A Constitutional Framework of a Future Palestinian State - Synthesis of Leading Palestinian Thinking and Public Perceptions

Green financing plays a pivotal role in addressing environmental challenges and fostering sustainable development, particularly in emerging economies. However, its adoption is often hindered by systemic barriers. This study examines the barriers to green financing in Nepal, focusing on four critical factors: the incapability of banks and financial institutions (BFIs), limited accessibility, political constraints, and public perception. Using a quantitative, cross-sectional survey design, data were collected from 228 investors across Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley. Statistical analyses, including correlation and regression, reveal that all four factors significantly influence investor participation in green financing, with political constraints and accessibility emerging as the most prominent barriers. The findings highlight a considerable communication gap, insufficient institutional capacity, and weak policy support as key obstacles. This study underscores the need for enhanced public awareness, institutional capacity building, and supportive regulatory frameworks to overcome these challenges. By addressing these barriers, Nepal can unlock the potential of green financing, advancing its sustainability goals and economic resilience. The research contributes valuable insights to the growing body of literature on green finance, offering actionable implications for policymakers, financial institutions, and investors in similar emerging markets.Green financing plays a pivotal role in addressing environmental challenges and fostering sustainable development, particularly in emerging economies. However, its adoption is often hindered by systemic barriers. This study examines the barriers to green financing in Nepal, focusing on four critical factors: the incapability of banks and financial institutions (BFIs), limited accessibility, political constraints, and public perception. Using a quantitative, cross-sectional survey design, data were collected from 228 investors across Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley. Statistical analyses, including correlation and regression, reveal that all four factors significantly influence investor participation in green financing, with political constraints and accessibility emerging as the most prominent barriers. The findings highlight a considerable communication gap, insufficient institutional capacity, and weak policy support as key obstacles. This study underscores the need for enhanced public awareness, institutional capacity building, and supportive regulatory frameworks to overcome these challenges. By addressing these barriers, Nepal can unlock the potential of green financing, advancing its sustainability goals and economic resilience. The research contributes valuable insights to the growing body of literature on green finance, offering actionable implications for policymakers, financial institutions, and investors in similar emerging markets.Green financing plays a pivotal role in addressing environmental challenges and fostering sustainable development, particularly in emerging economies. However, its adoption is often hindered by systemic barriers. This study examines the barriers to green financing in Nepal, focusing on four critical factors: the incapability of banks and financial institutions (BFIs), limited accessibility, political constraints, and public perception. Using a quantitative, cross-sectional survey design, data were collected from 228 investors across Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley. Statistical analyses, including correlation and regression, reveal that all four factors significantly influence investor participation in green financing, with political constraints and accessibility emerging as the most prominent barriers. The findings highlight a considerable communication gap, insufficient institutional capacity, and weak policy support as key obstacles. This study underscores the need for enhanced public awareness, institutional capacity building, and supportive regulatory frameworks to overcome these challenges. By addressing these barriers, Nepal can unlock the potential of green financing, advancing its sustainability goals and economic resilience. The research contributes valuable insights to the growing body of literature on green finance, offering actionable implications for policymakers, financial institutions, and investors in similar emerging markets.Green financing plays a pivotal role in addressing environmental challenges and fostering sustainable development, particularly in emerging economies. However, its adoption is often hindered by systemic barriers. This study examines the barriers to green financing in Nepal, focusing on four critical factors: the incapability of banks and financial institutions (BFIs), limited accessibility, political constraints, and public perception. Using a quantitative, cross-sectional survey design, data were collected from 228 investors across Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley. Statistical analyses, including correlation and regression, reveal that all four factors significantly influence investor participation in green financing, with political constraints and accessibility emerging as the most prominent barriers. The findings highlight a considerable communication gap, insufficient institutional capacity, and weak policy support as key obstacles. This study underscores the need for enhanced public awareness, institutional capacity building, and supportive regulatory frameworks to overcome these challenges. By addressing these barriers, Nepal can unlock the potential of green financing, advancing its sustainability goals and economic resilience. The research contributes valuable insights to the growing body of literature on green finance, offering actionable implications for policymakers, financial institutions, and investors in similar emerging markets.

Fairness in the tax system seems unachievable when the well-advised free-ride on the many benefits of an organized global economy paid for by tax revenues extracted from others. While those publicly accused of ‘tax-dodging’ point to their full compliance with all applicable laws, they are substantially less forth-coming about their efforts to influence the shape of the law to their own benefit. All too often, tax policy appears to respond primarily to those with the resources to influence the policy-makers. As the system becomes increasingly unresponsive to legitimate policy goals and increasingly out of touch with justice – perceived and actual – public perceptions about the system understandably trend toward the cynical. In the extreme, taxpayers who lose trust in their elected representatives, their tax administrators, and their fellow taxpayers will feel justified in refusing to cooperate with a system they view as fundamentally unprincipled. This chapter argues that this is a governance problem that cannot be eliminated but must be systemically addressed in order to restore taxpayer trust. It suggests that transparency and accountability in policy-making are necessary, and that governments can move toward achieving these aims by supporting and contributing to global, open-access data resources and independent tax policy research in the public interest.

