Open Society Institute Research Articles

Case Watch: European Court Strengthens Anti-Torture Safeguards

In “Case Watch” reports, lawyers at the Open Society Justice Initiative provide analysis of notable court decisions and cases that relate to our work to advance human rights law around the world.

Social partners for health without discrimination

Background Starting with 2010, over 600 students from 5 state Romanian medical universities from Romania attended the new course on “Ethics and Nondiscrimination of vulnerable groups in the health system”. The course, unique in Europe, was initiated by the Romanian Roma NGO, Association for Development and Social Inclusion ADIS with help from the Open Society Foundations. In 2013 ADIS has also established the Network “Social Partners …

Human Rights in Patient Care: A Practitioner Guide

Reducing inequalities in health and health care and strengthening enforcement of human rights in the patient care arena continue to be growing concerns in the European Region and globally. In response, the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and national partners have supported development of 10 practitioner guides (PGs) targeted primarily to legal practitioners, and secondarily to medical and public health professionals, in Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, FYR …

The borders I crossed.

I wanted to become a respected scientist, maybe not a Nobel Prize winner but someone who is capable of making a decent contribution. I started by studying biochemistry at the University of Bucharest. I graduated less than a year after the end of Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship. Free to see the world for the first time, I was eager to get a Ph.D. in the United States. My father, a biology teacher who referred to all trees by their scientific names and often explored the neighboring Macin Mountains with his students, encouraged me to go. When I was young, borders were serious, scary things. Crossing the first border required a passport—banned during the dictatorship—a student visa, and a one-way ticket that cost the equivalent of my father's yearly income. I bought my ticket, Bucharest to New York, using three bricks of devalued Romanian currency provided by the Soros Foundation. I waved goodbye to my family at the airport. The first border was the hardest; for the rest of my life, I just pushed my way across them. ![Figure][1] “Looking back from midcareer, those borders seem much less scary.” ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER I became a graduate student at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. For 6 years, I studied relentlessly—signal transduction in yeast—and adapted to a new culture. Crossing the boundary into another discipline, I became a postdoc at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). It was—is—an extraordinary place, full of enthusiasm, sharp minds, and state-of-the-art resources focused on understanding and curing cancer. There I met Amore, the postdoc from Rome with pistachio-green eyes. We got married, had a baby, and became permanent residents. When my research project sank, I moved briefly into medical writing but found that field too remote from my goal. I returned to MSKCC as a research project manager, working in immunology with inspiring clinician-scientists. We rolled out several cancer-research discoveries from the lab into clinical practice. Amore's research prospered, and he won a coveted independent-researcher position offered by City of Hope, outside Los Angeles, California. I followed him, of course, and my odyssey continued. I worked at City of Hope and then at the John Wayne Cancer Institute, adding pebble after pebble to the cancer-research pyramid. I prepared clinical-trial protocols, grants, and new-drug applications. In 2009, Amore had an opportunity in Melbourne, Australia. Holding in one hand a one-way ticket and in the other my 8-yearold daughter's hand, I crossed another border. I had a work visa but no work prospects. I started from zero in yet another culture. In Australia, many scientists work part-time, especially women. Jobs in academia are scarce, translational research is in its infancy, and the job market is small compared with the one in the United States. I got my first part-time job by responding to a broad “expression of interest” ad placed by a well-known epidemiologist. He saw the value of my skills and relied on my experience to start a high-risk project. Soon after, I got another part-time job, at biotech company Avipep, and then another, at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. In the 4 years I spent in Australia, I worked all the part-time and consulting jobs I could find, sometimes two or three at a time, following my passion and doing whatever I could to stay fully employed. I left Australia more than a year ago to return to City of Hope for a job I could not refuse. Most of the projects I started in Melbourne had achieved their goal. My family fell apart, but that's another story. I left Amore behind and resettled with my daughter in Los Angeles. Looking back from midcareer, those borders seem much less scary. I took risks, followed passions, changed visas, packed and unpacked, explored, settled, worked hard, met mentors, and fought to build a career. I made a decent contribution to science—with more to come I hope—placing my own small pebbles, one by one, on the pyramid of research. [1]: pending:yes

Ten Practical Steps to Organization and Operation of a Law School Clinic

This short essay draws on my experience of over 30 years, working on six continents (though primarily in Latin America and Europe), advising law schools, international donors and governments that may be considering opening a legal clinic within a law school. It targets live-client clinics and provides a five-part definition of an ideal in-house clinic, but it recognizes that the process of opening a clinic is eminently practical, and often very political, and may sometimes be a long-term goal. Cost should not be a deterrent to opening a clinic; many clinics have started on a shoestring and grown to flourish. The ideas in the paper were originally presented at a conference sponsored by the Open Society Foundation in Mexico City, to Mexican academics considering such a step.

