ In the following part, the dissident argumentative blend of legalism and natural rights will be analysed as both a critique of the communist system and a structural precondition of post-communist constitutional and legal transformations. The final part will focus on how the political dissent in communist countries symbolised virtues of civil society and liberal democratic politics based on the rule of law and influenced the emerging constitutional systems based on the protection of human rights.
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The war and the consequences of the war in former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and especially the war against the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina took a terrible toll both in terms of human casualties and in material losses. International and Bosnian judicial institutions have filed indictments against some of the organizers and perpetrators of war crimes on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, the crimes committed on August 8, 1992, in the villages and hamlets of the marginal local community Vikoč in Foča, have remained uninvestigated and still unsanctioned. The most vulnerable categories of the civilian population (women, the elderly and children) were predominantly targeted (or disporoportionaly targeted) during the aforementioned attack. Therefore, this paper seeks to, using relevant and accessible sources, shed light on the crimes committed in just one day, which unequivocally confirm the widespread, almost everyday practice, especially in the first months of 1992. Based on the facts established by international and domestic judicial institutions, the focus of this research is on one day, the eighth day of August, in the area of one Foča border local community – Vikoč local community.
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