Forgoing primacy: Damaging democratic policing in the West Bank

Since the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1993, the international community has supported civil policing programmes. It has done so as part of its development commitments to Palestinian state-building. Such programmes were, until the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000, largely regarded as successful in terms of supporting the establishment of a Palestinian civil police (PCP). Such programmes were essentially Western imported models which loosely mixed community and public order policing approaches. With re-engagement in the Palestinian security sector (PSS) in the West Bank in 2007, the international community has once again sought to play a major role in PSS reform. This role includes supporting rehabilitation and retraining of the PCP as a principal institution of state-building. Such activities alongside the so-called transformation efforts within the wider realm of the PSS have re-established as their goal law and order. Within the transformation agenda, there are inherent demands with respect to Israel and the Palestinian National Authority's security and counterterrorism agendas. This analysis examines these activities, and accompanying political intent to contend that such approaches are undermining principles of democratic policing including civil police primacy (CPP). CPP reinforces police universality and means supporting rule of law by putting security under governmental control with proper mechanisms of accountability. This article argues that support to the security sector in the West Bank has increasingly only paid lip service or sought to subvert normative approaches to democratic policing.

Bank Failures of the 1990s::An Exploratory Analysis

Past research has frequently attributed the incidence of bank failures to macroeconomic cycles and/or downturns in the regional economy. More recent analyses have suggested that the incidence and severity of bank failures can be linked to governance failures, which may be preventable through more stringent disclosure and auditing requirements. Using data on bank failures during the years 1991 to 1997, for the US, Canada, the UK and Germany, this study examines the relationship between institutional characteristics of national legal and auditing systems and the incidence of bank failures. In the second part of our analysis we then examined the relationship between the same institutional variables and the severity of bank failures.
The first part of our study notes a significant correlation between the law and order tradition (‘rule of law’) of a national legal system and the incidence of bank failures. Nations which were assigned high 'rule of law’ scores by country risk guides appear to have been less likely to experience bank failures. Another variable which appears to impact on bank failure rates is the ‘risk of contract repudiation’. Countries with a greater ‘risk of contract repudiation’ appear to be more likely to experience bank failures. We suggest that this may be due to a greater ex ante protection of stakeholders in countries where contract enforcement is more stringent.
The results of the second part of our study are less clear cut. However, there appears to be a significant correlation between the amount paid out by national deposit insurers (our proxy for the severity of bank failures) and the macroeconomic variable 'GDP change'. Here our findings follow the conventional wisdom; with greater amounts of deposit insurance funds being paid during economic downturns (i.e. low or negative GDP 'growth' correlates with high amounts of deposit insurance being paid out). A less pronounced relationship with the severity of bank failures can also be established for the institutional variables ' accounting standards' as well as 'risk of contract repudiation'. Countries with more stringent ‘accounting standards’ and a low ‘risk of contract repudiation’ appear to have been less prone to severe bank failures.

Organising EU non-discrimination law around the nodes of ‘race’ gender and disability?

EU non-discrimination law has seen a proliferation of discrimination grounds from 2000. Dis-crimination on grounds of gender (in the field of equal pay) and on grounds of nationality (generally within the scope of application of EU law) were the only prohibited forms of discrimination in EU law, until the Treaty of Amsterdam empowered the Community to legislate in order to combat discrimination on grounds of sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation (Article 13 EC). Proliferation of non-discrimination grounds is also characteristic for international and national non-discrimination law. As such, proliferation of grounds results in an increase in potential cases of “multiple discrimination” and the danger of diluting the demands of equality law by ever more multiplication of grounds. The hierarchy of equality, which has been so widely criticised in EU law, is a signifier of the latter danger.
This chapter proposes to structure the confusing field of non-discrimination grounds by organising them around nodes of discrimination fields. It will first reflect different ways of establishing hierarchies between grounds. This will be followed by a recount of different (narrow and wide) reading of grounds. A comprehensive reading of the grounds gender, ‘race’ and disability as establishing overlapping fields of discrimination grounds will be mapped out, with some examples for practical uses.

Enforcing Employment Discrimination Law - Potential Transplants from Italy to Britain and Vice Versa?

While substantive EU non-discrimination law has been harmonized in great detail, the enforcement regime for EU non-discrimination law consists merely of a few isolated elements. Thus, the pursuit of unity through harmonization in substantive EU law is accompanied by considerable regulatory autonomy for Member States in securing the efficiency of those laws, reflecting the diversity of national enforcement regimes, and resulting in twenty-seven different national models for enforcing discrimination law in labour markets. This article pursues two connected arguments through a comparison of rules for enforcing non-discrimination law in labour markets in Britain and Italy. First, it argues that enforcing non-discrimination law in labour markets is best achieved when responsive governance, repressive regulation and mainstreaming equality law are combined. Second, the article submits that diversity of national legal orders within the EU is not necessarily detrimental, as it offers opportunities for mutual learning across legal systems.The notion of mutual learning across systems is proposed in order to analyse the transnational migration of legal ideas within the EU. Such migration has been criticized in debates about the ‘transplantation’ of legal concepts or legal irritation through foreign legal ideas, in particular by comparative labour lawyers. However, EU harmonization policies in the field of non-discrimination law aim to impact on national labour laws. The article develops the notion of mutual learning across legal systems in order to establish conditions for transnational migration of legal ideas, and demonstrates the viability of these concepts by applying them to the field of non-discrimination law

International order flows: Explaining equity and exchange rate returns

Macroeconomic models of equity and exchange rate returns perform poorly at high frequencies. The proportion of daily returns that these models explain is essentially zero. Instead of relying on macroeconomic determinants, we model equity price and exchange rate behavior based on a concept from microstructure – order flow. The international order flows are derived from belief changes of different investor groups in a two-country setting. We obtain a structural relationship between equity returns, exchange rate returns and their relationship to home and foreign equity market order flow. To test the model we construct daily aggregate order flow data from 800 million equity trades in the U.S. and France from 1999 to 2003. Almost 60% of the daily returns in the S&P100 index are explained jointly by exchange rate returns and aggregate order flows in both markets. As predicted by the model, daily exchange rate returns and order flow into the French market have significant incremental explanatory power for the daily S&P returns. The model implications are also validated for intraday returns.