The Opportunities and Challenges of an Interdisciplinary Clinic

<p>Law school clinics in many countries increasingly provide the major opportunities that law students have to engage in interdisciplinary collaborations with other professionals. The collaboration may be with a wide range of professionals, such as: doctors and medical students; social workers and social work students; business school students; engineering faculty and students including biomedical engineering students; nursing students; and experts in public health, education, mental health or palliative care. It can occur in diverse contexts or targeted to specific populations, such as children, the elderly, victims of domestic violence or low-income business owners.</p><p>Some examples of these interdisciplinary clinics illustrate their variety. Clinical legal education initiatives in South Africa, Thailand and Ukraine promoted public health through programs that partnered with the Law and Health Initiative of the Open Society Institute’s Public Health Programs. In South Africa, palliative care was integrated with legal services; law students worked with staff at a hospice association to conduct workshops on wills, debts and family law for hospice caregivers. In Ukraine a Medical Law Clinic was started to advise and represent clients; in Thailand a law clinic wrote an HIV/AIDS Community Legal Education Manual, collaborated with organizations working on health and human rights issues to discuss harm reduction and incarceration, and implemented community education programs in prisons, detention centers and community centers. At Palacky University in the Czech Republic a new Patient’s Rights Legal Clinic, which prepares students to give legal advice, is taught by lecturers of the medical faculty and lawyers from a human rights non-profit. A clinic in the United States provides business planning and legal advice to small businesses; law and business students collaborate to assist with community economic development. Another United States clinic combines students in law, business, medicine, social work, biomedical engineering, and arts and sciences in a collaboration focused on intellectual property and business formation, with an emphasis on biodiversity and agricultural-biotechnology innovations.</p>

New Forms of Government and the Europenisation of Minority Representation: the Case of European Roma

The situation of roma since the fall of socialism is a paradox. On the one hand, many organizations, international governing organizations (IGOs), such as the European Union (Council of Europe, European Commission, European Parliament), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the World Bank and the United Nations (UNDP, UNICEF, ILO), local and international/transnational NGOs, government agencies are involved in projects for Roma to improve their situation in Europe. Roma have become the target of social inclusion programs of the European Union (EU), the Decade of Roma Inclusion - a project of the Open Society Foundation and the World Bank -, Strategies for improving the situation of Roma developed by governments in Southeastern Europe. On the other hand, Roma continue to be marginalized, discriminated against, politically underrepresented, with a higher probability of being unemployed, not having access to public services - education, health , housing - compared with the majority population. This paper seeks to understand how was it possible to understand the recent shift from the representation of the Roma as a non-European minority, which lasted since their arrival in Europe until the fall of socialist regimes, to their representation as an European minority as it is shown in documents of the European institutions and the World Bank? How did Roma appear on the EU social inclusion agenda, the Human Development agenda of UNDP or the minority rights agenda of OSCE?

Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity

Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity

Muslims in Copenhagen: Social Cohesion or a Parallel Society? Results from an Empirical Survey 2008–09

The Nørrebro sub-district of Copenhagen, where 14% of the population belong to ethnic minorities, mainly Muslim, has stood on the Danish media’s agenda for many years as a problem-ridden area, developing into a parallel society with ethnic ghettos, crime and deviancy among the second generation and lack of social cohesion and integration. This article introduces results from the survey ‘At Home in Europe: Muslims in the European Cities’ commissioned by the Open Society Institute, which examines the current policy and patterns of Muslim integration in eleven municipal districts of the seven metropolises of the EU countries. It argues that when measured across a range of parameters to ascertain the social, cultural and economic integration of the Muslim minorities, the empirical data and the documentary evidence gathered from, and about, the sub-district (2008-9) contradict the political claims and the media rhetoric of a parallel society.

Book review: Flammable Societies: Studies on the Socio-Economics of Oil and Gas, by John-Andrew McNeish and Owen Logan (eds.)

