A protecção jurídica do consumidor em Angola

The scope of the present work is to study the legal protection conferred upon the consumer in Angola, especially as regards electronic communication agreements. Its purpose is to promote consumers’ rights and contribute to its defence given the relatively privileged position of professionals in their relationship with consumers. With this in mind, we have made a description of the Consumer Law in Angola based on the Angolan Constitution (as the law that establishes the fundamental rights and guarantees of citizens) and on the Consumer’s Defence Law, which, as the basic law regarding consumers’ rights, provides the framework for this dissertation. We have analysed several aspects relating to consumer relationships, starting from its concept and rights of consumers and covering the legal and contractual mechanisms put in place for their protection. We have also analysed the Advertising Law with a view to better understand consumer’s rights before advertising campaigns carried out by professionals whilst promoting their goods and services and, additionally, to understand the duties and principles that shall be complied with in such campaigns with the purpose to protect the rights and interests of consumers. From a criminal point of view, we have briefly covered the crimes against consumers provided for in the Penal Code and the Law of Infractions against the Economy. In the second part of this work, we have summarised the institutions that protect the rights and interests of consumers, which include the Public Prosecutor Office, the National Institute for the Defence of the Consumers and the Consumers’ Associations. The third and last part of this work covers electronic communications agreements. Given the fact that there is no specific legislation in this matter, our analysis was based on the Civil Code – specifically the part relating to contracts – the Law on General Contractual Terms and Conditions and the Consumer’s Defence Law. We have analysed the formation of contracts, compliance and consumers’ rights resulting from contract breach. We further have appealed to the Angolan legislator to legislate certain aspects of consumer relationships, especially those where breach of consumers’ rights are blatant and facilitated by the lack of specific laws addressing such cases.

Continuidade e mudança. O sistema internacional no post‐Guerra Fria

O fim da Guerra Fria é um caso inédito de mudança pacífica da estrutura internacional, em que os Estados Unidos e a União Soviética transcendem a divisão bipolar para decidir os termos da paz no quadro das instituições que definem o modelo de ordenamento multilateral, consolidando a sua legitimidade. Nesse contexto, ao contrário dos casos precedentes de reconstrução internacional no fim de uma guerra hegemónica, o novo sistema do post-Guerra Fria, caracterizado pela unipolaridade, pela regionalização e pela homogeneização, forma-se num quadro de continuidade institucional. A ordem política do post-Guerra Fria é um sistema misto em que as tensões entre a hierarquia unipolar e a anarquia multipolar, a integração global e a fragmentação regional e a homogeneidade e a heterogeneidade política, ideológica e cultural condicionam as estratégias das potências. As crises internacionais vão pôr à prova a estabilidade da nova ordem e a sua capacidade para garantir mudanças pacíficas. A primeira década do post-Guerra Fria mostra a preponderância dos Estados Unidos e a sua confiança crescente, patente nas Guerras do Golfo Pérsico e dos Balcãs, bem como na crise dos Estreitos da Formosa. A reacção aos atentados do "11 de Setembro" revela uma tentação imperial da potência unipolar, nomeadamente com a invasão do Iraque, que provoca uma crise profunda da comunidade de segurança ocidental. A vulnerabilidade do centro da ordem internacional é confirmada pela crise constitucional europeia e pela crise financeira global. Essas crises não alteram a estrutura de poder mas aceleram a erosão da ordem multilateral e criam um novo quadro de possibilidades para a evolução internacional, que inclui uma escalada dos conflitos num quadro de multipolaridade regional, uma nova polarização entre as potências democráticas conservadoras e uma coligação revisionista autoritária, bem como a restauração de um concerto entre as principais potências internacionais.

Surrogacy in Portugal

Surrogacy is the arrangement made by at least three people, in order for a surrogate or gestational mother to carry a pregnancy for the two intended parents, with the objective of the former party relinquishing all rights to the child, once the child is born. As it has only been in recent years that that same reproductive method has begun to be commonly accepted due to certain modern scientific developments that thus diminished ethical and moral negative stances, there is still an unsettling legal void (both at a national and international level) in regards to such subsidiary form of reproduction. As such, some countries have not only left their citizens with no choice but to travel abroad in order to enter a surrogacy arrangement (leading to private international law issues on establishing parenthood and nationality of the born child) or to resort to surrogacy within black market conditions. Unfortunately, one of those countries is Portugal as it has been considered, both by its political parties and experts in the area, and by its citizens as not dealing adequately with such theme and thus being poorly equipped to deal with surrogacy, at both a legal and social level. The present paper attempts to analyse Portugal’s current legal perspective by looking at the present efforts being made to contradict the current situation, and thus outline altruistic gestational surrogacy’s tangible future within such nation. In order to also become aware of possible improvements specifically regarding to the full protection of human rights and human dignity as a whole, the United Kingdom’s legal standpoint in relation to surrogacy was also studied. Via direct comparison of both social and legal perspectives, a new approach to altruistic surrogacy is thus proposed with view to suggest a harmonious solution for countries that have at least recognized that the present issue deserves to be duly noticed and that altruistic gestational surrogacy may exist in order to grant protection of human dignity and not to place it in check.