The Jew's struggle for religious and civil liberty in Maryland

by E. Milton Altfeld

Dus grose success lied "Unser neue Heim" : sung by Joseph Shoengold in Isidore Solotorefsky's "Yesoimem fin der Welt" (Orphan's of the world) ; played at Liberty Theatre East New York

music by Peretz Sandler. Words by Isidor Lilien

Addressing teenage pregnancy in rural areas: A case study from Liberty County, Texas

This study explores the issue of teenage pregnancy in a case study of Liberty County, a rural area in Texas with no public health department. It also describes the decision-making process and barriers faced in the beginning phases of adopting a sexual education program, and sets forth an implementation plan for two school districts on disseminating an evidence-based, comprehensive curriculum. Methods include a review of epidemiological data surrounding teenage pregnancy on the national, state, and county level; a literature review of factors related to teenage pregnancy and past interventions implemented in a rural community; a policy review of past and current bills in Legislature; and an analysis of barriers and decision making in implementing an evidence based program through qualitative observations, discussions with community members during meetings, presentations, and discussions. Results of this study indicate that there is a lack of research conducted in rural areas in the field of teenage pregnancy prevention and sexual education programs. Barriers experienced in Liberty County are shown to be consistent in scientific literature such as funding, logistical issues, and problems approaching the School Board in adopting a comprehensive sexual education program. This study fills a large gap in the literature on rural adolescents and attempts to analyze the process of decision-making in a rural area related to adoption of sexual education programming. In order to relieve this health disparity, further research should focus on rural areas to gain insight on the attitudes and behaviors of rural adolescents and beliefs among community stakeholders.^

A Fair Day's Wages: Liberty, Legality, and Liability Among Denver's Day Laborers

Day laborers occupy an essential position in Denver’s booming construction industry. Day laborers make up a highly flexible, highly effective workforce able to respond to market changes. For day laborers, informal day-labor gathering points provide increased control over working hours and employee-employer relationships when compared to traditional wage labor. Still, recent legislation and policies around irregular migration has forced large numbers of workers who may have benefited from the stability of full-time regular employment into the informal sector. The day laborers’ flexibility also exposes them to employers constantly inventing ways to deny them the wages and benefits they are owed. Despite changes in Colorado law in attempts to strengthen workers’ recourse against their employers, and despite social and individual tactics day laborers employ to mitigate their vulnerability, systematic structural, symbolic, and everyday violence continue to advantage employers.

Russia and the Common Space on Freedom, Security and Justice. CEPS Paper on Liberty and Security in Europe No. 54, 25 February 2013

EU-Russia cooperation in the framework of the Common Space on Freedom, Security and Justice, launched almost a decade ago in 2003, has borne fruit more in the security aspects than the justice and liberty-related policy areas. This study assesses the uneven cooperation on justice and home affairs between the EU and Russia, while delving into the intersection between cooperation on justice, liberty and security and the promotion of human rights, democracy and rule of law in EU-Russia relations. The study concludes by proposing a set of policy recommendations to the European Parliament for playing a more active role in this important field of cooperation between the EU and Russia.

Europe’s most wanted? Recalibrating Trust in the European Arrest Warrant System. CEPS Paper Liberty and Security in Europe 55/21 March 2013