John-Andrew McNeish and Owen Logan (eds.) Flammable Societies: Studies on the Socio-Economics of Oil and Gas, Pluto Press, London, 2012; 369 pp: 9780745331171, 25 [pounds sterling] (pbk) If we are to believe George Soros's Open Society Institute (Humphreys et al. 2007) and Paul Collier's Natural Resource Charter, there is a simple cure for the resource curse. Apply transparency, competitive bidding, and 'multi-stakeholder groups' made up of civil society, industry and government, and corruption, conflict and susceptibility to oil price volatility will disappear. The editors of Flammable Societies are unconvinced by this prescription. The transplantable tools of oil technocracy proceed by 'ruling out other influences and factors, ceteris paribus' (p. 31), in order to treat problems of resource governance in isolation from the larger body politic. And, as has been noted elsewhere (Watts 2004), the language of the resource curse encourages the excision of history from analyses of conflict, substituting for it a moralising language of greedy militants and patrimonial elites. Logan and McNeish signal early on their intention to escape this framework, which 'risks producing a self-fulfilling prophecy for the global south by wrenching the theory of rent from its counterpart, the labour theory of value, the latter being an integral concept that shaped development in the global north' (p. 6). What really makes Flammable Societies stand out against other recent anthropologically-inspired attempts to engage with the resource curse, though (e.g. Behrends et al. 2011), is their refusal to bracket the 'exceptional' well-managed oil states from those apparently prone to the curse. As such, McNeish and Logan open and close the volume in Norway. Rather than treating the model as a technocratic achievement suitable for export (p. 8), they point to the hard-won social-democratic consensus that preceded the Norwegian discovery of oil, influencing outcomes for labour, extraction tares and national ownership. The extent to which negotiating a social-democratic consensus can mean the difference between rapid or sustained periods of extraction, and between strong unions or fragmented and enclaved working populations, is taken up again by Folorunso et al. in relation to Nigeria, and by Brotherstone and Cumbers in relation to North Sea oil. In a standout chapter that aims to unpick the wilful historiographical blindness that has removed the labour history of British oil workers from that of Britain's 20th century, Brotherstone argues convincingly that 'Oil revenues helped make Thatcherite neoliberalism possible' (p. 74). Papering over the rising welfare bills caused by Thatcher's war on the collieries, and providing reassurance to the City, oil revenue flowed--too rapidly--into the Exchequer. Moreover, it was pumped there by US contractors with little time for trade unions, and a dismal safety record. Thus it was not technocratic differences between the UK and Norway, bur the breakdown of Britain's social-democratic consensus in the mid-1960s that, for Brotherstone, made their North Sea oil experience a 'determined' one (p. 85). Brotherstone argues that little has changed since Thatcher's economic experiment. Post-financial crisis union negotiation now takes place over how public spending will be cut--concessions are made over distribution while 'An antagonist mode of production [is retained] fetishistically intact' (Meszaros 2010: 286, cited on p. 88; see the chapter by Kjaernet on oil welfare in Azerbaijan). The resource curse literature is certainly far too concerned with the morality of distributional politics to ever attend to questions of reorganizing production--and in truth, this volume does not devote substantial attention to the violent organisation of production that dominates in the oil industry. The majority of chapters relate to efforts to carve out spaces of autonomy and sovereignty through which claims might be made on oil revenues. …

Dealing with ‘open access’ demons

The possibility of open-access scholarly publications started almost 24 years ago, in response to a growing demand to make research findings free and available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection, and building on the digital developments of the 1990s. The initiators of the movement came from a wide range of prestigious research-intensive institutions and major research funders including Harvard, the Max Planck Institute, University College London, the University of Montreal and - amongst funders - the Open Society Foundations and the Wellcome Trust. They worked on open-access issues for 10 years before releasing the Budapest Declaration and Guidelines for Open Access Publishing in 2001. Sadly, the Mellon, Carnegie and Ford Foundations seem not to have been supporters at that stage.

Mapping the WSIS + 10 Review Process: Research Report on the 10-year Review Process of the World Summit on the Information Society

This paper is a report on the WSIS 10 mapping project, which was funded by the IAMCR Rapid Response Research Grant on Communication Policy by the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) with the support of the Media Program of the Open Society Foundations (OSF). The project aimed at mapping the events taking place in the framework of the 10-years review process or the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS 10), the actors involved and their concrete contributions, with a particular focus on the role of expert contributions. The report was presented at the annual IAMCR conference in India in July 2014.

