Law Enforcement Regime Research Articles

Employment, labor and social protection in a hybrid enforcement regime

The features of the hybrid law enforcement regime in the field of employment, labor and social protection are considered. Russia and the whole world have entered an era of turbulence, when customary and even emergency legal regimes that have been developed over decades do not allow us to respond effectively to challenges, regulate public relations and protect the rights and freedoms of legal entities in response to changes in the current situation. The traditional systematic approach to legal regulation using blocks of legislation formed in advance as a reaction to the situation changing in one direction or another often does not justify itself and each time requires a creative and individual, rather than template, approach from the law enforcement officer to the selection of used tools and norms of different legal regimes , which requires active rule-making to fill emerging gaps. Avoiding complex legal regulation adds originality to rulemaking and law enforcement in the early 2020s, the general direction of which is to accelerate the creation of rules of conduct in the field of labor, employment and social protection by increasing the role of the Government, speeding up the lawmaking process, expanding regional rulemaking, and giving greater legitimacy to the instructions of officials in comparison with documented acts. The legislator has consistently optimized the legal technique of preparing and adopting laws that meet the needs of operational support of a special military operation with labor legal means. The growth of regional rule-making in the field of social protection requires the elimination of shortcomings and unification at the federal level. A noticeable phenomenon was in a number of cases the replacement of written administrative acts with instructions from a senior official. The legal regimes formed in this way - aimed at countering the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19, accompanying the conduct of a special military operation, etc., can be called hybrid or constructed – assembled from various legal elements and do not form systems sufficient to achieve an integration-entropy balance. Moreover, for this design, elements of normatively established special legal regimes are used, which, however, have undergone significant transformation - a self-isolation regime instead of mandatory quarantine measures, special measures in the economic sphere instead of special economic measures established by presidential decree; mobilization – but partial. All this points to the 2020s as a period of hybrid law enforcement, when elements of other emergency regimes are used to construct the current law enforcement regime, but not in combination, while avoiding measures that entail a radical and total violation of civil rights and freedoms. At the same time, accelerated law-making clearly indicates that the array of norms that have been created over decades is insufficient to regulate the current agenda.

The implementation of intellectual property rights to enhance music business in Zimbabwe: Challenges and prospects

In the Zimbabwe music industry, the issue of copyright law implementation has been problematic with intellectual property rights violations plaguing the society and resulting in musicians failing to fully benefit financially from their creations. This study is an attempt to find out how musicians are benefiting from their intellectual property that is being used by various businesses including broadcasters. We argue that the problem of piracy has become an Achilles tendon for many artists despite the presence of a copyright law enforcement regime in the country. This article examines the nature and consequences of the copyright law in the country, as well as the way in which ZIMURA is implementing it to advance the cause of popular musicians. The article illustrates how the challenges faced by ZIMURA serve to impoverish Zimbabwean musicians in unheralded ways that leave a good number of artists poor and famous. This qualitative study uses participant observation, document analysis and key informant interviews with purposively selected informants to elucidate the implementation of intellectual property rights in Zimbabwe’s music industry. The analysis is informed by the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach as well as Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital. The findings show that in Zimbabwe music is taken as free property by most users who either sell pirated copies or access them for personal use without paying anything. From the study, it is clear that musicians are not getting a fair share of their intellectual property in the form of royalties. It is also notable that music that is appreciated more gets paid more royalties than music which is not popular with broadcasters and audiences.

AI-Driven Market Manipulation and Limits of the EU Law Enforcement Regime to Credible Deterrence

AI-Driven Market Manipulation and Limits of the EU Law Enforcement Regime to Credible Deterrence

Open defecation near a world heritage site: causes and implication for sustainable tourism and heritage management

