From Litigation to Rights: The Case of the European Court of Human Rights

Do regional human rights courts influence respect for rights? Beyond providing remedy for individual human rights abuse, case outcomes help frame potential social mobilization by setting standards and raising the rights consciousness of civil society actors. The expectation of mobilization can increase the government’s costs of flouting the court’s rulings. We argue that an enabling domestic environment characterized by two features increases government expectation of mobilization following regional court litigation. First, a robust civil society creates strong horizontal ties between potential mobilizing groups. Second, a national human rights institution (NHRI) creates vertical ties that both transfer information down from the court to civil society; and transfer demands up from civil society to political elites in position to make stronger human rights policy. Using data for all Council of Europe countries from 1980 to 2012, we find European Court of Human Rights litigation associated with higher respect for rights in an enabling domestic environment characterized by strong civil society and the presence of a NHRI.

Role of TGF-β in Skin Chronic Wounds: A Keratinocyte Perspective

Chronic wounds are characterized for their incapacity to heal within an expected time frame. Potential mechanisms driving this impairment are poorly understood and current hypotheses point to the development of an unbalanced milieu of growth factor and cytokines. Among them, TGF-β is considered to promote the broadest spectrum of effects. Although it is known to contribute to healthy skin homeostasis, the highly context-dependent nature of TGF-β signaling restricts the understanding of its roles in healing and wound chronification. Historically, low TGF-β levels have been suggested as a pattern in chronic wounds. However, a revision of the available evidence in humans indicates that this could constitute a questionable argument. Thus, in chronic wounds, divergences regarding skin tissue compartments seem to be characterized by elevated TGF-β levels only in the epidermis. Understanding how this aspect affects keratinocyte activities and their capacity to re-epithelialize might offer an opportunity to gain comprehensive knowledge of the involvement of TGF-β in chronic wounds. In this review, we compile existing evidence on the roles played by TGF-β during skin wound healing, with special emphasis on keratinocyte responses. Current limitations and future perspectives of TGF-β research in chronic wounds are discussed.

CONCILIATE ROCK ART, ARCHAEOLOGY AND GEOLOGY IN THE STUDY OF DECORATED CAVES: THE CASE OF SAINT-FRONT CAVE (OR MAMMOTH’S CAVE, DOMME) AND FEW OTHER CAVERNS FROM DORDOGNE (FRANCE)

French South-West, especially the Dordogne region, is one of the richest European area of Palaeolithic sites, whether for human dwelling (including epony-mous and very famous sites like La Madeleine) as for Upper Palaeolithic rock art (of which Lascaux cave, Rouffignac cave, Font-de-Gaume cave, etc.). Those two categories are testimony of organization of daily life and livelihood strategies on one side, and the common system of values and meaning (culture) on the other side. Those two aspects are however very difficult to bring together. For adorned caves, it is often difficult to cross data coming from the walls and ground from a same decorated cave, data sometimes acquired separately. One way to deal with this problem is to develop a multi-disciplinary approach, which allows to combine rock art, archaeological and geological studies and which implies interactions and dialogs between many specialists. This goal, which goes be-yond simply providing archaeological and geological contexts for an image or a group of images, leads to the development of new approaches. Fig. 1. This paper proposes to present cases to the interdisciplinary study of the Great Saint-Front Cave (or Mammoths cave) and other adorned sites, studied within the frame of a collective research program, conducted from 2013 to 2016 and called Archologie des grottes ornes de Dordogne: cadre conceptuel, potentiel et ralit (Cave art archaeology: conceptual frame, potential and reality).