Two Poems

12 worldliteraturetoday.org A uthor note: These prose poems are flash semi-témoignage or reportage, inspired by stories people told me. It began as a personal account of my relationship to the island of Hispaniola—Haiti and the Dominican Republic —and moved to the voices I encountered because they were louder than mine. An earthquake hit Haiti on January 12, 2010. It had been over twenty years since I had been in Haiti for any length of time. I initially planned to go with Eve Ensler and a few members of the V-Day team after the earthquake, but unfortunately the trip was canceled. Not long afterward, Writers Bloc, led by Zadie Smith, Rachel Holmes, and others and sponsored by the Open Society Foundations, commissioned ten authors to write about education in a developing country from a personal lens. I chose Haiti and went there in February 2011, via the Dominican Republic, where my parents reside. Coincidentally, Edwidge Danticat was in Haiti visiting a women’s organization called We Advance, founded by Haitian activist Barbara Guillaume and American actress Maria Bello. Our time together took me to places I needed to return to but didn’t know how to reapproach. After that trip, I started working on these flash reportages. Ten Drumbeats to God I confess to stealing the tomb to bury my mother . I admit to emptying the gas tank my neighbor kept for blakawouts. I took the rope and the cakes of an old lady because she had more and I needed some. I stole a radio to eat. Stole medicine to sleep. I tried to forget I lay beside dead bodies but my eyes couldn’t shut. Tried to refill my heart but it stayed shut. I wished and wish some more to be dead and not an idea, a solitude, a shame. I summoned words tangled in debris, measured the distance of fire a mile into my voice. I took everything and a little more. Then I heard the drumbeats and remembered—like rain like song like light lit by old questions—there is no reason —there is god, drum, beat, there is what lingers and there is what comes later. Strong Motion He had to leave so he could see her. Count the chickens before he gave them away. Count the money under her bed. He had to leave to see his face vanish in hers. To recognize the country he is from. The good news is, he allowed himself to keep the accordion and recordings of some perico ripiao. He opened his mouth to accommodate the white moon, his body like a machine you turn off and on. On and off—when on it means he is sneaking into a place, disguised, the way church music is disguised when we pause to think how much meat costs. He had to walk miles to play dominos and allow the sea inside the tidy grave he dug in his heart. You can’t have a weak heart here. And milk isn’t cheap here, nor is melancholy or a funeral procession. He robs a banana leaf and lets the tropical thunder that evening steal it again. It’s only fair, he thinks. The warm wind whips night into an early beginning . And everything is now purple around him above Photos taken after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti by Zoriah, an awardwinning photojournalist who has a background in disaster management and humanitarian aid. She specializes in documenting human crises in developing countries (www.zoriah.com). Two Poems Nathalie Handal May–August 2014 • 13 —his hands, the dark, the distance, and even the unused roads. Damn it, a man can’t even get drunk properly here. He lies flat on his back and imagines himself naked. Why take his clothes off if she is not next to him? After all, sleep lasts one hour in the countryside. Misery does that to a man. He has to walk miles to see a baseball game, to cross a cemetery and buy an orchid for her. She has a long neck and wide hips and breast like wild apples—hard and directionless. He decomposes grace to find another grace...