PurposeThe sixth of the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has access to improved sanitation as one of its targets. Sanitation is important not only for environmental quality and public health but also for the outstanding universal value (OUV) of heritage monument sites and tourism promotion. The study examined the causes of open defecation (OD) in the neighbourhood of a World Heritage (WH) site in Ghana and the implications of the practice for sustainable tourism and heritage management.Design/methodology/approachThe study used the qualitative approach. Data were gathered from purposively targeted respondents (an Environmental Health Officer, Heritage Managers, a Tourism Expert, Hoteliers, Zoomlion Staff, Open Defecators, Community Opinion Leaders and Ordinary Community Residents) and analysed using the thematic approach.FindingsIt became evident that the causes of OD were: the lack of toilet facilities in many houses in the community, filthy and foul-smelling public latrines, poor attitude and heritage culture, mental and income poverty, inadequate sensitisation and a poor law enforcement regime. OD threatened the sustainability of heritage tourism and its associated livelihoods, as well as public health. In addition, it impaired the authenticity and integrity of the heritage monument, culminating in a detraction from the OUV of the heritage property.Practical implicationsIn collaboration with the local, national and international stakeholders, the managers of the heritage monument should design and implement a comprehensive environmentally friendly plan. The plan should consider demarcating the boundaries of the heritage asset, monitoring the protected area, enforcing sanitation laws and mounting intensive sanitation education campaigns. It should also consider providing a decent toilet in the vicinity of the monument for the transit population, facilitate the provision of a toilet in every house through the community-led total sanitation approach, installing digital cameras at vantage points in the buffer zone of the castle to capture open defecators and punishing offenders severely to deter others from engaging in the ignoble practice of OD.Originality/valueThe authors argue that sanitation at heritage sites in developing countries merits further discussion within the WH network to promote sustainable heritage conservation management and tourism.

Criminalizing Corporations In Environmental Crimes

The research objective is to find out how criminal law against the environment accommodates criminal acts committed by corporations and to find out the practice of settlement through criminal law instruments in terms of corporate criminal liability in the environmental sector. The research method used is a normative juridical research method. There is the existence of criminal law as a part of 3 law enforcement regimes (state administrative law and civil law). then the involvement of criminal law in the settlement in the environmental sector regulates the existence of corporate criminal liability (business entity) as a subject of criminal law. The corporate criminal responsibility used by the UUPPLH is strict liability according to the law.

Business Friendliness: A Double-Edged Sword

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that business-friendly local-government policies combined with weak legal institutions lead to lower economic welfare in the form of greater fraud activity. Using data of almost 3000 failed peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms in China, labeled as “runaways”, we find that they are more prevalent in provinces with business-friendly policies with weak law-enforcement regimes.

The new players in Africa’s public transportation sector: Characterization of auto-rickshaw operators in Kumasi, Ghana

Shared taxis, mini-buses, and motorcycles have been the conventional means of intra-city public transportation in most parts of Africa. In recent years, auto-rickshaws are fast becoming an alternative and preferred form of public transport in many African cities. This article adopts descriptive statistics to analyze the demographic characteristics of 429 auto-rickshaw operators in Kumasi and logistic regression analysis to understand the association between these demographic characteristics and operational attributes and challenges. The study found that auto-rickshaw operators in Kumasi possess gender, age, and educational characteristics similar to other transport operators in Ghana and elsewhere. Auto-rickshaw operators, however, differ from others in terms of their origin characteristics, as they are mostly migrant workers. Findings also revealed that the income generated by an auto-rickshaw operator is influenced by his training, union membership and type of transport activity. There is a general lack of compliance with road safety and traffic regulations irrespective of the educational level and training of auto-rickshaw operators. Nevertheless, operators who are relatively educated are more likely to maintain their auto-rickshaws than the less educated ones. The article recommends, among others, the strengthening of driver licensing and law enforcement regimes in Ghana while making formal training and education for auto-rickshaw operators mandatory.

Legal Obstacles to Private Enforcement of Competition Law

Private enforcement of competition law serves many important goals, including deterrence of future anti-competitive harms and correction of past harms. This article sheds light on several potential legal obstacles to such enforcement which could prevent it from achieving its goals. The examples mainly build upon the experience of different jurisdictions with private litigation. It also suggests some possible solutions for dealing with or limiting such obstacles. As Europe is in the early stages of applying its Damages Directive and creating a private competition law enforcement regime, recognising – and possibly avoiding – obstacles to efficient private enforcement is both timely and important.

Private Damages Actions in EU Competition Law and Restorative Justice: Towards a New Streamlined Institutional Framework?