Trust in the Tax System: The Problem of Lobbying

The law applicable to investment disputes is of paramount importance because it can be a determinant of the outcome of the dispute. Disputing parties can choose the law applicable to their dispute. This derives from the principle of party autonomy in international arbitration. The parties’ choice of the applicable law often takes place in tandem with or as part of their consent to arbitration. Treaty partners can insert a clause on applicable law in the investment treaty or indirectly incorporate the provisions on applicable law of various arbitration rules, such as when offering arbitration according to the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (ICSID Convention) or the Arbitration Rules of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). When an investor accepts the host state’s offer to arbitrate, it also accepts its choice of applicable law as expressed in the treaty and/or in the arbitration rules under which the investor selects to bring the dispute. There are also other ways in which disputing parties can choose the applicable law. For instance, their choice of applicable law can be crystallized in a compromis drafted once a dispute has arisen. In the absence of an express choice of applicable law, the latter is determined on the basis of the default rules found in the arbitration rules which govern the dispute. As an illustration, Article 42(1) of the ICSID Convention provides that, if the parties do not agree on the applicable law, the tribunal shall apply the law of the host state, including its conflict of law rules, “and such rules of international law as may be applicable.” Debates about the identification of the applicable law have often revolved around the relative weight to be accorded to the municipal law of the host state and to international law. Sometimes the tribunal’s failure to apply primarily the investment treaty has been at the heart of debate. Failure to apply the proper law constitutes a ground for annulment under the ICSID Convention (as manifest excess of powers). In non-ICSID Convention arbitration, awards can also be set aside for failure to apply the applicable law (e.g., when the tribunal is perceived to overstep its mandate). However, such annulment or set-aside concerns the effect of failure to apply the applicable law. This is a separate issue and as such it is not covered in the present article.

An organizational approach to public governance focuses on the organizational architecture of public organizations and contributes to explaining governance processes by the organizational characteristics of such organizations. The dependent variable “public governance” is defined as the process through which the steering of society takes place. Such steering of society can unfold directly (“governance”) as well as indirectly (“meta-governance”), the latter denoting the process of organizing the apparatus within which governance happens. Governance is not only about making formal decisions, but also about agenda setting, development of alternative policy directions, implementation, and learning. In practice, it is about hammering out legislation, budgets, policy programs, and law application (“governance”), as well as organizing, staffing, and locating the machinery of government (“meta-governance”). Organization structure, organization demography, and organization locus make up the key independent variables. Such a partial model is not thought to provide a full account of what happens in governance processes, but the organizational factors are expected to intervene and bias governance processes systematically and significantly. Since these factors are, arguably, relatively amenable to deliberate change, they constitute at the same time potential design tools. However, rational organizational design also depends on knowledge about the conditions under which the organizational factors themselves may be changed (“meta-governance”). Knowledge about these two relationships is, arguably, ultimately a prerequisite for (rational) organizational design. Public organization literature has largely neglected theorizing meta-governance and conditions for institutional (re)design. Organizational factors may influence meta-governance in two ways: first, existing organization structures, demographics, and locations may affect reform processes; secondly, reform processes themselves may be deliberately organized on a temporary basis to achieve particular goals. Organization theory is helpful in dissecting how different ways of organizing reform processes may produce different reform trajectories and outcomes. The idea sees reform processes as decision-making processes that allocate attention, resources, capabilities, roles, and identities. Reform organizations have structures, demographics, and locations that distribute rights and obligations, power and resources, and normally do so unevenly. Yet, when considering organizational (re-)design, its limitations should be considered as well. Organizational designers might benefit from being aware of the potential stickiness of existing organizational arrangements and the influence of environmental demands, as well as temporal sorting of events. Moreover, the limits to design are greater in complex organizational orders with nested rules such as in nation states, meta-organizations, and supranational institutions such as the European Union, than in single organizations such as government ministries and agencies.

