Theory and Practice of the European Convention on Human Rights

This edited book brings you a collection of current, critical issues regarding the theory and practice of the European Court of Human Rights. The book is divided into three parts: procedural concerns, principles and jurisprudence, and interaction with national legal systems. Each chapter was written by an expert, with each author coming from a distinct background. The authors all presented at the 2019 University of Leipzig’s & University of Dresden’s 1st International Summer School on the European Court of Human Rights, with only select presenters asked to contribute to this book. The book’s goal is to promote further research and discourse on the operation of the Court, a goal that will be continued in the second summer school in 2021. With contributions by Veronika Bilkova, Katharina Braun, Robert Frau, Hanaa Hakiki, Beti Hohler, Stefanie Lemke, Helga Molbaek-Steensig, Jacopo Roberti di Sarsina, Christiane Schmaltz, Barbara Sonczyk, Dominik Steiger, Edith Wagner and Alain Zysset.

Case Note – Justice Served?: Ashwaq Haji Hamid Talo's Confrontation and Conviction of Her Islamic State Captor

Over five years after the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group launched its genocidal attack against the Yazidi ethno-religious minority community in Sinjar, Northern Iraq, calls for 'justice' remain largely unanswered. While hundreds of IS members have been tried and convicted of their group affiliation, few have faced charges for crimes committed against the Yazidis. However, in March 2020, Ashwaq Haji Hamid Talo – a 20-year-old Yazidi woman – took the stand of a Baghdad courtroom and played a driving role in the prosecution and conviction of her attacker. Through examination of her case in the context of wider political and procedural concerns for trying IS members, this article highlights both the opportunities and challenges for individual victims and the wider Yazidi community to secure meaningful 'justice'.

The Relationship between Just World Beliefs and Life Satisfaction

An important and often unexplored factor shaping life satisfaction is one’s perception of the world as a “just” place. The “just world hypothesis” is predicated on the idea that the world works as a place where people get what they merit, an idea that often serves as a means for people to rationalize injustices. The research addressing just world beliefs has expanded into a four-factor model that categorizes just world beliefs for self and others into subcategories of distributive and procedural justice. Distributive justice involves evaluations of the fairness of outcomes, allocations, or distribution of resources, while procedural concerns evaluations of the fairness of decision processes, rules, or interpersonal treatment. This study explored the relationship between the four just world beliefs subscales and overall satisfaction with life and examined their associations with demographic variables including ethnicity, age, gender, religion, and social class. The relationships of demographic factors with justice beliefs and life satisfaction generally yielded very small effect sizes. However, respondents who identified themselves as middle and upper class reported higher levels of life satisfaction than those who identified themselves as lower class, with a medium effect size. Consistent with the results of earlier research, regressing life satisfaction on the four justice beliefs subscales indicated that the two self-subscales (distributive and procedural) were significantly predictive of life satisfaction, but the two other subscales (distributive and procedural) were not.

P950 Impact of True Vue-Trans- Illumination rendering imaging for intraoperative echocardiography in a wide range of interventions

Background Volume rendering methods have been improved to further enhance the quality of imaging and make the communication between echocardiographers and interventionists more fast, reliable and simple. The last innovation in this field is the "3D Real Time True Vue-Transillumination (TI)" rendering method. This allows to freely move virtual light inside a sample volume to enhance image details and depth. No studies have addressed the advantage of this method in the context of procedural guidance for structural interventions. Purpose The aim of the present paper is to test the advantages of this method when applied to interventional TOE during cardiac structural interventions. Methods During different procedures we prospectively collected the apparent added value of TI compared to conventional rendering scored independently by two cardiologists in charge of procedural guidance, one being in training (observer 1) and one trained (observer 2). The score was performed in a Likert scale from 1 to 5 with refer to advantage of TI for different procedural concerns (from 1 that meant "strongly disagree" to 5 "strongly agree"). We tested the inter-rater reliability with the K coefficient of agreement between the two observers. In this analysis we included multiple procedural targets to be imaged during different procedures. Results We included 8 complex procedures performed in our institutions between November 2018 and March 2019 and collected the agreement of the two observers about the following procedural concerns: evaluation of MV area for MV repair procedures; evaluation of MV main target lesion at the beginning of repairing procedure for procedural planning; evaluation of calcifications of MV leaflet and annulus and cleft for patients selection; evaluation of device trajectory with 3D real time imaging before crossing the valve plane during orienting manoeuvre; assessment of residual lesion after first clip for procedural decision making; evaluation of para-valvular leak: site and amount;evaluation of inch point of leaflets for direct annuloplasty in mitral valve and tricuspid valve regurgitation; visualization of coronary sinus during the implant of anchors of Cardioband in posterior part of tricuspid annulus. We collected the scores for a total of 13 records. The 2 observers perceived an added value for TI for all the procedural concerns analysed (mean score of 4.0 ± 0,75); a good agreement was obtained about the superiority of TI rendering in these 13 concerns with a Kappa coefficient of inter-agreement of 0.71, p < 0.0001. Conclusions this is the first experience comparing the new 3D TI rendering with 3D conventional rendering in the context of intra-procedural guidance for structural valve interventions. We obtained good inter-agreement between two echocardiographist with different levels of experience suggesting that TI may have advantages even for education.

