The IHR (2005), disease surveillance, and the individual in global health politics

Since the revisions to the International Health Regulations (IHR) in 2005, much attention has turned to two concerns relating to infectious disease control. The first is how to assist states to strengthen their capacity to identify and verify public health emergencies of international concern (PHEIC). The second is the question of how the World Health Organization (WHO) will operate its expanded mandate under the revised IHR. Very little attention has been paid to the potential individual power that has been afforded under the IHR revisions – primarily through the first inclusion of human rights principles into the instrument and the allowance for the WHO to receive non-state surveillance intelligence and informal reports of health emergencies. These inclusions mark the individual as a powerful actor, but also recognise the vulnerability of the individual to the whim of the state in outbreak response and containment. In this paper we examine why these changes to the IHR occurred and explore the consequence of expanding the sovereignty-as-responsibility concept to disease outbreak response. To this end our paper considers both the strengths and weaknesses of incorporating reports from non-official sources and including human rights principles in the IHR framework.

Duty in the time of epidemics : what China and Zimbabwe teach us

In November 2002, a man with ‘atypical pneumonia’ treated in Foshan hospital, Guangdong Province, in the People's Republic of China, was the first known case of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). However, it was not until April 2003 that the Chinese government admitted to the full scale of ‘atypical pneumonia’ cases infected with SARS, two months after the disease had rapidly spread across the world with initial infections in Hong Kong and Vietnam sourced to Guangdong. In 2008, Zimbabwe experienced one of the biggest outbreaks of cholera ever recorded. By February 2009, the disease had spread across all of Zimbabwe's 10 provinces and to neighbouring countries—Botswana, South Africa, Zambia and Mozambique—causing thousands of infections amongst their populations. This article seeks to examine what duties the Chinese and Zimbabwe states had to protect their citizens and the international community from these outbreaks. The article refers to the findings of the International Law Commission's study into the role of states and international organisations in protecting persons in the event of a disaster to consider whether there is an international duty to protect persons from epidemics. The article concludes that both cases reveal a growing concept of protection that entails an international duty to assist individuals when an affected state proves unwilling or unable to assist its own population in the event of a disease outbreak.

The responsibility to protect in the Asia-Pacific region

In 2005, governments around the world unanimously agreed to the principle of the responsibility to protect (R2P), which holds that all states have a responsibility to protect their populations from genocide and mass atrocities, that the international community should assist them to fulfil this duty, and that the international community should take timely and decisive measures to protect populations from such crimes when their host state fails to do so. Progressing R2P from words to deeds requires international consensus about the principle’s meaning and scope. To achieve a global consensus on this, we need to better understand the position of governments around the world, including in the Asia-Pacific region, which has long been associated with an enduring commitment to a traditional concept of sovereignty. The present article contributes to such an endeavour through its three sections. The first part charts the nature of the international consensus on R2P and examines the UN secretary-general’s approach. The second looks in detail at the positions of the Asia-Pacific region’s governments on the R2P principle. The final part explores the way forward for progressing the R2P principle in the Asia-Pacific region.

The international politics of disease reporting : towards post-Westphalianism?

Since the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003, there has been much discussion about whether the international community has moved into a new post-Westphalian era, where states increasingly recognize certain shared norms that guide what they ought to do in responding to infectious disease outbreaks. In this article I identify this new obligation as the ‘duty to report’, and examine competing accounts on the degree to which states appreciate this new obligation are considered by examining state behaviour during the H5N1 human infectious outbreaks in East Asia (since 2004). The article examines reporting behaviour for H5N1 human infectious cases in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam from 2004 to 2010. The findings lend strong support to the claim that East Asian states have come to accept and comply with the duty to report infectious disease outbreaks and that the assertions of sovereignty in response to global health governance frameworks have not systematically inhibited reporting compliance.

Introduction

"The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a major new international principle, adopted unanimously in 2005 by Heads of State and Government. Whilst it is broadly acknowledged that the principle has an important and intimate relationship with international law, especially the law relating to sovereignty, peace and security, human rights and armed conflict, there has yet to be a volume dedicated to this question. The Responsibility to Protect and International Law fills that gap by bringing together leading scholars from North America, Europe and Australia to examine R2P’s legal content. The Responsibility to Protect and International Law focuses on questions relating to R2P’s legal quality, its relationship with sovereignty, and the question of whether the norm establishes legal obligations. It also aims to introduce readers to different legal perspectives, including feminism, and pressing practical questions such as how the law might be used to prevent genocide and mass atrocities, and punish the perpetrators."--publisher website