In June 2025, Ethiopia implemented a comprehensive nationwide ban on single-use plastic bags to address the growing plastic pollution crisis and to promote sustainable waste management practices. This perspective article critically examines the role of public perception and behavioral compliance in shaping the success of the ban on single-use plastic bags in Ethiopia. Drawing on policy analysis, public discourse and anticipated public perception, this study examines the potential key challenges that could hinder the effective implementation of the ban, including limited public awareness, socioeconomic disparities, lack of affordable alternatives and weak enforcement mechanisms. It also examines how cultural norms, infrastructure limitations and fragmented communication strategies impede policy adoption. The challenges faced in enforcing plastic ban, along with insights from both successful and failed strategies in comparable societies and economies of some developing countries, have been highlighted and explained, offering valuable guidance and lessons for Ethiopia. The article concludes by providing context-specific recommendations, including multichannel awareness campaigns, economic incentives, institutional capacity building and community-driven engagement strategies. The findings can provide critical insights for policymakers and stakeholders seeking to enhance policy effectiveness and foster behavioral transitions in Ethiopia and other developing nations.

Logic Programming is a style of programming in which programs take the form of sets of sentences in the language of Symbolic Logic. Over the years, there has been growing interest in Logic Programming due to applications in deductive databases, automated worksheets, Enterprise Management (business rules), Computational Law, and General Game Playing. book introduces Logic Programming theory, current technology, and popular applications. this volume, we take an innovative, model-theoretic approach to logic programming. We begin with the fundamental notion of datasets, i.e., sets of ground atoms. Given this fundamental notion, we introduce views, i.e., virtual relations; and we define classical logic programs as sets of view definitions, written using traditional Prolog-like notation but with semantics given in terms of datasets rather than implementation. We then introduce actions, i.e., additions and deletions of ground atoms; and we define dynamic logic programs as sets of action definitions. addition to the printed book, there is an online version of the text with an interpreter and a compiler for the language used in the text and an integrated development environment for use in developing and deploying practical logic programs. This is a book for the 21st century: presenting an elegant and innovative perspective on logic programming. Unlike other texts, it takes datasets as a fundamental notion, thereby bridging the gap between programming languages and knowledge representation languages; and it treats updates on an equal footing with datasets, leading to a sound and practical treatment of action and change. – Bob Kowalski, Professor Emeritus, Imperial College London In a world where Deep Learning and Python are the talk of the day, this book is a remarkable development. It introduces the reader to the fundamentals of traditional Logic Programming and makes clear the benefits of using the technology to create runnable specifications for complex systems. – Son Cao Tran, Professor in Computer Science, New Mexico State University Excellent introduction to the fundamentals of Logic Programming. The book is well-written and well-structured. Concepts are explained clearly and the gradually increasing complexity of exercises makes it so that one can understand easy notions quickly before moving on to more difficult ideas. – George Younger, student, Stanford University

For as long as our modern legal systems exist they have operated on the basis of the lex rei sitae rule. As an expression of the principle of territoriality, the law of a country applies to all objects that are situated on the territory. In domestic cases, of course, the regular rules apply, but in international disputes a legal system uses its own rules to be able to apply its own domestic law. The doctrine of lex rei sitae becomes relevant in a situation in which two legal systems come into contact with one another. A conflict of laws or conflit mobile arises when the law of one country is to be applied in the law of another country. Over the last centuries an intricate system of rules has developed with which private international lawyers resolve conflict of laws by pointing towards one of these legal systems as the applicable law. They do so - at least in theory - blindfolded, so that they cannot favor one legal system over the other. Instead of choosing one system over another, a set of impartial and objective rules is used to determine what legal system is to be applied. Private international law theory is, however, less facilitative in practice. In the European Union there is an internal market in which there is free movement of goods, persons, services and capital. This internal market is governed by principles and theory that are very different from the principles and theory underlying private international law. EU law works on the basis of a market functionalism that seeks to allow legal relations to remain to be governed by their country of origin. Property private international law rules are aimed to have legal relations governed by the host country. This tension between two opposite viewpoints is part of a larger tension between the unifying nature of EU Law and the procedural autonomy of the EU Member States. Rather than having EU law decide what is to be the applicable law, in general private international law cases, the host country, i.e. the lex fori, decides this by itself. In the past decade, however, many private international law rules have become EU law to centralise the rule deciding on applicable law and jurisdiction. The EU has therefore claimed competence in the area of applicable law and jurisdiction. However, when property law has been concerned, mostly connection has been sought, also at the EU level to the traditional lex rei sitae rule. In practice however, also an EU lex rei sitae rule turns out to be difficult to apply. The best example of this is perhaps the EU Succession Regulation that allows one single legal system to be applied to an entire cross-border succession case.

