Around the world, people with mental disabilities are subject to many types of behavioral therapies against their will, including medications and restraints. This is especially true of people who are institutionalized. These intrusions are in violation of fundamental international human rights principles. People with mental disabilities are often stripped of many of their basic rights, including the right to determine what is done to their bodies. This article compares the prevailing law on the right to refuse treatment for people with mental disabilities in an institutional setting in three different nations on three continents, specifically in the United States, Kenya, and Brazil.

The objective of this study is to explore and determine the legal constraints related to adult male rape and the consequences as they exist in the Bangladeshi criminal justice system. Primary and secondary data sources for the study were derived from the narratives of adult male rape survivors, blood relatives of rape survivors, police officers, and legal practitioners. A snowball sampling technique was applied. The study reveals that there is an absence of a police-support response to adult male rape victims, which is attributable to the lack of a gender-neutral definition of rape. This legal definition vacuum diverts complainants to a range of other futile options, such as submitting a general diary and/or adjacent complaints and seeking assistance from other law enforcement agencies. Finally, this study demonstrates that the landscape of the Bangladeshi criminal justice system is likely to remain unchanged until its legal foundation is better developed.

The movement for a civil law reform in Greece that was initiated in 1975 with the constitutional guarantee of equal rights and obligations of the sexes led to the adoption of Law 1329/1983 on the Application of the Constitutional Principle of Equality of the Sexes in the Civil Code and Its Introductory Law, in Commercial Legislation, and in the Code of Civil Procedure, as well as to Partial Modernization of Certain Provisions of the Civil Code Regarding Family Law.

Animal rights and animal welfare issues have reached beyond national boundaries and are now the focus of a variety of international concerns. For example, the current controversy surrounding the sale of bear parts from animals in North America to Asian nations for use in traditional medicines involves the laws of the United States and Canada, the market for bear parts in Asia, and the regulations of trade in endangered species on an international level. Other international animal rights issues include the environmental threat to wildlife in the Antarctica, the importation to the U.S. of coats made from dog and cat pelts, and the impact of animal husbandry on the problem of world hunger.

This Bibliography draws together materials authored or edited by librarians and members of the legal community in the Commonwealth Caribbean and further afield. It was compiled as part of a research study on The Provision of Legal Information in the Commonwealth Caribbean, in an effort to bring together and disseminate a listing of materials, particularly those on the legal information and the various laws and legal systems of the Caribbean.

Among the many old and new actors on the international stage of nations the United States is one of the most active and most important. The U.S. is a member of most existing intergovernmental organizations, participates in hundreds upon hundreds of international conferences and meetings every year and, in conducting her bilateral and multilateral relations with the other members of the community of nations, contributes very substantially to the development of contemporary international law. The Government of the United States has a policy of promptly informing the public about developments in its relations with other countries through a number of documentary publication, issued by the Department of State

It is known world-wide that there are human rights abuses in Tibet. In this paper I wish to discuss why these abuses arise, and how they can be put to an end. This will be analyzed with the help of theories laid down by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, a Sudanese expert on human rights and international law, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a Portuguese expert in the sociology of law.

I admit that I am an addict, a compulsive user of libraries and especially law libraries. As a comparative lawyer I need to investigate foreign law, which for me is the law of jurisdictions outside the United States. Since I believe the social and cultural context in which law operates is important to its understanding, I must leave the relative comfort of United States libraries and venture abroad to learn about the features of legal systems not adequately described in books. Beyond common law countries, as the IALL 20th Annual Course illustrates, the language of law is something other than English: yet another hill to climb to understand foreign law. For most of you, United States law is foreign law, which is the other side of the same issue. In addition, public international law lawyers could benefit from the comparative approach. This is particularly true for those from the Anglo-American world who rely almost exclusively on English language materials in their research. This narrow perspective undercuts the fundamental premise of universality behind a truly international legal system.

There has been a high level of activity in the development of standards concerning access to public sector information in Europe in recent years. At domestic level, freedom of information (FOI) legislation has been introduced to the overwhelming majority of member states of the European Union and to a number of former Eastern bloc countries. Freedom of Information has also increased its impact at supra national level, both in terms of progress towards the development by international bodies such as the European Union and the Council of Europe of FOI norms for their Member States and with respect to the opening up of access to documents of the international institutions themselves. There is, however, considerable variation in the content and scope of the various FOI measures introduced. The aim of this paper is to assess the scope and operation of two contrasting examples of recently introduced or proposed FOI measures, namely the Irish FOI Act and the proposed Regulation on Access to Documents of the European Institutions. The overall theme of the paper is that strong FOI measures are needed to combat the tendency toward secrecy in public administration in Europe but that even where access measures are relatively strong in their formulation, their effectiveness can be limited through under-funding or more direct interference with the operation of the access scheme.

Library of Congress' Bicentennial Summer 2000 was set as the deadline for completion of Class K for law, the only class of the Library's classification system (LCC) not yet fully developed. The last section of Class K - KB-KBX: Religious law (see detailed outline in the Appendix) - will at its implementation close the lacunae in the LCC.

It is an honor to have been invited to deliver this paper on my experiences as a member of the group drafting South Africa's first Bill of Rights in the course of the constitutional negotiations in 1993 to such an august international audience. I am also very pleased to be sharing the podium with Christina Murray, since we were student contemporaries (although at neighboring universities) and have been close colleagues in the Department of Public Law at the University of Cape Town since early 1988. Despite our close working relationship over these years, however, I think that this is the first occasion upon which we have talked jointly about our experiences in assisting the drafting of the Constitution, which makes it a special occasion for us, too. Mine will be a very personal recollection and assessment of a period in the constitutional history of South Africa which I never believed possible, let alone that I should have played a small part in it.