This Article explores Microfinance and microcredit (“MFI”) programs from several perspectives, with particular emphasis on human rights issues. These programs involve making small loans to people who would otherwise be unable to borrow money to facilitate them starting their own businesses: frequently, the programs focus on women borrowers in developing countries. The emphasis of MFI programs on women in developing countries makes it important to consider these programs in terms of both women's and indigenous rights, while MFI as an approach to poverty merits a discussion of economic rights. Part I of the article will explore the concept and scope of current MFI programs, describing key components of these programs and assessing comments from both fans and critics. The Grameen Bank, which has been studied extensively and has acted as a model for several other programs, will be examined in detail. Part II of this Article considers MFI in the context of human rights considerations, including economic, indigenous, and women's rights. One particular aspect of Grameen's program, namely the use of Sixteen Decisions, is also critiqued, applying organizational behavior theory. Part III will compare MFI with other approaches to poverty, inclu property rights initiatives, women's cooperatives and social enterprise approaches.

Islamic Family Law is one of the most studied fields in Malaysian law. This is because it affects the personal life of Muslims, and because many issues have arisen as a result of the implementation of the Islamic Family Law Enactment which governs Muslims in Malaysia. Scholarship in this area has expanded with the development of the Enactment itself. Several approaches have been used to analyze the implementation of the law inter alia, legal, socio-legal, comparative, and anthropological and sociological perspecitves. It cannot be denied that research and scholarly publications in the field of Islamic Family Law have contributed to further strengthening the administration of justice and the implementation of the law. As such, this paper is intended to describe the trends in the area of Islamic Family Law. Doing so will assist in ascertaining the direction of this field in the future.

After World War II, the non-proliferation of weapons of massive destruction (WMD) and the export controls of conventional weapons and civilian and military dual use technologies have been one of the most important focal point of international cooperation. Many international treaties have been signed and the international organizations have been established to promote these non-proliferation and export control efforts. The industrialized countries and the developing countries of China, India, and Pakistan that possess nuclear weapons and missile technologies have also enacted domestic laws and set up administrative regimes to control these goods and technologies from flowing to other countries or undesirable people. Among these countries, the United States has been the leader strongly advocating non-proliferation of WMD and export controls of civilian and military dual use goods. In fact, the United States has established a very sophisticated export control system to prevent its weapons and technologies from going to the hands of any adversaries. Because the complicities and overlaps of international treaties and domestic laws on this topic, it warrants a research guide for would-be researchers to walk through the maze of international and domestic export control regimes.

This paper provides an introduction to the SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway) Law Gateway a web based descriptive database of high quality legal information resources on the Internet (www.sosig.ac.uk/law). The Law Gateway is a new research support service being developed by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (University of London) in partnership with the University of Bristol as part of the UK's Resource Discovery Network initiative. The project seeks to provide access to the expanding range of global legal materials now being delivered over the Internet. In effect, the Law Gateway aims to offer the UK and international legal communities appropriate new ways to find, assess and access law in the new century.

“Every flower is beautiful in its own garden. Every antiquity is beautiful in its own country. “ Sign in Ephesus Museum lobby, quoted in Lonely Planet Turkey (11th ed.) at 60.

“History is beautiful where it belongs.”—OzgenAcar[Acar Erghan], imprinted on posters in Turkish libraries, classrooms, public buildings and shops and quoted in S. Waxman, Loot at 151; see also S. Waxman, Chasing the Lydian Hoard, Smithsonian.com, November 14, 2008.

In spite of being signatories to the United Nations Charter and the African Charter on Rights, human rights abuses are rife in African countries. The democratic wave that swept across Africa in the early 1990s and witnessed the demise of many authoritarian regimes only minimised the practice of human rights violations; it did not abate it. There are still reports of opposition activists being jailed without trial for daring to seek level playing fields in politics; journalists being detained or sometimes forced into exile for daring to expose corruption in high places; academics being threatened with arrests for daring to write about mis-governance; workers being dismissed for attempting to unionise or to ask for better remuneration in the face of currency devaluations and inflation. There are countless instances of gross human right abuses, which cannot be recounted here because of time constraints. In some instances, the state has completely failed to promote peace, welfare and private property. Perhaps it is appropriate to describe these states as “failed states.” They are failed states because in spite of maintaining law and order, they are unable to perform their traditional functions, including the protection of human rights.

The Indian Constitution with its mandate of equality (Art. 14), non-discrimination on the basis of sex (Art. 15) positive discrimination in favor of women (or affirmative action) (Art. 15(3)) equality and non-discrimination in employment and service conditions (Art. 16), right to life and liberty (Art.21) is an important instrument for the protection of women in India. Although certain protective legislation was enacted in the first thirty years after the Constitution came into being, it is only during the last three decades that women's concerns were highlighted in the official discourse and in the public domain. One major contributory factor towards this change has been the Report of the Status of Committee for Women brought out in 1974 as the background country paper for the forthcoming United Nations Conference in 1975 – the International Year of the Women.

In 2004, the Special Summit of the Americas meeting that took place in Monterrey, Mexico recommended the enactment of a law on the right to access public information in the Americas. The Summits of the Americas is the meeting of the heads of state of the Western Hemisphere. The purpose of these meetings is to discuss the major challenges faced in the region and commit to joint actions at the national and regional level addressing these problems and establishing common policies.

I.1. A choice: the use of comparative methodology to describe one's own national legal system.