Egy tanúságtevő hitvalló, szolgáló, tudományos és papi pálya lezárult

Passed a Wittness of the Faith, Scientist, a Servant of The Lord, True Priest: Nicefor Petrashevich (1915–2013), canon of the Preshov Greek Catholic Eparchy. Abstract Decease of the witness of the Faith, a servant of the Lord and a famous researcher of the religious folklore: Nicefor Joseph Petrashevich (1915–2013) distinguished member of the Capitol of Preshov Greek Catholic Eparchy. Born in Cukalovce, East-Slovakia (then Csukaloc, Upper-Hungary) in 1915 as the sixth of the eleven children in the family of a Greek Catholic bishop, he was inspired by his father and elder brother who served the Lord. He studied in the high school (gymnasium) of the Cistercian Order in Eger (Northern Hungary) which provided its pupils with knowledge and deep faith. He became a choir-minister of the Uzghorod Bishopric Basilica where he turned to the examination of folklore traditions reflected in the liturgical chants. Apparently, it was his calling and his findings on the Byzantine chants contributed significantly to the understanding of religious folklore. He was known as a gift ed composer and singer, too. The Greek Catholic Church was banned in the Soviet Union which obtained Subcarpathia after the World War II, and this church was oppressed in Slovakia as well, so he faced a dilemma: to convert to the Ortodox (Pravoslav) Christianity and live free, or to remain faithful to the Catholic Church and be persecuted. Moreover, he was a coelebs, a priest who did not have a wife (despite the fact that Greek Catholic priests are allowed to have families). Consequently, he could have been elected as bishop, as the higher ranks in the Byzantine Churches are open for monks. The communist authorities offered Father Nicefor the episcopate of the Slovak Ortodox Church, if he converted to the Ortodoxy. He refused it: “my head does not accept the mithra (bishops’ crone) by leaving my Catholic faith” –he said. As a result, he was imprisoned for more than two years in Slovakia. Later he came to Hungary where could not serve as a parochial priest, but worked as cantor or helping pope in various places and in centres of pilgrimage where performed the liturgy in Church Slavonic which he sang excellently. Continuing his researches in the folk sings in the liturgy and the local traditions of the liturgical chants, he gained a small grant of the Soros Foundation in 1986 and delivered lectures for two semesters at the Department of the Folklore at the Eotvos University in Budapest in 1988–89. His papers have been partially published, but most of them are still preserved as manuscripts in the Institute of Musicology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, or even in unknown places worldwide, as he sent his works to his brothers-in-faith to the United States. In his eighties, instead of enjoying the golden days of ageing, he moved to Slovakia in order to serve as a pastor who spoke both Slovakian and Hungarian as mother tongues. He was buried in Szikszo, Hungary where the Greek Catholic Bishop of Preshov and approximately forty popes from Ukraine, Hungary and Slovakia commemorated him on 20 July 2013. Church historians and folklorists honored his memory as a researcher with a conference on 4 October 2013 in Szikszo. Proceedings are to be published next year. A memorial website about him is open for bloggers.

A.3. Round Table: Bridging the gap between policy and practice in Roma health: from common European goals to local achievements<subtitle>Organized by: Open Society Foundations, Public Health Program</subtitle>

A.3. Round Table: Bridging the gap between policy and practice in Roma health: from common European goals to local achievements<subtitle>Organized by: Open Society Foundations, Public Health Program</subtitle>

Increasing responsibility of future healthcare professionals for vulnerable patients: an innovative and unique initiative from Romania

Background Starting with 2010, with the help of the Open Society Foundations’ Roma Health Project, the Association for Development and Social Inclusion from Romania (ADIS) has created and introduced into the curricula of four Romanian medical universities (state universities of Iasi, Targu Mures, Cluj Napoca and Bucharest) a university course on “Ethics and non-discrimination of vulnerable groups in the health system”. The course focuses on the Roma …

Joint Briefing on the Directive on the Right of Access to a Lawyer in Criminal Proceedings and the Right to Inform a Third Party upon Deprivation of Liberty 15 April 2013

Amnesty International, European Criminal Bar Association, Fair Trials International, Irish Council for Civil Liberties, JUSTICE and Open Society Justice Initiative

PP06 Cardiovascular Risk Factor Patterns in Long-Settled Roma and Recently Settled Indian Populations

BackgroundLinguistic and genetic evidence shows that Romani people, now numbering around 10-12 million in Europe, originate from North India. Romanis are thought to have migrated from North India around 10th-11th...

Arrest Rights Brief No. 2: The Right to in Formation

A Legal Brief prepared by the Open Society Justice Initiative to assist legal practitioners to litigate the right of detained persons to be informed of the reason for their arrest and the nature and cause of any accusation or charge against them; the right to be informed of their defence rights; and the right to have access to the evidence upon which the accusations are based.

Increasing programme effectiveness through parent empowerment: the Getting Ready for School project in Tajikistan

Within the development studies framework, empowerment involves increasing individual agency vis-à-vis the formal and informal opportunity structure. The Open Society Foundation's Early Childhood Programme developed the Getting Ready for School programme specifically for parents of preschool-age children to use at home in the year before school to build early math and literacy skills in their children. In Tajikistan, parents met on a regular basis with teachers in their local schools to learn activities to use with their children at home. Focus group reports indicated that parents gained knowledge and self-confidence as a result of programme participation, considered foundational aspects of the empowerment process. Responses also demonstrated that parents displayed characteristics of empowerment as they used programme activities and skills not only with their six-year-old child, but with siblings, extended family members and community children. They also shared the skills they learned with family members and neighbours.