Reforming Ukraine: Problems of Constitutional Regulation and Implementation of Human Rights

The article focuses on current problems of human rights constitutional provision, protection and implementation in Ukraine in the context of the reforms aimed at Eurointegration. The aim is to brief in the historical aspects of the development of ideas and concepts of human rights in Ukraine, focus on the human rights provision of the active Constitution projected through the ongoing reforms and to expose the correlation between the rights enshrined and their actual implementation. The existing and possible future problems related to the regulation and realization of human rights in Ukraine’s reform process are considered. The article reflects the problem of the value approach to human rights, which is directly related to the low level of legal culture and the insufficient level of development of civil society Ukraine. The work also analyses the amendments that have been made to the Constitution since the independence. While presenting the latest developments and drafts regarding the addressed issues, we try to look deeper into the problem, far beyond the formal and procedural concerns, addressing social and cultural barriers in understanding the importance and necessity of the problems under consideration not only by the leadership of the state but also by ordinary Ukrainians.

Reforming Ukraine: Problems of Constitutional Regulation and Implementation of Human Rights

The article focuses on current problems of human rights constitutional provision, protection and implementation in Ukraine in the context of the reforms aimed at Eurointegration. The aim is to brief in the historical aspects of the development of ideas and concepts of human rights in Ukraine, focus on the human rights provision of the active Constitution projected through the ongoing reforms and to expose the correlation between the rights enshrined and their actual implementation. The existing and possible future problems related to the regulation and realization of human rights in Ukraine’s reform process are considered. The article reflects the problem of the value approach to human rights, which is directly related to the low level of legal culture and the insufficient level of development of civil society Ukraine. The work also analyses the amendments that have been made to the Constitution since the independence. While presenting the latest developments and drafts regarding the addressed issues, we try to look deeper into the problem, far beyond the formal and procedural concerns, addressing social and cultural barriers in understanding the importance and necessity of the problems under consideration not only by the leadership of the state but also by ordinary Ukrainians.

Enhancing Sustainability of Complex Epidemiological Models through a Generic Multilevel Agent-based Approach

The development of computational sciences has fostered major advances in life sciences, but also led to reproducibility and reliability issues, which become a crucial stake when simulations are aimed at assessing control measures, as in epidemiology. A broad use of software development methods is a useful remediation to reduce those problems, but preventive approaches, targeting not only implementation but also model design, are essential to sustainable enhancements. Among them, AI techniques, based on the separation between declarative and procedural concerns, and on knowledge engineering, offer promising solutions. Especially, multilevel multi-agent systems, deeply rooted in that culture, provide a generic way to integrate several epidemiological modeling paradigms within a homogeneous interface. We explain in this paper how this approach is used for building more generic, reliable and sustainable simulations, illustrated by real-case applications in cattle epidemiology.

The Draft cdc Circumcision Recommendations: Medical, Ethical, Legal, and Procedural Concerns

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“cdc”) is poised to recommend that physicians counsel the parents of every newborn boy and heterosexually active adolescent and man in the United States – approximately 36 million boys and men – that the benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks, that parents should take non-medical factors into account in making the “circumcision decision”, and that Medicaid should pay for it. The draft cdc recommendations are not medically correct, ethically sound, legally permissible or procedurally valid. Accordingly, they should not be implemented and would be legally invalid if they are. They provide erroneous and misleading advice to physicians that exposes them to the threat of lawsuits by men and parents. The cdc must revise its draft guidelines to comport with the correct and prevailing view in the Western world that circumcision is on balance deleterious to health; that men have the right to make the “circumcision decision” for themselves; that physicians are not permitted to circumcise healthy boys; and that it is unlawful to use Medicaid to pay for unnecessary surgery.