This thesis examines the nature, content and legal implications of the constitutional right to development and investigates its (non-)realization by inquiring how development and human rights are being pursued in Ethiopia. In addressing these issues, this study analytically situates the conception of the right to development as enshrined in the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE) Constitution within the context of the general human rights and development debates, the normative framework of the right to development as established by the United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development (UNDRD) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights (ACHPR). Thus, it discusses the theoretical and moral basis for linking development and human rights and conceptualizing the claim for development as a distinct human right. It further explores the evolution of the right to development into an international human rights norm and addresses its attendant controversies. It subsequently analyses the nature and content of the right to development as established under the UNDRD and ACHPR before engaging with the issues relating to the FDRE Constitution. This research has employed doctrinal and comparative legal research methodologies and also involved critical analysis of policy documents and data from secondary sources. This research finds that the right to development as enshrined in the FDRE Constitution is enunciated in ambiguous terms and asserts that it needs to be understood within the broader constitutional context of Ethiopia which, in conformity with UNDRD and ACHPR, considers development and human rights to be interdependent and mutually reinforcing projects which can only be realized through such interdependence and mutuality. It further submits that the constitutional right to development generally provides a legally binding normative framework within which development processes in Ethiopia should be pursued and puts a constitutional limit on the power of the State as it relates to development undertakings. It, however, identifies that, despite its legally binding nature, the observance of this right is not provided with effective guarantee (enforcement mechanism) as the Ethiopian courts are excluded from enforcing constitutional human rights. This study also claims that the realization of the constitutional right to development has been impeded by the governing ideologies of revolutionary democracy and developmental state which undermine the basic conditions necessary for undertaking development and human rights as interdependent and mutually reinforcing goals of the Constitution. Its review of Ethiopia’s successive development policies reveals the marginal importance given to human rights in general and the two fundamental aspects of the constitutional right to development – the right to active, free and meaningful participation in development and the right to fair distribution of the benefits of development – in particular. Its assessment of Ethiopia’s balance sheet of socio-economic development and human rights in the last decade also attests that development and human rights have been practically disentangled and signals the need for taking the constitutional right to development seriously.

abstract: The collision between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates marked the onset of the rise of the Himalayan-Tibetan orogen, but also brought about profound changes to the Earth's oceans and climate. The exact sequence of events that occurred during this collision is poorly understood, leading to a wide range of estimates of its age. The Indus and Yarlung sutures are generally considered to represent the final collision between India and Eurasia, and together form a mostly continuous belt that can be traced over 2000 km along strike. In the western portions of the orogen the Karakoram Fault introduces a key complexity to the study of timing of collision by offsetting the Indus and Yarlung sutures. Recent work has used the complexities introduced by the Karakoram Fault to suggest that the more northerly Shyok suture, not the Indus suture, represents the India-Eurasia collision zone. Estimates for timing of the India-Eurasia collision fall into one of three groups: 40-34 Ma, 55-50 Ma, and 66-60 Ma. Attempts to reconcile these models have thus far been unsuccessful. In order to provide additional data that might further clarify the timing and location of collision, studies have been performed along the Shyok suture in India and along the Yarlung suture in Tibet at Sangsang. A study along the Shyok suture argues that the suture formed between 92-85 Ma. This timing precludes an interpretation that the Shyok suture marks the location of the India-Eurasia collision. A second study demonstrates the utility of two new geochronometers, (U-Th)/Pb joaquinite and 40Ar/39Ar neptunite, that play an important role in unraveling the tectonic history of the Yarlung suture. A third study is an investigation of the structure and geochronology of the Sangsang ophiolite complex. Here, multiple (U-Th)/Pb and 40Ar/39Ar systems record magmatism and metamorphism spanning ca. 125-52 Ma. By tying these chronometers to tectonic process, a history is reconstructed of the southern margin of Tibet that includes Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous forearc rifting associated with mid ocean ridge subduction, Paleocene accretionary wedge uplift and erosion, and finally Eocene metasomatism and collision. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Geological Sciences 2016

This research argues that cooperatives have become uncategorizable in terms of their identity, especially when one attempts to distinguish them from investor-owned firms and hence it is further argued that they should have specified objectives that match with their historical not-for-profit objectives so that they can easily distinguishable. The cooperatives have become uncategorizable mainly due to the gradual adaptation of the idea of investor owned firms into cooperatives and the possibility of organizing business enterprises in the form of cooperatives. The problems are further exacerbated in Ethiopia due to (1) the existence of state incentives to cooperatives,(2) the legislative failure to properly define cooperatives,(3) the policy failure to properly define cooperatives objectives (4) the absence of state regulation of cooperatives or self- regulation by the cooperatives themselves. Cooperatives could easily be categorized if they have specified objectives that match with their historical not-for-profit objectives. Historically, they were intended to solve problems left unsolved by market forces or state intervention or even the charities. Currently, it is the issue of trust that remains unsolved by these alternatives. Although trust is a foundation of any society, it is an attribute which is in decline due to changing nature of community. Consumer cooperatives are viable alternatives of reviving trust by rebuilding traditional communities in a contemporary world. This argument is advanced by reviewing academic writings and critically analyzing the Cooperative Society Proclamation No. 147/1998 in comparison to the Commercial Code of Ethiopia. This is further followed by critical examination of policy documents of the Federal Government of Ethiopia concerning cooperatives. The actual motives and practical regulation of Ethiopian Cooperatives are evaluated on the basis of interviews. Academic literature is used to review the importance of trust and the role of the cooperative in safeguarding and rebuilding it.

