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191.More information
Stromboli, a small island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, is home to one of the most active volcanoes on the planet and is the land of a community of islanders, the Strombolani. The latter, through complex mental processes and adjustments, manage to make this place – although considered by some as particularly exposed to various geological hazards – a place of life, where the volcano, more than an inspiration of death, symbolizes the breathing of a living Earth. Through an inversion of their point of view, they offer us an insight into the processes of appropriation of the deadly risk, in this case volcanic, to create an appeased daily life.
Keywords: ethnographie, volcanisme, risques, ontologies, etnografía, vulcanismo, riesgo, ontologías
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Established to resolve disputes arising from the application and interpretation of the texts of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the ECOWAS Court of Justice (ECOWASCJ) is entitled since 2005 to hear cases of human rights violations, which are contrary to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights. Thus, when facing a case of slavery between the Republic of Niger and Ms. Hadijatou Mani Koraou, it ruled in favor of the latter, based exclusively on the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which had however expressed reservations about the widespread conception of slavery. Moreover, the jurisprudence and the doctrine of fundamental rights of the individual seem to clash with the said conception. This article gives an overview of the ECOWASCJ and the definition of slavery in various fields of international law. Despite the undoubted merits of the Hadijatou judgment, it suggests that by not considering the jurisprudence and the doctrine of fundamental human rights, the ECOWASCJ adopted a truncated view of slavery and that, therefore, its contribution to the understanding of the definition of slavery in international law must be put into perspective. Finally, the article suggests some ways of improving the overall quality of the work of the ECOWASCJ regarding the protection of fundamental human rights.
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In following dialectic reasoning, avenues of analysis are proposed to assess the insolvable contradiction that puts the vectors of globalized expansion at odds with the requisites of the Rule of Law. The issue of their reciprocal compatibility cannot be eluded because the two phenomena are based upon hegemonic premises, which allow them to lay claim to the preeminence of distinct fields. Thus, during the 1990s, the tangible progression of the Rule of Law as a means of expression for constitutional democracy beyond the limited circle of occidental countries contributed to the latent universalization of the principle, but also of the development of a rhetoric that transformed it into a myth that forms the basis of contemporary political debates. The ideas (constitutionalism, political democracy, the « juridical handling » of fundamental freedoms) that nurture discussions on the Rule of Law point the political and institutional practices of sovereign states in a specific direction. Conversely, globalization is associated with the emergence of « borderless laws » and the creation of new machinery for imposing regulations that would reduce state sovereignty in various areas currently under their exclusive jurisdiction. Since the integrity of national legal systems is solidly based upon the prevalence of constitutional standards, the effectiveness of the Rule of Law and constitutionalism may become shaky owing to the multiplication of legal systems in potential competition with one another. Globalization offers fertile ground for devising various scenarios wherein states no longer have precedence over the dynamics for creating standards or setting reference points. If this analysis highlights the exacerbation of many contradictions, it correspondingly underscores the complementarity arising from the limits of the State being outpaced by the classical sources of international law. Between the globalization of the Rule of Law and its correlative integration into the multiform realities of globalization, current transformations demonstrate the need for reformulating the Rule of Law.