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Abstract
In June 2022, a Czech climate lawsuit, Klimatická žaloba ČR, z. s. and Others v. Government of the Czech Republic and Others was decided by a first-instance court. The litigation was led against the Czech state for insufficient climate mitigation and adaptation effort. The Municipal Court in Prague largely upheld the plaintiffs’ claim that the Czech mitigation measures adopted to date were contrary to the Paris Agreement; and it found that the country must substantially strengthen its reduction rate of greenhouse gas emissions. This result—the first of its kind in the Czech Republic—was a surprise to many in a country whose courts have been conservative in environmental matters. The judgment fits in well with current trends in climate litigation and follows the arguments of landmark climate cases such as Urgenda. This article provides a summary of the lawsuit and analyses two of the most important parts of the judgment: the court’s reasoning on the state’s obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and its ‘climatic’ interpretation of the fundamental right to a favourable environment, as guaranteed by the Czech Constitution.
Abstract
Studies on mission and migration have often focused on the propagation of Christianity from a home context to a foreign context. This is true of studies of Christian mission by Catholics and Protestants, but also true in the growing discussion of “reverse mission” whereby diasporic African and Korean missionaries evangelize the “heathen” lands of Europe and North America. This article proposes the alternative term “return mission” in which Christians from the diaspora return to evangelize the lands of their ancestral origins. It uses the case study of Jonathan Chao (Zhao Tian’en 趙天恩), a return missionary who traveled in and out of China from 1978 until near his death in 2004 and is considered an instrumental figure in the revival of Calvinism in China. This article suggests that “return mission” provides a new means to understand the subjects of mission and migration, and raises new challenges to questions about paternalism and independency.
Abstract
The aim of this article is to explore British courts’ jurisprudence relating to the actions of those who have committed acts abroad which, in some circumstances, might be considered terrorism. It does this by identifying three different types of attacks: against civilians, against UN-mandated forces and against another State’s military forces. What emerges from this analysis is that British courts readily classified the first two forms of attack as terrorism while remaining flexible in respect of the third. The article draws on domestic law concerning terrorism and also that which relates to immigration and asylum claims. From this it is apparent the courts have used a complex patchwork of international and domestic law to distinguish between terrorism and ‘legitimate armed attacks’. This is significant because the discussion of the issues by the courts might be of assistance in clarifying and developing the distinction in international law.
Abstract
The exclusion of women from politics is a historical and worldwide phenomenon. Evidently, the existing records within decision-making organs reveal significant under-representation of women. However, this state of affairs is neither natural nor unchanging. It must be noted that women suffer this political exclusion irrespective of the fact that they are demographically the majority in terms of population worldwide and in most individual countries. Tanzania is not distinct from this worldwide trend. Despite the fact that it is a signatory to several normative frameworks that seek for the inclusion of women in major decision-making organs, the actual situation is still critical. Using the public-private dichotomy, I note that the legal framework, nature of political parties, electoral system and economic position of women are central in explaining the exclusion of women from major decision organs.
Abstract
Does “where to publish” affect academic staff promotion outcome? Using rational choice theory and the University of Dar es Salaam as case study, this article analyses the law and practice associated with academic staff promotion regarding “where to publish”. The article finds that the University has relatively well elaborate and adequate promotion guidelines and institutional frameworks to guide on “where to publish” in line with its vision of becoming a world-class university. Nonetheless, through series of workshops with staff and heads of department as well as interviews with the University management, it was observed that there is still little understanding of “where to publish” among staff although the situation is progressively changing. Some staff prefer predatory journals due to ignorance, frequent failures and lack of confidence to publish in credible journals. Consequently, the annual promotion rate remains low suggesting high rejection of publications by the University due to predatory nature of media of publication and failure by majority staff to publish.
Abstract
This article 1 explores how constitutional imaginaries could be used in comparative constitutional research. It claims that, while western imaginaries are partly responsible for a western-oriented focus in constitutional comparison, constitutional imaginaries could, if conceptualised differently, fruitfully contribute to inquiries concerning different parts of the globe. Given this Janus-faced feature of constitutional imaginaries, the analysis highlights the variety of these imaginaries and their non-reducibility to a single overarching Imaginary. Building on Paul Blokker’s “Imaginary components”, making up two distinct ideal type Imaginaries, modernist and democratic, the article introduces a framework entailing three different normative stances in conceptualising imaginaries, being homogeneity, tension and disengaged coexistence. These stances range from a western-centred to a global-pluralistic take on Imaginaries. The benefits comparative constitutional research may obtain using this framework are twofold: first, it allows a more nuanced description of specific Imaginaries; second, it creates an adequate methodological setting to be applied also to non-western settings.
Abstract
This word study addresses the linguistic archaeology of Old Egyptian dp.t ‘ship’ and its crosslinguistic cognates specifically from an Arabic comparative perspective. Initially a Sumerian loanword in several branches of Afroasiatic, this lexeme significantly retains its Old Egyptian maritime semantics in Hebrew, Arabic and Cushitic, yielding a cohesive and suggestive word family plausibly lexifying an isogloss of a maritime lingua franca evoking Ancient Egyptian commercial traffic with ports along the Red Sea down to the Horn of Africa and the adjacent coast of Arabia. The lexical documentation presented here further endorses the intuition advanced in Borg (2019a, b) that Ancient Egypt was, from the Bronze Age onwards (if not earlier) a strategic site in the diasporic prehistory of the Arabic language.