During the spring of 2014 two midwives in Sweden were denied work because they refused to perform abortion on the grounds of their religious beliefs. Shortly after the health authorities were sued for discrimination. The purpose of this study is to examine whether there should be room for exemptions based on one’s conscience in a neutral liberal state. This essay applies Cécile Labordes theory of individual exceptions and liberal justices on the midwives’ case in Sweden to perform this purpose. Should, or could, they have been exempted from performing abortion and thus be allowed to work as midwives? This essay’s analysis demonstrates that the current case is not compatible with justice and there is thus no room for exemptions on a national level. However, there should be space for exemptions for cases that are compatible with justice, in order for all citizens in a pluralistic society to live in accordance with their own conception of the good.

O tema proposto para o presente estudo gravitou ao redor da relação arbitragem e execução no direito brasileiro. A primeira parte dedicou-se ao estudo da arbitragem e da convenção de arbitragem e da sentença arbitral, de modo a situar o tema, destacando as principais características que acabam por refletir no tema da execução. Após, foi analisada a execução da sentença arbitral, nacional e estrangeira, bem como a possibilidade de ser proferida a sentença arbitral parcial e como se dá sua execução. Ademais, verificou-se a necessidade de prévia homologação da sentença arbitral estrangeira para que possa ser executada no país. Ato contínuo, demonstrou-se a execução de medidas liminares concedidas pelo árbitro e a possibilidade do árbitro determinar medidas de apoio de natureza coercitiva. Também, analisou-se a sentença arbitral ilíquida e a necessidade do procedimento de liquidação antes de sua execução perante o Poder Judiciário. Em um terceiro momento dedicou-se a análise dos meios de defesa do executado na execução da sentença arbitral e demais formas de impugnação desta, notadamente a ação anulatória. Verificou-se a possibilidade de a impugnação ser utilizada como meio de anulação da sentença, desde que respeitado o prazo decadencial de noventa dias estabelecido na lei, o que também é aplicado no caso de execução de sentença parcial. Posteriormente, analisouse a execução do título executivo extrajudicial em que foi previsto convenção de arbitragem, concluindo-se pela impossibilidade do uso dos embargos do devedor para discussão do mérito e a necessidade de instauração da arbitragem. / The theme proposed for this study revolves around the relationship between arbitration and enforcement under Brazilian law. The first part was dedicated to the study of arbitration and arbitration agreements and of arbitral awards, so as to set the bases for this dissertation, highlighting the main characteristics that eventually have reflections in enforcement. Afterwards, the enforcement of national and foreign arbitral awards was analysed, along with the possibility of rendering partial awards and how their enforcement is carried out. Furthermore, the necessity of recognising a foreign award prior to its enforcement in Brazil was acknowledged. Subsequently, the enforcement of preliminary measures granted by arbitrators and the possibility of an arbitrator granting coercive and supportive measures were demonstrated. In addition to that, awards passed with no fixed amount and the necessity of the fixation of such amount prior to their enforcement in court were analysed. In its third stage, this dissertation was dedicated to reviewing defence mechanisms for the debtor in proceedings for the enforcement of arbitral awards and further objections thereto, namely the motion to set aside arbitral award. The possibility of the objection to enforcement be utilised as a setting aside mechanism was confirmed, as long as the limitation period of ninety days set forth in law is observed, which is also applied to the enforcement of partial awards. Eventually, the enforcement of extrajudicial deeds in which an arbitration clause is inserted was analysed, and the conclusion was that the filing of a motion to stay enforcement in order to discuss the merits of the case was found to be inadmissible, as in that scenario, initiating arbitral proceedings is necessary.