Conclusion

"The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a major new international principle, adopted unanimously in 2005 by Heads of State and Government. Whilst it is broadly acknowledged that the principle has an important and intimate relationship with international law, especially the law relating to sovereignty, peace and security, human rights and armed conflict, there has yet to be a volume dedicated to this question. The Responsibility to Protect and International Law fills that gap by bringing together leading scholars from North America, Europe and Australia to examine R2P’s legal content."--publisher website

The BRICS and R2P : contestation, re-interpretation and norm entrepreneurship

The intra-state humanitarian crises in Libya and Syria have led to renewed debate over the content and implementation of pillar three of the responsibility to protect (R2P). This paper examines the BRICS’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) current perspectives on R2P and their recent efforts to shape the concept’s evolution. While Brazil’s “Responsibility while Protecting” (RwP) proposal has been widely discussed, the central focus here is on the lesser-known, semi-official Chinese idea of “Responsible Protection” (RP). Like RwP, RP proposes decision-making criteria and accountability mechanisms for UN-authorised military intervention under R2P’s third pillar. This paper argues that although RP draws heavily on previous R2P proposals such as the original 2001 ICISS report and Brazil’s RwP, by amalgamating and re-packaging these earlier ideas in a more restrictive form the Chinese initiative represents a new and distinctive interpretation of R2P. However, as it currently stands, some aspects of RP appear to be framed too strictly to provide workable guidelines for determining the permissibility of R2P military intervention, and would, therefore, benefit from clarification and refinement. Of broader significance, China’s RP and Brazil’s RwP initiatives point to the growing willingness of rising, non-Western powers to articulate and promote their own normative preferences on sovereignty, intervention and global governance. This development has potential implications both for R2P’s evolution and for the structure of the international system.

'Means to ends': Integration for stakeholder engagement.

In project management today, sustainability considerations are becoming increasingly necessary as an inclusion into project discovery, design and delivery phase methodologies. However, sustainability cannot always be tacked on to traditional project management approaches and still achieve the best project outcomes. Throw in the particular considerations for a culturally specific project, as for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and the traditional project management approach is at risk of not meeting the needs of stakeholders or their engagement. In this presentation, we will briefly demonstrate how from beginning with sustainability considerations and integrating both project management principles and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander va lu es that QUT's Oodgeroo Unit is actioning a 'means to ends' integration approach for stakeholder engagement in two national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander projects. The iterative discovery and design of the federally Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) funded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Higher Education Social Marketing Strategy (Strategy) and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Higher Education Portal (Portal) projects is being informed through a 'means' to 'ends' user- and design -led project management approach for inclusivity, visioning, and participation informing these projects for susta inable national deliverables. This approach draws upon the integration of Sustain ability Development Pillars and Project Management Pillars with the contextual lens of our proposed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Pillars as the underpinning methodology of the Strategy and Portal Project's Communication and Collaboration Plan and approach with stakeholders. These th ree Pillars are integrated further through participatory consideration and inclu sion of comparative models: Daly's Sustainability Triangle, Walker's Object Design, Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs, Olsen's Four Layers of Communication,Project Management In stitute's (PMI's) Integrated Framework for Organisational Project Management, with the Aborig inal and Torres Strait Islander six core research ethics values. This presentation invites participants to join us in envisioning the 'ultimate means' of Environment, Del ivery and Sovereignty, through Economy, Design and Self-determination to the 'ultimate ends' of Social, Discove ry and Cultural Safety principles through stakeholder engagement.

China's "Responsible Protection" concept : re-interpreting the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and military intervention for humanitarian purposes

This article assesses the extent to which the recently formulated Chinese concept of “Responsible Protection” (RP) offers a valuable contribution to the normative debate over R2P’s third pillar following the controversy over military intervention in Libya. While RP draws heavily on previous proposals such as the original 2001 ICISS report and Brazil’s “Responsibility while Protecting” (RwP), by amalgamating and re-packaging these earlier ideas in a more restrictive form the initiative represents a new and distinctive interpretation of R2P. However, some aspects of RP are framed too narrowly to provide workable guidelines for determining the permissibility of military intervention for civilian protection purposes, and should therefore be clarified and refined. Nevertheless, the Chinese proposal remains significant because it offers important insights into Beijing’s current stance on R2P. More broadly, China’s RP and Brazil’s RwP initiatives illustrate the growing willingness of rising, non-Western powers to assert their own normative preferences on sovereignty, intervention and global governance.

eARTh : the dynamics of ontological representation

This Australian Indigenous creactive work and its Treatise promote ways of thinking about practice and research that extend well beyond the current discourse. It invites re-thinking on how research can be practice-led in new ways, and what that might mean for future students. When discussing the challenges of today, this work signifies how "Western Style" thinking and theory is wanting in so many ways. It engages a new dynamic and innovative way of theorising, encouraging future students to apply their full capacity of energy and wisdom. (Extract from examiners' reports.)