This paper assesses the uses and misuses in the application of the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) system in the European Union. It examines the main quantitative results of this extradition system achieved between 2005 and 2011 on the basis of the existing statistical knowledge on its implementation at EU official levels. The EAW has been anchored in a high level of ‘mutual trust’ between the participating states’ criminal justice regimes and authorities. This reciprocal confidence, however, has been subject to an increasing number of challenges resulting from its practical application, presenting a dual conundrum: 1. Principle of proportionality: Who are the competent judicial authorities cooperating with each other and ensuring that there are sufficient impartial controls over the necessity and proportionality of the decisions on the issuing and execution of EAWs? 2. Principle of division of powers: How can criminal justice authorities be expected to handle different criminal judicial traditions in what is supposed to constitute a ‘serious’ or ‘minor’ crime in their respective legal settings and ‘who’ is ultimately to determine (divorced from political considerations) when is it duly justified to make the EAW system operational? It is argued that the next generation of the EU’s criminal justice cooperation and the EAW need to recognise and acknowledge that the mutual trust premise upon which the European system has been built so far is no longer viable without devising new EU policy stakeholders’ structures and evaluation mechanisms. These should allow for the recalibration of mutual trust and mistrust in EU justice systems in light of the experiences of the criminal justice actors and practitioners having a stake in putting the EAW into daily effect. Such a ‘bottom-up approach’ should be backed up with the best impartial and objective evaluation, an improved system of statistical collection and an independent qualitative assessment of its implementation. This should be placed as the central axis of a renewed EAW framework which should seek to better ensure the accountability, impartial (EU-led) scrutiny and transparency of member states’ application of the EAW in light of the general principles and fundamental rights constituting the foundations of the European system of criminal justice cooperation.

Shifting Responsibilities for EU Roma Citizens: The 2010 French affair on Roma evictions and expulsions continued. CEPS Paper in Liberty and Security in Europe No. 55, June 2013

Despite the ultimatum delivered in October 2010 to the French government by Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission, to adapt its national immigration law ‘to the letter’ of the Citizens Directive 2004/38, the country has continued to evict and expel Romanian and Bulgarian nationals of Roma origin. This paper examines the state of affairs with respect to France’s policy on eviction and expulsion of Roma and assesses the way in which the controversy has developed and can be understood from the perspective of citizenship of the EU. On the basis of an examination of the subsequent responses by the European Commission and the EU member states involved, as well as of a recent bilateral agreement concluded between France and Romania on the reintegration of families of Romanian citizens belonging to the Roma minority who have exercised their freedom to move, the paper suggests that there has been a paradigm shift in the priorities driving EU policy responses and politics. This shift has led to an ethnicisation of citizenship of the Union, where ethnicity increasingly plays a decisive role in the allocation and attribution of responsibility to secure and safeguard the union freedoms.

The EU’s Paradoxical Efforts at Tracking the Financing of Terrorism: From criticism to imitation of dataveillance. CEPS Paper in Liberty and Security No. 56, August 2013

In July 2011, the European Commission published a Communication aimed at setting out different options for establishing a European terrorist finance tracking system (TFTS). The Communication followed the adoption of the EU-US agreement on the US Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) in 2010. The agreement concluded various series of national, European and transatlantic negotiations after the disclosure through public media of the US TFTP in 2006. This paper takes stock of the wide range of controversies surrounding this security-focused programme with dataveillance capabilities. After stressing the impact of the US TFTP on international relations, the paper argues that the EU-US agreement primarily has the effect of shifting information-sharing practices from the justice/judicial/penal/criminal investigation framework into the security/intelligence/administrative/prevention context as the main rationale. The paper then questions the TFTP-related conception of mass intelligence through large-scale databases and transnational communication of bulk data in the name of targeted surveillance. Following an examination of the project creating an EU system equivalent to the TFTP, the paper emphasises the fundamental paradox of transatlantic security matters, in which European criticism of American programmes tends to be ultimately translated into EU imitation of US dataveillance practices.

Survey on Rules on Loss of Nationality in International Treaties and Case Law. CEPS Paper in Liberty and Security in Europe No. 57, 30 August 2013

This paper offers a picture of the obligations existing under international and European law in respect of the loss of nationality. It describes international instruments including obligations in this field with direct relevancy for the loss of nationality of Member States of the European Union, but also obligations regarding loss of nationality in regional non-European treaties. Attention is given to two important judicial decisions of the European Court of Justice (Janko Rottmann) and the European Court of Human Rights (Genovese v Malta) regarding nationality. Special attention is devoted to Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which forbids the arbitrary deprivation of nationality. A survey is provided of possible sub-principles that can be derived from this rule. Finally, some observations are made on the burden of proof in cases of loss of nationality.