The transposition of Directive 2014/104 on private damages actions marks an important development in the setting up of a harmonised private competition law enforcement regime across different EU Member States. Coupled with deterrence-focused public enforcement, the European Union has taken a necessary and welcomed step towards enhancing justice for all those individuals and competitors damaged by competition law infringements. This article argues, however, that the current emphasis on balancing public and private enforcement of the European Commission focuses too little on the need and healing effects of restoration. At the same time, the Directive contains a promising restorative justice opening by virtue of its Article 18. Starting from that opening, the article will propose a more developed way forward, taking the form of the setup and development of so-called antitrust “trust funds”. Exploring the legal possibilities and limits of such funds, the article questions to what extent this approach could be a useful complementary way to overcome the limits identified. It will be submitted that, although it is legally possible to set up those trust funds under EU law, important practical questions have to be addressed prior to doing so. Having outlined the potential features and limits of this approach, the article additionally calls for more and comparative research to be performed in this area.

Female Genital Mutilation in the United States: The Tension Between Feminism and Multiculturalism and its Effect on Eradication Efforts

In 1996, Congress passed, and the President signed into law, the Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) Act. This law was intended to eradicate the brutal practice of the mutilation of the genitalia of girls under the age of 18 within the United States. With the government reporting large numbers of girls either at risk or having already suffered the effects of this criminal activity, it is incomprehensible that to date, only one prosecution has taken place. This paper posits that this disparity is the result of a tension between traditional, or universalist feminist ideology, and its modern multiculturalist strain that finds strict condemnation of FGM problematic. This paper will show evidence that the latter has permeated the law enforcement regime established in the statute and altered its trajectory from a balanced approach of education and law enforcement, to one heavily reliant on education and community outreach. Further evidence will reveal that the 21-year failure to prosecute individuals engaged in this criminal activity, did not just happen, but was orchestrated through the elevation of multicultural sensitivities above the societal obligation to protect children from acts of violent bodily harm through the application of tough law enforcement.

Terrorism Financing with Virtual Currencies: Can Regulatory Technology Solutions Combat This?

ABSTRACTThis article considers the terrorism financing risk associated with the growth of Financial Technology innovations and in particular, focuses on virtual currency products and services. The ease with which cross-border payments by virtual currencies are facilitated, the anonymity surrounding their usage, and their potential to be converted into the fiat financial system, make them ideal for terrorism financing and therefore calls for a coordinated global regulatory response. This article considers the extent of the risk of terrorism financing through virtual currencies in “high risk” States by focusing on countries that have been recently associated with terrorism activities. It assesses the robustness of their financial regulatory and law enforcement regimes in combating terrorism financing and considers the extent to which Regulatory Technology and its global standardization, can mitigate this risk.

Incredible Women: Sexual Violence and the Credibility Discount

Credibility is central to the legal treatment of sexual violence, as epitomized by the iconic “he said/she said” contest. Over time, the resolution of competing factual accounts has evidenced a deeply skeptical orientation toward rape accusers. This incredulous stance remains firmly lodged, having migrated from formal legal rules to informal practices, with much the same result — an enduring system of disbelief. Introducing the concept of “credibility discounting” helps to explain the dominant feature of our legal response to rape. Although false reports of rape are uncommon, law enforcement officers tend to default to doubt when women allege sexual assault, resulting in curtailed investigations along with infrequent arrests and prosecutions. Credibility discounts, which are meted out at every stage of the criminal process, involve downgrades both to trustworthiness (corresponding to testimonial injustice) and to plausibility (corresponding to hermeneutical injustice). By conceptualizing prejudiced disbelief as a distinct failure of justice, one deserving of separate consideration, we may begin to grasp the full implications of credibility discounting, beyond faulty criminal justice outcomes. Attending to this failure of epistemic justice on its own terms advances a conversation about how best to reform institutions so that credibility judgments do not perpetuate inequality. To this end, credibility discounting should count as actionable discrimination. Under certain conditions, moreover, this recognition raises constitutional concerns. When rape victims confront a law enforcement regime predisposed to dismiss their complaints, they are effectively denied the protective resources of the state.