Locating Indigenous Australia within community development practice : clients, consumers or change makers?

The philosophical promise of community development to “resource and empower people so that they can collectively control their own destinies” (Kenny 1996:104) is no doubt alluring to Indigenous Australia. Given the historical and contemporary experiences of colonial control and surveillance of Aboriginal bodies, alongside the continuing experiences of socio-economic disadvantage, community development reaffirms the aspirational goal of Indigenous Australians for self-determination. Self-determination as a national policy agenda for Indigenous Australians emerged in the 1970s and saw the establishment of a wide range of Aboriginal community-controlled services (Tsey et al 2012). Sullivan (2010:4) argues that the Aboriginal community controlled service sector during this time has, and continues to be, instrumental to advancing the plight of Indigenous Australians both materially and politically. Yet community development and self-determination remain highly problematic and contested in how they manifest in Indigenous social policy agendas and in practice (Hollinsworth 1996; Martin 2003; McCausland 2005; Moreton-Robinson 2009). Moreton-Robinson (2009:68) argues that a central theme underpinning these tensions is a reading of Indigeneity in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, behaviours, cultures, and communities are pathologised as “dysfunctional” thus enabling assertions that Indigenous people are incapable of managing their own affairs. This discourse distracts us from the “strategies and tactics of patriarchal white sovereignty��� that inhibit the “state’s earlier policy of self-determination” (Moreton-Robinson 2009:68). We acknowledge the irony of community development espoused by Ramirez above (1990), that the least resourced are expected to be most resourceful.; however, we wish to interrogate the processes that inhibit Indigenous participation and control of our own affairs rather than further interrogate Aboriginal minds as uneducated, incapable and/or impaired...

On food security and alternative food networks: Understanding and performing food security in the context of urban bias

This paper offers one explanation for the institutional basis of food insecurity in Australia, and argues that while alternative food networks and the food sovereignty movement perform a valuable function in building forms of social solidarity between urban consumers and rural producers, they currently make only a minor contribution to Australia’s food and nutrition security. The paper begins by identifying two key drivers of food security: household incomes (on the demand side) and nutrition-sensitive, ‘fair food’ agriculture (on the supply side). We focus on this second driver and argue that healthy populations require an agricultural sector that delivers dietary diversity via a fair and sustainable food system. In order to understand why nutrition-sensitive, fair food agriculture is not flourishing in Australia we introduce the development economics theory of urban bias. According to this theory, governments support capital intensive rather than labour intensive agriculture in order to deliver cheap food alongside the transfer of public revenues gained from rural agriculture to urban infrastructure, where the majority of the voting public resides. We chart the unfolding of the Urban Bias across the twentieth century and its consolidation through neo-liberal orthodoxy, and argue that agricultural policies do little to sustain, let alone revitalize, rural and regional Australia. We conclude that by observing food system dynamics through a re-spatialized lens, Urban Bias Theory is valuable in highlighting rural–urban socio-economic and political economy tensions, particularly regarding food system sustainability. It also sheds light on the cultural economy tensions for alternative food networks as they move beyond niche markets to simultaneously support urban food security and sustainable rural livelihoods.

Atmospheres : Aesthetics of emotional spaces[Review]

More problematic than his avoidance of recent geographic scholarship is his treatment of indigenous, ethnographic and postcolonial perspectives on island life. Not only is much of this scholarship absent, the bits that are there are mostly derided. He slams Kamau Braithwaite and his concept of ‘tidalectics’ as ‘unpackable’ (p. 20) and also claims that Greg Dening’s approach to islands as having ‘permeable cultural boundaries’ has ‘intellectual costs’ (p. 23). In a section of the book on ‘Naming and Sovereignty���, instead of an in-depth examination of the processes of decoding and recoding that goes on in indigenous island landscapes under colonialism (as could be discussed at length if Shell chose to examine Aotearoa, Hawaii, or hundreds of other places) we are instead presented a vignette about his childhood street fights with other kids over the naming of a hometown island in Canada, as well as ruminations about what Herman Melville and Ellen Semple thought of islands in the nineteenth century. In short, if you want to know what dead Caucasians like Shakespeare, Melville, Kant, Mackinder, More, and ancient Athenians thought about islands, then this book is a good resource. If, however, you are looking for information about what islands are like today – and what they mean to the people who live on and interact with them – then you will have to look elsewhere.