The study develops two significant arguments in relation to Pakistan’s socio-legal situation and analysis. First, it outlines and discusses the various prominent facets of the country’s legal architecture to formulate and present, what the thesis terms as, Pakistan’s Socio-Legal Tapestry. It considers the historical and conceptual trajectories of some of the multiple legal and normative structures that prevail in the country, their interplay and encounters, as well as their limitations and problems. It puts this socio-legal architecture at the heart of the examination, and by making the different constituents of the legal terrain explicit – components that include common law, Islamic law, colonial law, traditional law, legal ‘exteriority’ of tribal regions, and issues of ‘lawlessness’ – it makes the case for a holistic understanding of law as the necessary prerequisite to understanding the difficulties that that the country’s law, state and the wider society are faced with. The second significant argument of the study emerges from this expansion of the subject matter of (socio)legal analysis. It is argued that a shift in the understanding of what constitutes law in the context of Pakistan logically leads towards a (re)consideration of the lenses and narratives generally employed to examine it. The identification, examination and problematisation of these narratives – which include the dominant state-oriented legal narrative and the legal positivistic approach, the Islamic law narrative, legal pluralistic approach and the ascendant discourse on human rights – formulate the second substantive part of the study. It is argued that these Narratives of law differ in terms of how they perceive the context, identify their priorities, frame the problems and then propose solutions for their rectification. However, caught in a struggle to maintain their definitional consistencies, these narratives are only able to adopt a partial view of the picture and, owing to that, they generate contradictions that ultimately weaken their approach and proposed solutions. The purpose behind these two arguments is both to make a case for new avenues of context-specific legal analysis, as well as to create possibilities for it in the case of Pakistan. The problems that the country faces and the suffering that its people experience create an urgent need to recognise the deficiencies, both in our conceptualisation of law in this particular context, as well as the narratives, perspectives, theories and ideologies that we employ to approach it. This necessitates the search for alternative narratives for comprehending Pakistan’s socio-legal situation, to offer more nuanced approaches that might enable us to frame issues differently. This, I argue, is the most pressing task for those engaged in the analyses of legal, social and political spheres of Pakistan, and the necessary first step if our goal is the (re)formation of the legal and normative orders to make them more accountable to the people. By adopting the framework of colonialism and Coloniality to offer a different lens to understand Pakistan’s socio-legal peculiarities, the study presents one such attempt in this vein, with the purpose of initiating discussion and inviting critique.

Through analysis based on an empirical study of the Chinese criminal process, this thesis examines the underlying reasons that lead to a striking feature of criminal trials in China---the absence of witnesses. The Chinese criminal justice system routinely relies on official written dossiers to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused. To investigate whether the constructed written evidence is truly reliable, participant observation and semi-structured interviews have been conducted to explore how these investigative dossiers are created, scrutinised and utilised at different stages of the criminal process. Themes that emerge in this study include the police's manipulation and fabrication of written statements, prosecutors' acceptance of, and even encouragement of, police malpractice in falsifying evidence, coerced prosecutorial interrogation in pursuit of a guilty plea, the pro forma trial process, predetermined judicial outcomes based on the official dossier produced and marginalised defence practice throughout the criminal process. Approaching the enquiry from an internal perspective of the legal institutions for the first time within empirical research, this study outlines the key issues with the Chinese criminal justice system through examination of the strategic inter-relationships between the key legal actors, the deep-seated legal culture embedded in legal actions and the structural injustices that follow. Positioning these findings within the Chinese socio-political context, this study reveals that the criminal justice system in China is not a precise truth-finding process, but serves as a State apparatus of social control. The criminal justice system has been structured through the Appraisal System, bureaucratic management, and the central value of collectivism in such a way as to maintain the stability of the authoritarian regime. None of China’s criminal justice institutions are capable of functioning independently to protect innocent individuals from being wrongly accused and convicted. Thus, wrongful convictions should not be seen as aberrational or exceptional, but as an inevitable outcome of established deficiencies.