Current Challenges regarding the International Refugee Law, with focus on EU Policies and EU Co-operation with UNHCR. CEPS Paper on Liberty and Security in Europe No. 59, September 2013

From an examination of the instruments of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) and related policy measures regarding border surveillance and migration management, two interrelated issues stand out as particularly sensitive: Access to asylum and responsibility for refugee protection. The prevailing view, supported by UNHCR and others, is that responsibility for the care of asylum seekers and the determination of their claims falls on the state within whose jurisdiction the claim is made. However, the possibility to shift that responsibility to another state through inter-state cooperation or unilateral mechanisms undertaken territorially as well as abroad has been a matter of great interest to EU Member States and institutions. Initiatives adopted so far challenge the prevailing view and have the potential to undermine compliance with international refugee and human rights law. This note reviews EU action in the field by reference to the relevant legal standards and best practices developed by UNHCR, focusing on the specific problems of climate refugees and access to international protection, evaluating the inconsistencies between the internal and external dimension of asylum policy. Some recommendations for the European Parliament are formulated at the end, including on action in relation to readmission agreements, Frontex engagement rules in maritime operations, Regional Protection Programmes, and resettlement.

The ‘Lisbonisation’ of the European Parliament: Assessing progress, shortcomings and challenges for democratic accountability in the area of freedom, security and justice. CEPS Paper on Liberty and Security in Europe No. 58, September 2013

This paper examines the performance of the European Parliament in EU AFSJ law and policy-making from the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty until the end of the first half of 2013. The paper situates the EP in the new post-Lisbon institutional setting, documenting its transition to ‘AFSJ decision-maker’, and its new powers to shape and make policy covering the EU’s internal and external security agenda. While the paper finds that the EP has become an active co-owner of the EU AFSJ post-Lisbon, with the Parliament demonstrating a dynamic adjustment to its new post-Lisbon role and powers, the authors identify a set of new developments and challenges that have arisen in the conduct of democratic accountability by the EP in the AFSJ since 2009, which call for critical reflection ahead of the new parliamentary term 2014-2019 and the post-2014 phase of the EU’s AFSJ.

Why come here if I can go there? Assessing the ‘Attractiveness’ of the EU’s Blue Card Directive for ‘Highly Qualified’ Immigrants. Paper on Liberty and Security in Europe No. 60, 14 October 2013

This paper analyses the attractiveness of the EU’s Blue Card Directive – the flagship of the EU’s labour immigration policy – for so-called ‘highly qualified’ immigrant workers from outside the EU. For this purpose, the paper deconstructs the understanding of ‘attractiveness’ in the Blue Card Directive as shaped by the various EU decision-making actors during the legislative process. It is argued that the Blue Card Directive sets forth minimum standards providing for a common floor – not a common ceiling: the Directive did not, as originally envisaged by the European Commission, create one European highly skilled admission scheme. This raises questions regarding its concrete use. A critical focus is placed on the personal scope of the Blue Card Directive and the level of rights offered, and a first comparative perspective on the implementation of the Directive in five member states is provided.

Mass Surveillance of Personal Data by EU Member States and its Compatibility with EU Law. CEPS Liberty and Security in Europe No. 61, 6 November 2013

In the wake of the disclosures surrounding PRISM and other US surveillance programmes, this paper assesses the large-scale surveillance practices by a selection of EU member states: the UK, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Given the large-scale nature of these practices, which represent a reconfiguration of traditional intelligence gathering, the paper contends that an analysis of European surveillance programmes cannot be reduced to a question of the balance between data protection versus national security, but has to be framed in terms of collective freedoms and democracy. It finds that four of the five EU member states selected for in-depth examination are engaging in some form of large-scale interception and surveillance of communication data, and identifies parallels and discrepancies between these programmes and the NSA-run operations. The paper argues that these programmes do not stand outside the realm of EU intervention but can be analysed from an EU law perspective via i) an understanding of national security in a democratic rule of law framework where fundamental human rights and judicial oversight constitute key norms; ii) the risks posed to the internal security of the Union as a whole as well as the privacy of EU citizens as data owners and iii) the potential spillover into the activities and responsibilities of EU agencies. The paper then presents a set of policy recommendations to the European Parliament.