Indigenous as ’not-Indigenous' as ’Us'?: A dissident insider's views on pushing the bounds for what constitutes 'our mob'

In australia, 'Aboriginality' is often defined by people in constrictive ways that are heavily influenced by the coloniser's epistemological frameworks. An essential component of this is a 'racial' categorisation of peoples that marks sameness and difference, thereby influencing insider and outsider status. In one sense, this categorisation of people acts to exclude non-aboriginal 'others' from participation in preinvasion indigenous ontologies, ways of living that may not have contained such restrictive identity categories and were thereby highly inclusive of outsiders. One of the effects of this is that aboriginal peoples' efforts for 'advancement' - either out of 'disadvantage' and/or towards political independence (ie, sovereignty) - become confined and restricted by what is deemed possible within the coloniser's epistemological frameworks. This is so much so that aboriginal people are at risk of only reinforcing and upholding the very systems that resulted in their original and continuing dispossession.

Indigenous Intellectual Property: A Handbook of Contemporary Research

Taking an interdisciplinary approach unmatched by any other book on this topic, this thoughtful Handbook considers the international struggle to provide for proper and just protection of Indigenous intellectual property (IP). In light of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007, expert contributors assess the legal and policy controversies over Indigenous knowledge in the fields of international law, copyright law, trademark law, patent law, trade secrets law, and cultural heritage. The overarching discussion examines national developments in Indigenous IP in the United States, Canada, South Africa, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia. The Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the historical origins of conflict over Indigenous knowledge, and examines new challenges to Indigenous IP from emerging developments in information technology, biotechnology, and climate change. Practitioners and scholars in the field of IP will learn a great deal from this Handbook about the issues and challenges that surround just protection of a variety of forms of IP for Indigenous communities. Preface The Legacy of David Unaipon Matthew Rimmer Introduction: Mapping Indigenous Intellectual Property Matthew Rimmer PART I INTERNATIONAL LAW 1. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: A Human Rights Framework for Indigenous Intellectual Property Mauro Barelli 2. The WTO, The TRIPS Agreement and Traditional Knowledge Tania Voon 3. The World Intellectual Property Organization and Traditional Knowledge Sara Bannerman 4. The World Indigenous Network: Rio+20, Intellectual Property, Indigenous Knowledge, and Sustainable Development Matthew Rimmer PART II COPYRIGHT LAW AND RELATED RIGHTS 5. Government Man, Government Painting? David Malangi and the 1966 One-Dollar Note Stephen Gray 6. What Wandjuk Wanted Martin Hardie 7. Avatar Dreaming: Indigenous Cultural Protocols and Making Films Using Indigenous Content Terri Janke 8. The Australian Resale Royalty for Visual Artists: Indigenous Art and Social Justice Robert Dearn and Matthew Rimmer PART III TRADE MARK LAW AND RELATED RIGHTS 9. Indigenous Cultural Expression and Registered Designs Maree Sainsbury 10. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act: The Limits of Trademark Analogies Rebecca Tushnet 11. Protection of Traditional Cultural Expressions within the New Zealand Intellectual Property Framework: A Case Study of the Ka Mate Haka Sarah Rosanowski 12 Geographical Indications and Indigenous Intellectual Property William van Caenegem PART IV PATENT LAW AND RELATED RIGHTS 13. Pressuring ‘Suspect Orthodoxy’: Traditional Knowledge and the Patent System Chidi Oguamanam, 14. The Nagoya Protocol: Unfinished Business Remains Unfinished Achmad Gusman Siswandi 15. Legislating on Biopiracy in Europe: Too Little, too Late? Angela Daly 16. Intellectual Property, Indigenous Knowledge, and Climate Change Matthew Rimmer PART V PRIVACY LAW AND IDENTITY RIGHTS 17. Confidential Information and Anthropology: Indigenous Knowledge and the Digital Economy Sarah Holcombe 18. Indigenous Cultural Heritage in Australia: The Control of Living Heritages Judith Bannister 19. Dignity, Trust and Identity: Private Spheres and Indigenous Intellectual Property Bruce Baer Arnold 20. Racial Discrimination Laws as a Means of Protecting Collective Reputation and Identity David Rolph PART VI INDIGENOUS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES 21. Diluted Control: A Critical Analysis of the WAI262 Report on Maori Traditional Knowledge and Culture Fleur Adcock 22. Traditional Knowledge Governance Challenges in Canada Jeremy de Beer and Daniel Dylan 23. Intellectual Property protection of Traditional Knowledge and Access to Knowledge in South Africa Caroline Ncube 24. Traditional Knowledge Sovereignty: The Fundamental Role of Customary Law in Protection of Traditional Knowledge Brendan Tobin Index