'Immigrants Are Not Criminals': Respectability, Immigration Reform, and Hyperincarceration

Mainstream pro-immigrant law reformers advocate for better treatment of immigrants by invoking a contrast with people convicted of a crime. This Article details the harms and limitations of a conceptual framework for immigration reform that draws its narrative force from a contrast with people — citizens and noncitizens — who have been convicted of a criminal offense and proposes an alternate approach that better aligns with racial and class critiques of the U.S. criminal justice system. Noncitizens with a criminal record are overwhelmingly low-income people of color. While some have been in the United States for a short period of time, many have resided in the United States for much longer. Many are lawful permanent residents with strong family ties, including U.S. citizen children. Convicted noncitizens who have served significant time in our penal system have experienced the well-documented harms associated with both criminal and civil incarceration. Despite the significant size of this population and its location at the convergence of two heavily criticized law enforcement regimes, these individuals rarely serve as an example for what is wrong with our immigration system. To the contrary, convicted noncitizens are typically regarded as foils for more deserving immigrants. Immigration reformers are not the first to employ a deserving/undeserving narrative as a means of obtaining political gains for some at the expense of others. Across all areas of law reform, policy makers and advocates have sought to generate empathy for groups of people by invoking a contrast with others. In drawing a contrast between a favored group and others who are degenerate, deviant, or less deserving, the “politics of respectability” depends on a contrast with an “out” or deviant group. Racial justice proponents, much more than immigration reformers, have made significant headway in moving beyond respectability politics, especially when critiquing hyperincarceration. This Article describes a different conceptualization of immigrants and crime as well as examples of how certain immigration reform groups have sought to implement aspects of this alternate frame.

Deferred Corporate Prosecution as Corrupt Regime: The Case for Prison

This paper looks at the growing phenomenon of deferred corporate criminal prosecutions from a new perspective. The literature accepts the practice and is largely concerned with the degree to which efficient and effective criminal deterrence is achieved through pretrial diversion. I examine the practice and conclude that it presents, from a structural perspective, a case of a corrupt law enforcement regime centered in the United States Department of Justice. The regime works in effective – if unintentional – conspiracy with corporate officials to produce an inefficient enforcement regime that disregards democratic processes and threatens a loss of respect for the rule of law. I conclude that the use of individual prosecution with the possibility of prison for corporate executives is the most effective way to restore the corporate criminal regime to a functioning legal practice.

Implications of China's latest statute on internet and the forthcoming real-name registration scheme

A scheme called 'real name registration of information network users' is required to be implemented in China by the end of June 2014. Presumably this scheme is based on the NPC Standing Committee's latest legislation on internet titled Decisions on Strengthening the Protection of Network Information, which imposes on ISPs and ICPs not only obligations to protect online personal information and privacy but also the obligation to collect their clients' true identity information. The latest internet-related legislation and the forthcoming 'real-name registration' scheme raises the question whether the Chinese Government is changing its policy, law and/or the law enforcement regime on regulating the internet contents. Are they merely a disguised internet content control toughening, or something indicating a new trend of China's internet regulation, that is, paying more attention to the protection of online privacy? Does the new legislation add anything new to China's pre-existing legal framework and enforcement mechanism for internet content regulation? Is the Chinese Government sacrificing citizens' freedom of speech for privacy? What are the most possible implications of the latest internet-related statutory legislation and the forthcoming 'real-name registration' scheme? This paper draw its conclusions mainly based on in-depth analyses of China's pre-existing internet regulation regime and the new legislation.

Data & Civil Rights: Criminal Justice Primer

Discrimination and racial disparities persist at every stage of the U.S. criminal justice system, from policing to trials to sentencing. The United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any of its peer countries, with 2.2 million people behind bars. The criminal justice system disproportionately harms communities of color: while they make up 30 percent of the U.S. population, they represent 60 percent of the incarcerated population. There has been some discussion of how “big data” can be used to remedy inequalities in the criminal justice system; civil rights advocates recognize potential benefits but remained fundamentally concerned that data-oriented approaches are being designed and applied in ways that also disproportionately harms those who are already marginalized by criminal justice processes. Like any other powerful tool of governance, data mining can empower or disempower groups. The values that go into an algorithm, and the metrics it optimizes for, are baked into its design. Data could be used to identify discrimination in current practices, or to predict where certain combinations of data points are likely to lead to an erroneous conviction. When algorithms are designed to improve how law enforcement regimes are deployed, the question that data analytics raises is, which efficiencies are we optimizing for? Who are the stakeholders, and where do they stand to gain or lose? How do these applications intersect with core civil rights concerns? Where can we use big data techniques to improve the structural conditions criminal justice system that lead to disparate impacts on marginalized communities? How do we measure that impact, and the factors that lead to it?