The presentation will provide an overview of the copyright issues related with the implementation of Open Access policies. It will focus on the need to obtain permission to reproduce and disseminate a copy of any published paper taking into account any copyright transfer signed by authors. This permission is needed to implement Green Open Access policies through repositories. Moreover it will explore the use of open content licenses in repositories and journals to move to the Gold Open Access model that offers not only free access to full text but full reuse of contributions.

Despite nearly 100 years of international organization and practice, international refugee law is confronted today with the critical challenges of globalization, securitization and an increasingly mobile world. Large-scale movements have exposed serious cracks in the European project; the EU's stated policy goal seems simply to keep refugees away. Elsewhere, numerous refugee situations are “protracted,” while persistent underdevelopment continues to drive the movement of people between States, in a context in which States appear unable to manage “irregular” migration. If a generous asylum policy is in practice, contingent on well-controlled external borders, can the basic rules of protection survive? Or are asylum and the principle of non-return to persecution (non-refoulement) at risk in a new international legal order? These are the issues addressed below.

This conference of law librarians is convened around the theme of “New Rights — New Laws.” I want to argue that, with regard to information, while there are new laws aplenty, there are in fact no new rights. Worse, we are presently witnessing a steady erosion of even the existing public rights of access to and use of information content, whether of a legal nature or not. In fact, there is mounting evidence that the idea of the public domain itself is under serious attack both as a concept and as a collection of practices. The global privatization of cultural and intellectual content in ways unimaginable only a few decades ago is actively threatening the established structures of scholarly communication, to the increasing disadvantage of the less-developed South. Intellectual property (IP) rights are being extended into new areas, as the patent system, for example, expands into biotechnology, agriculture and medicine, while copyright, patent and trade secret protection is claimed even for computer software, mathematical algorithms, and business methods. IP protection is under discussion for indigenous knowledge, and not necessarily for altruistic reasons. And as the useful shelf life of such content shortens, the protection afforded to it lengthens disproportionately in a disturbing pattern that nearly always favors rights holders and their claims above even the most rudimentary forms of public good.

Both theoretically and constitutionally, South Africa is a secular state with many religious and non-religious groupings co-existing with each other. The reality is that there is widespread observance of both religious and customary law — despite a lack of or limited recognition thereof under the apartheid government. The non-recognition of other forms of law in South Africa has had negative consequences and the remedial efforts of the present government is visible both in the area of customary law and also Muslim Personal Law, hereinafter referred to as MPL. This paper will confine itself to discussing the law reform efforts in respect of the recognition of Muslim marriages.

Much of the immense bibliographical problem involved in the study and practice of international law is both predictable and inevitable, following as it does from the fact that the discipline is necessarily international. There is bound to be, that is to say, French, German, Italian and Roumanian documentation in relation to any matter in which the States of France, Germany, Italy and Roumania are equally concerned. Only occasionally are there linguistic, but still not necessarily textual, simplications where two States, such as Spain and Argentina or Australia and the United States, speak the same language. There was of course once a diplomatic tongue—first Latin, later French—with pretensions to universal application. But even in a monophone international society the multiplication of texts is not excluded as the term Notes identiques makes clear.

After hearing the presentations about Islamic law by Professor Vogel and recent scholarship in the field by Peri Bearman, I hope you are convinced that the Law of the Islamic World is a subject of great breadth and complexity. What I would like to do now is describe how the Harvard Law School Library attempts to support teaching and research in this field. My talk will deal with the scope of collection development, acquisition strategies, processing standards, reference demands, and user education. I will also touch briefly on problematic areas and our hopes for future developments. Among the materials distributed after lunch, there is an eight-page handout, which, I hope, will highlight key points as my talk proceeds. At the end, there may still be adequate time for a few questions and discussion before we return to the Caspersen Room for the reception.

This annotated bibliography is compiled as a collection development guide for academic librarians and specialists in international law. The topic of International Humanitarian Law of Armed Conflict concerns the treatment of combatants and noncombatants in wartime, while the topic of International Human Rights Law has traditionally been concerned with the treatment of individuals by states in peacetime. During the period from the end of the twentieth century to the present, the boundaries between international humanitarian law and human rights law have become increasingly blurred. Therefore, this article concentrates on core sources in both branches of international law in these key areas of overlap: conflicts between states; internal conflicts; insurgencies.

Ordinary citizens, litigants, students of law and lawyers in a civil society have a right to know about the prevailing law of that country. The traditional way of disseminating legal information – on paper – has given way to the electronic format in most of the developed countries. Gradually, this change is also beginning in the developing countries. In India, no one has a copyright to the text of judgments delivered by the courts; however, in the headnotes of judgments, copyright issues are involved. The bigger Internet players have started fee-based legal websites where one can become a member and/or registered user by paying periodical subscriptions. These can run into thousand of rupees every year. Only after paying the access fees can the visitor gain access to the complete headnote or the plain text of the judgment.

Since my retirement from the High Court of Australia in April 1995, I have pursued various activities. As Chairman of the National Library 1995-1998, National Fellow at the Australian National University and Chancellor of the University of New South Wales, I have been concerned with some current issues concerning libraries, including funding and copyright reform. My main purpose on this occasion is to speak about my experiences as a judicial rover in Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Hong Kong, jurisdictions in which I have been sitting as a Judge and as a lecturer at the Chinese National Judges College in Beijing.