<p>This paper analyses head of state immunity, a traditional rule of international law, in relation to the indictments by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2009 against the current Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir. It can be agreed that the doctrine of immunity in international law attempts to overcome the tension between the protection of human rights and the demands of state sovereignty. The statutes and decisions of international criminal courts make it clear that no immunity for international crimes shall be attached to heads of states or to senior government officials. However, the case against the Sudanese President, where the jurisdiction of the ICC was triggered by the UN Security Council‟s referral of the situation in Darfur to the Court, represents the first case where a serving head of state has, in fact, been indicted before the ICC. From this case, a number of legal issues have arisen / such as the questions where the ICC‟s jurisdiction over an incumbent head of state, not party to the ICC Statute, is justified, and the obligations upon ICC state parties to surrender such a head of state to the requesting international criminal court. This paper gives an analysis of these questions.</p>

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

Joseph Raz has developed a concept of authority based on the special relationship between reasons and action. While the view is very complex and subtle, it can be summed up by saying that authorities are authorities insofar as they can mediate between the reasons that happen to bind their subjects and the subjects’ actions. Authorities do this by providing special reasons via directives to their subjects. These special reasons are what Raz calls “protected reasons.” Protected reasons are both first-order reasons for action and second-order “exclusionary reasons” that exclude the subject from considering some reasons in the balance of reasons for or against any action. I first make clear what Raz’s view of authority is, and I then defend this view from some contemporary critics.

Incomplete markets provide many challenges for both investment decisions and valuation problems. While both problems have received extensive attention in complete markets, there remain many open areas in the theory of incomplete markets. We present the results in three parts. In the first essay we consider the Merton investment problem of optimal portfolio choice when the traded instruments are the set of zero-coupon bonds. Working within a Markovian Heath-Jarrow-Morton framework of the interest rate term structure driven by an infinite dimensional Wiener process, we give sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of an optimal investment strategy. When there is uniqueness, we provide a characterization of the optimal portfolio. Furthermore, we show that a specific Gauss-Markov random field model can be treated within this framework, and explicitly calculate the optimal portfolio. We show that the optimal portfolio in this case can be identified with the discontinuities of a certain function of the market parameters. In the second essay we price a claim, using the indifference valuation methodology, in the model presented in the first section. We appeal to the indifference pricing framework instead of the classic Black-Scholes method due to the natural incompleteness in such a market model. Because we price time-sensitive interest rate claims, the units in which we price are very important. This will require us to take care in formulating the investor’s utility function in terms of the units in which we express the wealth function. This leads to new results, namely a general change-of-numeraire theorem in incomplete markets via indifference pricing. Lastly, in the third essay, we propose a method to price credit derivatives, namely collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) using indifference. We develop a numerical algorithm for pricing such CDOs. The high illiquidity of the CDO market coupled with the allowance of default in the underlying traded assets creates a very incomplete market. We explain the market-observed prices of such credit derivatives via the risk aversion of investors. In addition to a general algorithm, several approximation schemes are proposed. / text

<p>The thesis firstly looks at how women&rsquo / s right to freedom from violence has developed in international (global) human rights law since the early 1990s. In this regard, the study finds that while the issue of violence against women (and women&rsquo / s rights generally) was barely on the international human rights agenda at the beginning of this period, an enormous degree of development has subsequently taken place. Through the adoption of documents such as General Recommendation No. 19 by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, the Declaration on Elimination of Violence against Women and the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action, international norms and standards were set regarding role of the State in providing women with protection against violence.</p>

<p>This paper analyses head of state immunity, a traditional rule of international law, in relation to the indictments by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2009 against the current Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir. It can be agreed that the doctrine of immunity in international law attempts to overcome the tension between the protection of human rights and the demands of state sovereignty. The statutes and decisions of international criminal courts make it clear that no immunity for international crimes shall be attached to heads of states or to senior government officials. However, the case against the Sudanese President, where the jurisdiction of the ICC was triggered by the UN Security Council‟s referral of the situation in Darfur to the Court, represents the first case where a serving head of state has, in fact, been indicted before the ICC. From this case, a number of legal issues have arisen / such as the questions where the ICC‟s jurisdiction over an incumbent head of state, not party to the ICC Statute, is justified, and the obligations upon ICC state parties to surrender such a head of state to the requesting international criminal court. This paper gives an analysis of these questions.</p>

L'étude des aliments en droit privé consiste, à analyser les diverses implications juridiques de cette notion. Dans le langage courant les aliments renvoient à la nourriture. Dans certaines branches du droit privé telles que le droit commercial ou le droit de la consommation, on retrouve la première acception. En droit de la famille, elle présente une spécificité car utilisée à la forme plurielle les " aliments " recouvrent tout ce qui est nécessaire à la vie. Il s'agit d'une définition générale, les aliments sont conçus comme étant le minimum essentiel à la subsistance. Dans la mesure où il n'existe pas de liste définie des éléments nécessaires à la vie, cette thèse tend à rechercher des critères de qualification juridique des aliments, à analyser les moyens d'acquisition de ceux-ci. Ceci révèle une notion polysémique et protéiforme selon la nature des besoins. De même, les obligations alimentaires instaurées par le législateur entre certains proches d'une part et une solidarité collective d'autre part, permettant à celui qui est dans le besoin d'acquérir des aliments, sont caractérisées par un régime juridique, particulièrement dérogatoire du droit commun. Cela démontre que sous l'apparente simplification de la notion d'aliments, il se cache un concept juridique permettant d'assurer une vie convenable aux proches et aux personnes dans le besoin dans le cadre de la solidarité collective.

Les contrats civils appliqués aux actions ont pour finalité le transfert, souvent provisoire, des différents droits politiques et financiers inhérents à ces titres : les droits politiques convoités sont le droit de vote et la qualité d'actionnaire afin de devenir administrateur, si les statuts l'imposent ; les droits financiers permettent quant à eux de transmettre l'entreprise et d'utiliser les actions comme garantie. Pour opérer ces transferts, les praticiens utilisent des contrats classiques, souvent issus du Code civil, mais aussi des contrats d'inspiration civiliste qui emploient des techniques civilistes, leur empruntent une partie de leurs régimes juridiques et poursuivent les mêmes finalités. Toutefois, ces contrats ne donnent pas entière satisfaction : les uns ont un régime juridique souple mais n'offrent pas une sécurité juridique suffisante ; les autres sont au contraire fiables mais affligés d'un régime juridique contraignant. Le législateur, en instituant la fiducie, pouvait remédier à ces inconvénients. Mais si la fiducie offre une grande sécurité juridique, c'est toujours au détriment de la liberté contractuelle. Une nouvelle réforme de la fiducie est donc indispensable.

University, Diss--Köln, 2005.