Academic freedom and democracy in African countries: the first study to track the connection [The Conversation, August 2022]

Title:

Academic freedom and democracy in African countries: the first study to track the connection 

 

Author:

Liisa Laakso

Senior Researcher, The Nordic Africa Institute

 

Published:

The Conversation, 17 August 2022

https://theconversation.com/academic-freedom-and-democracy-in-african-countries-the-first-study-to-track-the-connection-186579

 

From the article:

There is growing interest in the state of academic freedom worldwide. A 1997 Unesco document defines it as the right of scholars to teach, discuss, research, publish, express opinions about systems and participate in academic bodies. Academic freedom is a cornerstone of education and knowledge.  

 

Yet there is surprisingly little empirical research on the actual impact of academic freedom. Comparable measurements have also been scarce. It was only in 2020 that a worldwide index of academic freedom was launched by the Varieties of Democracy database, V-Dem, in collaboration with the Scholars at Risk Network.

Bitcoin’s Blowing Up, and That’s Good News for Human Rights. Here’s Why [SingularityHub, 10 February 2021]

Title:

Bitcoin’s Blowing Up, and That’s Good News for Human Rights. Here’s Why 

 

Author:

Vanessa Bates Ramirez 

Published:

SingularityHub, 10 February 2021

https://singularityhub.com/2021/02/10/bitcoins-blowing-up-and-thats-great-news-for-human-rights-heres-why/

From the article:

Bitcoin’s value reached an all-time high this week after Tesla announced it had bought $1.5 billion worth of the cryptocurrency. After its launch in early 2009, Bitcoin has gone through a lot of ups and downs. Some of its biggest price swings were in 2017 and 2018, when a steep rise followed by an 84 percent decline brought plenty of hype and headlines. After a quiet period, the last three months of 2020 saw yet another sharp rise as the currency’s value more than tripled—and it’s still climbing.

Taking Stock of United Nations and African Union Constitutionalism [Scholarly Article - African Journal of International and Comparative Law, February 2021]

Title:

Taking Stock of United Nations and African Union Constitutionalism

 

Authors:

W.D. Lubbe* & Otto Spijkers**

*Senior Lecturer, North-West University, Faculty of Law (South Africa). 

**Professor of International Law at the China Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies (CIBOS) as well as the Research Institute of Environmental Law (RIEL), and Founding Staff Member of the International Water Law Academy (IWLA) of Wuhan University (China).

 

Published:

African Journal of International and Comparative Law, Volume 29, Issue 1, pp. 62-81, February 2021

https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/ajicl.2021.0350

 

Abstract:

Both the United Nations (UN) and the African Union (AU) present themselves as a constitutional order, in the sense that they both set out to define the common values of their community – the global and African communites respectively – and to establish supranational institutions to promote and protect these values within their community. Because the two legal orders have a similar ambition, we believe it is interesting to analyse how the two can learn from and complement each other in the way they further define and specify that ambition, and in the way they attempt to concretise and implement it. We thus seek to establish the extent to which global constitutionalism and African regional constitutionalism can strengthen each other in the promotion of key constitutional values. In so doing the article will, inter alia, look at challenges and contestations faced by the UN and AU in their efforts to promote one such constitutional value which they have in common: the value of human dignity.

Short Article: Bosses using tech to spy on staff is becoming the norm, so here's a realistic way of handling it

Title:
Bosses using tech to spy on staff is becoming the norm, so here's a realistic way of handling it

Author:
Douglas Bamford

Published:
Tech Xplore, 24 January 2020

From the article:
"Workplace surveillance sounds like the stuff of nightmares, but we are having to get used to it. In a sign of the times, the European Court of Human Rights has just ruled that a supermarket in Barcelona was entitled to fire employees after catching them stealing on CCTV cameras that they didn't know were installed. This overturned a decision by the court's lower chamber that the cameras had breached the employees' human rights.

Yet hidden cameras are almost quaint compared to some of the ways in which employers are now monitoring their staff."

To read this article:
https://techxplore.com/news/2020-01-bosses-tech-spy-staff-norm.html