This thesis examines the impact of structural reform strategies of International Financial Institutions (IFIs) on the rule of law, good governance and development in Pakistan. In doing so, it explores the extent to which the ethos and instruments of rule of law and good governance could be helpful in mitigating problems of social justice as experienced by Pakistan. One important outlet through which this is explored is the internal factors that have aggravated conditions of poverty and social injustice. The interface of these social variables is made possible by the scale of Pakistan’s social challenges which has culminated in the involvement of IFIs in the country’s internal struggles. But like other countries, the IFIs involvement in Pakistan’s domestic affairs has aggravated social injustice rather than alleviating it. The principal argument of this thesis is that absence of social justice in Pakistan could be attributed to the interaction between IFI policies, weak structures of governance and the rule of law. While IFIs policies have recently attempted to emphasise human rights, good governance and the rule of law, these have been ineffective partly because of IFI submissiveness to strategic interests of the United States and Western powers. The theoretical and analytic framework of the thesis is mediated through Amartya Sen’s capability approach. Capability means: What people can positively achieve is influenced by economic opportunities, political liberties, social powers, and the enabling conditions of good health, basic education, and the encouragement and cultivation of initiatives. The institutional arrangements for these opportunities are also influenced by the exercise of people’s freedoms, through the liberty to participate in social choice and in the making of public decisions that impel the progress of these opportunities (Sen, 1999:5). The theoretical framework is used as the frame upon which to engage the impact of Structural Reform Strategies of IFIs on the rule of law, good governance and development in Pakistan as the case study.

Mustelids, members of the weasel family, are the most species rich and ecologically diverse family within the order Carnivora. However, fossil mustelids are poorly understood due to their rarity in the fossil record. Fossils of “Eurasian” badgers in particular, subfamily Melinae, only include three stem and two crown genera: Arctomeles, Arctonyx, Ferinestrix, Meles, and Melodon. Today, melines are restricted to the Old World, but fossils of stem taxa have also been discovered in North America. Here, I discuss the occurrence of the fossil meline Arctomeles dimolodontus currently known only from the Gray Fossil Site of East Tennessee, USA, and its phylogenetic position within stem Melinae. A total of 34 dental characters across 8 taxa were selected because some taxa, such as Arctomeles sotnikovae and Ferinestrix vorax, are known only from teeth (or cranial fragments). A search of all possible trees using PAUP (set for maximum parsimony) yielded a single most parsimonious tree. Topology of that tree suggests that Ferinestrix is nested within crown group Melinae, rather than the stem group, and is the sister to extant Arctonyx, the hog badger. Results also suggest that Arctomeles sotnikovae does not group within the monophyletic clade formed by A. dimolodontus and A. pliocaenicus, but instead nests A. sotnikovae as a closely related, but separate, lineage to Melodon. Based on these findings, we propose that the ancestral stock of crown Melinae is more closely related to Arctomeles than Meles as previous research has suggested. Furthermore, the dental morphology within stem Melinae is relatively conservative for a generalized diet, although exceptions exist in some derived forms, such as Arctonyx and Ferinestrix, which may explain why PAUP nested the two as sister taxa. Arctonyx is an exclusively Old-World lineage, so it is likely that the Arctonyx-Ferinestrix clade had an Old-World origin, after which Ferinestrix migrated into North America and Arctonyx remained in the Old World. This begs the question: why do some melines migrate into North America while other contemporary forms do not? All stem meline genera have occurrences from Eurasia, yet only Arctomeles and Ferinestrix are known to have migrated into North America. This is likely because of the environmental constraints on where these different genera can live, but much remains unknown about the ecology of fossil melines to know for certain. Further study of this disparity can lead to a greater understanding of how the earth’s climate has changed since the Neogene and how this change impacts flora and fauna.

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Why do warring parties sometimes end up occupying territories they do not claim while not occupying territory they do? How do they explain this and how can we, from this explanation, understand the logic of occupation at work in these cases? This is the puzzle and the research questions at the center of this thesis. Using a case study of the Karabakh War (1991-94) it seeks to understand the rationale behind the Armenian occupation of previously undisputed Azerbaijani-populated territories around the contested entity of Nagorno Karabakh (NK). To achieve this objective the thesis considers one of these districts – Agdam – and contrasts its occupation to the lack of a concerted effort to return control over previously Armenian-populated district of Shaumyan, a territory Armenians view as under Azerbaijani occupation. The thesis presents the circumstances and rationales provided by the Armenian leaders for these counter-intuitive policies of occupation they pursued during the Karabakh war. This necessitates examining the prior meanings of these places, the contested and changed significance of Agdam and Shaumyan since the Karabakh war. There are five distinct explanatory accounts of logics of occupation. These are accounts based on 1) military/security needs; 2) political elite-driven decisions, 3) economic gain, 4) psychological and 5) identity-related factors. Process tracing and archival research points to primarily security and psychological rationales for the original actions, whereas economic gain played a secondary role. While these factors remain significant in justifying continued occupation, today they are also strongly augmented by newly-constructed identity markers and political elite-driven considerations. / Master of Public and International Affairs