Lex Rei Sitae and the EU Internal Market - Towards Mutual Recognition of Property Relations

This article analyzes the politicization of fatherhood in revolutionary Mexico City's process of social reform and institution building between 1910 and 1940. Based on evidence culled from juvenile court case histories, criminal trial transcripts, and letter-writing campaigns, it concludes that reformist and popular ideas about fatherhood were highly contested in this era of social change, legal reform, and state formation. By examining the competing visions of fatherhood that reformers, women, and fathers themselves promoted, it shows that ideas about appropriate parental roles in Mexico were linked to revolutionary conceptualizations of progress, social mobility, and political participation.

A coup d’etat is defined as “a sudden and decisive action in politics, especially one resulting in a change of government illegally or by force.” As one looks through all the coup d’etats that have occurred throughout the history in various parts of the world, one can observe that often the protagonists of such events are political enemies, military leaders, or distressed insiders. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find where a coup d’etat has been executed by way of a poor legal reasoning of a Constitutional Court. Well, that is until now! In the newest country in Europe, the Republic of Kosovo, major international and domestic investments are being made on institution building. One of the beneficiaries of such investments has been the newly formed Constitutional Court of the Republic of Kosovo. Soon after its establishment, this young court faced its first tough decision, namely a challenge to the President of the country regarding his alleged serious violation of the Constitution by holding posts as President of the country and Chairman of his party. In a highly controversial case, marred with procedural irregularities, judicial misconduct, lack of due process, human rights violations, regular media leaks, and behind-the-scenes international and domestic political influences on the Court, a split Court decided that the President had seriously violated the Constitution. This decision led to the President’s resignation, which caused a political imbalance that still lingers, further harming Kosovo’s long term interests and prospects. But more importantly, some argue that this marks the first case where a coup d’etat that took down a President was executed by a Constitutional Court. This paper argues that the Court should have dismissed the claim of the MPs as inadmissible on procedural grounds, specifically that it was filed by the MPs after the time permitted by law and that the MPs never maintained the number of 30 members that were needed for the group to be an authorized party. Additionally, even on the merits, the Court failed to distinguish between the constitutional requirement to not exercise a party function, which the President in this case did not do, but rather simply held the position in a suspended mode. Moreover, even had the President’s holding of the position amounted to a violation of the Constitution, in no way did that equate to a serious constitutional violation. Still, the Court held contrary to the Constitution, applicable laws, and the available evidence before it and found that the President had seriously violated the Constitution.

Given article analyzes the features of the application of law on the methodological basis of the principles of the rule of law and legal legitimacy, as well as establishes the following new definition for the application of law as a special form of the exercise of law: the application of law is the domineering activity of public bodies (officials) carried out in strict procedural order established by law and aimed at making an individual decision in respect of specific cases and certain persons on the basis of legal facts and rules of law, which may lead to supplementing or improving the regulatory framework.

Court Finance and Court Reactions to Judicial Reforms: A Tale of Two Chinese Courts

This article provides an assessment of the replacement of the UN Commission on Human Rights by the Human Rights Council, with a view to ascertaining whether the human rights architecture of the United Nations is now in better or worse shape. Institutionally, it is unique in that an international organ is dismantled and replaced by a new one for the sake of achieving greater effectiveness. What are the chances for success? For a proper assessment, the article first examines the status, functioning, and falling into disgrace of the UN Commission on Human Rights and, second, reviews the establishment of the new Human Rights Council as part of the UN reform process and identifies the new features of the Council compared with the previous Commission. Third, it discusses the work of the Council in its first year, in particular the extensive June 2007 decision on institution building of the UN Human Rights Council. The article concludes that the Council had a far from fresh and easy start, but that its establishment and functioning so far are not a radical departure from the acquis of the UN human rights regime. The first years of the Council are crucial for solid institution building and functioning credibly in an action-oriented way. The first members on the Council bear the heavy responsibility of seizing this historic opportunity.

This research studies the responses of two lower‐level courts, one in rural and the other in urban China, to recent judicial reforms focusing on strengthening institutional building and professionalism. It finds that the court‐funding structure under which the courts heavily rely on the local government for expenses, together with the unbalanced development of local economy, remarkably affects the two courts' behavioral pattern in different ways. The rural court, for the sake of litigation fees, tries to attract potential litigants to file certain lawsuits, even though it cannot effectively handle them. The efforts toward institutional building and professionalism only aggravate the already difficult situation. The urban court's institutional quality seems to have increased in the reform process, thanks to sufficient resources from the developed and diversified local economy. But it has also become more formalized and bureaucratic, as it tries to exclude difficult and problematic disputes from getting into the court. In illustrating the complexity of transitional China's judicial reform process generated by both the unbalanced economic development and the bureaucratization of the judiciary, this article suggests that the enhancement of institutional quality, which many argue is key to economic development, may itself be contingent upon the success of economic development.