De plus en plus soulevées, les exceptions préliminaires sont devenues aujourd’hui une institution classique du procès CIRDI. Leur utilisation croissante par les acteurs contentieux, et les multiples enjeux qu’elles recèlent, invitent résolument à s’interroger sur l’existence d’un réel régime juridique qui les encadre et, partant, qui permettrait de garantir un certain degré de prévisibilité. A cet égard, le volet procédural de l’exception renferme maints éléments problématiques. Certains sont liés à la mise en œuvre, d’autres au moment de l’introduction de l’exception. Ainsi, d’une part, cette étude s’intéressera aux motivations réelles derrière la consécration de la faculté de les soulever et aux acteurs contentieux qui en ont accès. D’autre part, ce mémoire se focalisera sur la réalité de l’exigence d’introduction in limine litis pour mieux cerner les dérogations fréquentes ainsi que la souplesse exagérée dont elle fait l’objet. Quant au volet substantiel, nous nous interrogerons sur l’objet de l’exception tant du point de vue de la qualification que du point de vue de la délimitation. Plus précisément, nous aborderons la question de la distinction entre compétence et recevabilité. Pourquoi cette distinction et tantôt observée, tantôt complètement ignorée par les parties au procès. Quel impact pourrait avoir une telle distinction sur le résultat escompté ? De même, nous nous nous interrogerons sur l’extension fréquente, parfois abusive, du champ de la compétence ou de la recevabilité afin de mieux appréhender les contours de l’objet, l’usage qu’en font les Tribunaux CIRDI et les raisons derrière un tel phénomène. / Increasingly used, preliminary objections have now become a traditional institution of ICSID proceedings. The increasing use by litigation actors raises many questions about the reality of their treatment. In particular, it raises questions about the existence of a consistent set of rules that would framework their use and, hence, ensure a certain degree of predictability. In this regard, the procedural aspect of the objections includes many problematic elements. Some are linked to the implementation of the objection, others to the introduction timing. Thus, on the one hand, this research will focus on the real incentives behind the consecration of the right to raise them and who has access to that right. On the other hand, this research will focus on the actuality of the condition to introduce them in limine litis and try to explain the frequent exceptions, and exaggerated flexibility, in the arbitral practice regarding this condition. As to the substantive aspect, we will inquire about the purpose of the objection from both qualification and delimitation point of views. Specifically, we will address the issue of the distinction between jurisdiction and admissibility. Why this distinction is sometimes considered and sometimes completely ignored by the parties to the proceedings. What impact might such a distinction have on the final outcome? Similarly, we will question the frequent extension, sometimes even abusive, of the scope of jurisdiction or admissibility by the ICSID Tribunals to help better understand the borders of the objections substance and the reasons behind such a phenomenon.

It is important that the story of organisations like the End Conscription Campaign be recorded. The narrative of the struggle against apartheid has become a site of contestation. As the downfall of apartheid is still a relatively recent event, the history is still in the process of formation. There is much contestation over the relative contributions of different groups within the struggle. This is an important debate as it informs and shapes the politics of the present. A new official narrative is emerging which accentuates the role of particular groupings, portraying them as the heroes and the leaders of the struggle. A new elite have laid exclusive claim to the heritage of the struggle and are using this narrative to justify their hold on power through the creation of highly centralised political structures in which positions of power are reserved for loyal cadres and independent thinking and questioning are seen as a threat. A complementary tradition of grassroots democracy, of open debate and transparency, of “people’s power”, of accountability of leadership to the people fostered in the struggle is being lost. It is important to contest this narrative. We need to remember that the downfall of apartheid was brought about by a myriad combination of factors and forces. Current academic interpretations emphasize that no one group or organisation, no matter how significant its contribution, was solely responsible. There was no military victory or other decisive event which brought the collapse of the system, rather a sapping of will to pay the ever increasing cost to maintain it. The struggle against apartheid involved a groundswell, popular uprising in which the initiative came not from centralised political structures, orchestrating a grand revolt, but from ordinary South Africans who were reacting to the oppressive nature of a brutally discriminatory system which sought to control every aspect of their lives.4 Leaders and structures emerged organically as communities organised themselves around issues that affected them. Organisations that emerged were highly democratic and accountable to their members. There was no grand plan or centralised control of the process. As Walter Benjamin warned in a different context, but applicable here: “All rulers are the heirs of those who have conquered before them.” He feared that what he referred to as a historicist view constructed a version of history as a triumphal parade of progress. “Whoever has emerged victorious” he reminds us “participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice the spoils are carried along in the procession.” 5 He was warning of just such a tendency, which has been repeated so often in the past, for the victors to construct a version of history which ends up justifying a new tyranny. To counter this tendency it is important that other histories of the struggle are told – that the stories of other groups, which are marginalised by the new hegemonic discourse, are recorded.This aim of this dissertation is thus two-fold. Firstly it aims to investigate “the story” of the End Conscription Campaign, which has largely been seen as a white anti-apartheid liberal organisation. The objective is to provide a detailed historical account and periodisation of the organisation to fill in the gaps and challenge the distortions of a new emerging “official” discourse.Secondly within this framework, and by using the activities and strategies of the organisation as evidence for its suppositions, the question of the role played by the ECC in the struggle.