Does International Criminal Law Create Humanitarian Law Obligations? The Case of Exclusively Non-State Armed Conflict under the Rome Statute

SummaryThis article argues that since the Tadić case before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, a new category of armed conflict has migrated from international criminal law to international humanitarian law: that of armed groups fighting each other within the borders of a state without the intervention of the armed forces of the latter. However, the extent to which the rules of this category of conflict cover issues that may arise in such a conflict has not been comprehensively examined. One may infer, from the war crimes that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court criminalizes in this type of conflict, a dozen rules of international humanitarian law. After giving an historical account of the codification of this category of armed conflict, the author argues that there is a need to further develop these rules in order to provide a more comprehensive humanitarian law regime applicable to conflict exclusively between non-state armed groups. The absence of such a comprehensive regime should not, however, be taken as evidence of a legal vacuum. The author suggests that a law enforcement regime resting on international human rights law should be applied to relations between the armed groups and the territorial state, while the warring relationship between the armed groups should fall under the law of armed conflict, including those core customary rules that are now recognized as being equally applicable to international and non-international armed conflict.

Incomplete antitrust laws and private actions for damages

Our purpose in this paper is to identify some of the implications that derive from the incompleteness of antitrust laws. Since with regard to certain anticompetitive conduct, the law remains substantially incomplete up to the first relevant court judgment, in terms of policy it is worth concentrating on stand-alone claimants who, not relying on earlier judgments, face very high evidentiary requirements, while generating large positive (information) externalities for potential follow-on claimants. The paper is structured as follows. In Sect. 2, we introduce the notion of incompleteness of the laws and address the process of production of evidence in antitrust lawsuits. Sect. 3 provides a survey of EU national case law and our summary of the results puts emphasis on incomplete laws, evidentiary requirements and stand-alone lawsuits. Sect. 4 presents a framework model to distinguish the decision-making processes for stand-alone and follow-on claimants in the presence of incomplete antitrust laws. In Sect. 5 we introduce a vector autoregressive model that we test with reference to the US antitrust law enforcement regime. Sect. 6 discusses some policy options and concludes the paper.

Private goods and services contracts: Increased emergency response capacity or increased vulnerability?

The United States public sector increasingly contracts with and relies on private firms to provide public goods. While this has brought efficiency gains in many contexts, in the disaster response context, these gains may be offset by increasing vulnerability to the public emergency response system by making it subject to the fragility of lean supply chains. Public–private contracts rely on the private law enforcement regime, an analysis of which indicates that there may be disincentives for private contractors to perform contractual obligations as disasters disrupt efficient supply chains and increase the cost of performance. This article argues that increasing public sector reliance on private contractor performance under extreme stress and uncertainty increases the complexity and interdependence of component parts of the disaster response system, key predictors of system failure. This article addresses the challenge of relying on private firms to provide public goods during a disaster and suggests several possibilities to increase reliability.

Civil Enforcement in Canadian Securities Law

Private enforcement of securities laws enhances incentives for issuers and other market participants to comply with their statutory and regulatory obligations, especially their disclosure obligations. Assessing the effectiveness of a jurisdiction's private securities law enforcement regime requires not only quantitative evaluations of enforcement intensity, but also a nuanced consideration of the qualitative institutional context within which the jurisdiction's enforcement regime has developed and operates. This article contextualises the regime for civil enforcement of securities law in Canada, focusing principally on statutory civil liability for continuous disclosure violations. The development of this statutory remedy, its apparent strengths and acknowledged weaknesses are considered not only within the context of Canadian public enforcement mechanisms, but also within a broader institutional context, including an examination of complementary developments relating to class actions and lawyers' contingency fees and key shareholder-friendly provisions of Canadian corporate law.