Doctors' Right to Withhold Medical Care Abstract Very little attention is being paid to the rights doctors have to refuse to provide medical care, notwithstanding how important this area of interest is. It is not the aim of this thesis to provide a superficial description of fundamental grounds for withholding treatment. Its primary purpose is to present an analysis of the issues that are of most concern. To this end, the key concepts closely examined are conscientious objection and religious beliefs, as these constitute the subject of frequent interpretative, judicial and ethical disputes. A chapter in this thesis is also dedicated to refusal to provide healthcare based on a risk to the life or body of the health professional. All of the other reasons for not providing medical care or for ending it are briefly discussed within the context of the so-called contractual obligation of healthcare providers. Conscientious objection and religious beliefs are most often viewed from the perspective of public law. Nevertheless, in this thesis the two concepts are presented mainly in the light of private and civil law. A short philosophical and ethical analysis of the two concepts is followed by an extensive legal analysis. The theoretical part of the thesis concentrates on related statutory regulation and the...

Conscientious objection to military service is a widely studied subject in many fields, peace and conflict studies included. The military institution has been an integral part of Israeli society and culture since its inception. However, what happens when you resist not only military service but also significant norms of society? This study explores the experiences of conscientious objectors in Israel with seven semi-structured interviews to understand how it affects their feeling of belonging and rejection within society. By using a thematic analysis and applying an analytical framework consisting of three notions; citizenship, discipline, and redefinition of citizenship, this study seeks to understand the power dynamics in society that shapes their experience of resisting military service. This study argues that conscientious objectors are deviating from the norms and, therefore, are experiencing various forms of discipline that consequently affects their sense of belonging and rejection within Israeli society. It also finds that the objectors themselves are rejecting the hegemonic attitudes of Israeli society which in turn leads them to redefining their belonging and notion of citizenship. This study contributes to the understanding of the intersections between citizenship, military service, and individual conscience.

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This dissertation consists of three essays in theoretical and applied microeconomics: the first essay is in cooperative game theory, and the second and third essays relate to forest economics. The first chapter studies a class of cooperative games dubbed ``r-essential games''. Cooperative game theory has proposed different notions of powerful players. For example, big-boss games (Muto et al., 1988) and clan games (Potters et al., 1989) are particular cases of veto games (Bahel, 2016). The first chapter extends these veto games by assuming that there is a given subset of powerful (or essential) players, but only a few (as opposed to all) essential players are required for a coalition to have a positive value. The resulting games, which are called r-essential games, encompass convex games (Shapley, 1971) and veto games. We show that r-essential games have a nonempty core. We give a recursive description of the core. Moreover, it is shown that the core and the bargaining set are equivalent for every r-essential game. An application to networks is provided. The second chapter employs a two-principal, one-agent model to estimate the social cost of fiscal federalism in China's northeast native forests. China's key forested region is located in the northeast and consists of state forest enterprises which manage forest harvesting and reforestation. Deforestation is a major problem there and has resulted in several central government reforms. We develop a framework for assessing the social cost of state forest enterprise deforestation. We first develop a two-principal, one-agent model that fits the federalistic organization of state forests, in that state forest managers make (potentially hidden) decisions under influence of provincial and central government policies. This model is used to quantify the social cost of these hidden actions. We then use panel data from a survey conducted by Peking University to compute social welfare losses and to formally identify the main factors in these costs. A sensitivity analysis shows that, interestingly, command and control through lower harvesting limits and a more accurate monitoring system are more important to lowering social welfare losses than conventional incentives targeting the wages of forest managers. Through regression analysis we also find that the more remote areas with a higher percentage of mature natural forests are the ones that will always have the highest social welfare losses. The third chapter studies the problem of choosing a rotation under uncertain future ecosystem values and timber prices. This problem is nearly as old as the field of forest economics itself. A forest owner faces various uncertainties caused by climate change and market shocks, due to its long-term nature of production and the joint production of interrelated timber and amenity (non-harvesting) benefit streams. The vast literature in stochastic rotation problems simply assumes a known probability distribution for whatever parameter is uncertain, but this type of assumption may lead to misspecification of a rotation decision model if a forest owner has no such information. We study a more relevant question of how to choose rotation ages when there is pure (or Knightian) uncertainty, in that the forest owner does not know distributional features of parameters and further can be averse to this type of information deficit. This chapter is the first to investigate pure uncertainty in amenity benefit streams and is also the first to analytically solve a stochastic rotation problem under pure uncertainty in either amenity streams or market prices. We use robust methods developed in macroeconomics that are particularly suited to forest capital investment problem, but with important differences owing to the nature of forest goods production. The results show that newer models suggesting rotation ages could be longer under volatile parameter distributions do not hold generally when pure uncertainty and forest owner uncertainty aversion is considered. Rather, the earlier literature showing faster or greater harvesting with increases in risk under risk neutrality may actually be a more general result than current literature supposes. In particular, we find that a landowner tends to harvest more when his degree of uncertainty aversion is higher and the model is misspecified by assumption, or when the volatility of an uncertain process is higher. These situations tend to magnify model misspecification costs, especially because the forest manager always assumes the worst case will happen when there is uncertainty. This implies the decision maker is pessimistic in the sense that he or she is always trying to maximize the utility under the worst possible state of nature (the lowest amenity benefit or the lowest timber price). Whether landowners are in fact uncertainty averse and assume the worst case in their decisions remains to be empirically investigated, but our work suggests it is an important question that must be answered. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation consists of three essays in theoretical and applied microeconomics: the first essay is in cooperative game theory, and the second and third essays relate to forest economics. The first chapter studies a class of cooperative games dubbed ``r-essential games''. Cooperative game theory has proposed different notions of powerful players. For example, veto games (Bahel, 2016) have powerful players that are named veto players. Any coalition needs to include all these powerful players to achieve a positive coalition value. The first chapter extends these veto games by assuming that there is a given subset of powerful (or essential) players, but only a few (as opposed to all) essential players are required for a coalition to have a positive value. The resulting games, which are called r-essential games, encompass two classic games, convex games (Shapley, 1971) and veto games. We show that each r-essential game has at least one solution that is an allocation guaranteeing that no coalition can do better on its own. We provide a process allowing to compute this allocation in each r-essential game. An application to networks is provided. The second chapter estimates the damage of deforestation in China's northeast forests. This region consists of state forest enterprises which manage harvesting and reforestation and have represented the most important source of wood supplies since the 1950s. Deforestation is a major problem there. We develop a framework for assessing the damage to the society because of deforestation. We develop a theoretical model to describe the forest management structure, in which state forest managers make (potentially hidden) decisions under influence of provincial and central government policies. This model is used to quantify the damage. We then use data from a survey conducted by Peking University to compute the damage and confirm the main factors in these damages in practice. We find that lower harvesting limits and a more accurate monitoring system are the keys to lowering the damage. These are more important than conventional instruments used by the governments such as the wages for managers that achieve certain targets. We also find that the remote areas with a higher percentage of mature natural forests are the ones that will always have the largest damage. These areas are the hardest to monitor, but our results show they must be a critical focus moving forward. The third chapter studies when should a forest owner harvest under uncertain future ecosystem values and timber prices. A forest owner faces various uncertainties caused by climate change and market shocks, due to its long-term nature of production and the joint production of interrelated timber and non-harvesting benefit streams (such as the recreation value, the biodiversity value and the clean air supported by forests). Previous studies assume a known probability distribution for whatever parameter is uncertain, but this type of assumption may lead to a wrong decision model if a forest owner has no such information. We study a more relevant question of how to choose when to harvest with pure uncertainty, in that the forest owner does not know distributional features of parameters and further can be averse to this type of information deficit. This chapter is the first to investigate pure uncertainty and is also the first to analytically solve a harvest decision making problem under pure uncertainty in either non-harvesting benefit streams or market prices. We use macroeconomics methods that are particularly suited to forest capital investment problem. We find that a landowner tends to harvest more when there is pure uncertainty. Because the forest manager is pessimistic and always thinks the worst case will happen when there is uncertainty.

[pt] Existe um conflito de direitos entre homossexuais e indivíduos que seguem religiões que pregam que a homossexualidade é contrária às leis divinas e que o casamento é uma união sagrada entre um homem e uma mulher. Esse conflito foi potencializado a partir da legalização do casamento homoafetivo. Por um lado, indivíduos homossexuais têm o direito à igualdade, o que significa que não devem ser discriminados por causa de sua orientação sexual; por outro lado, indivíduos religiosos têm a liberdade de crer em determinada religião e adotar condutas que estejam de acordo com suas crenças. Dentre as situações que podem gerar conflito, três são analisadas neste trabalho: a recusa de um indivíduo religioso a celebrar ou contribuir para uma cerimônia de casamento homoafetivo, com base na perspectiva religiosa sobre o conceito de casamento; a recusa por parte de um psicólogo a atender um paciente homossexual ou casal homoafetivo, sob o fundamento de que suas crenças religiosas o impedem de manifestar aprovação em relação à homossexualidade ou auxiliar uma união homoafetiva durante o atendimento; a recusa religiosamente motivada a fornecer produtos que manifestam apoio ao casamento homoafetivo ou alguma causa LGBT. Além do estudo de doutrina estrangeira sobre o tema, são examinadas dez decisões judiciais referentes a casos concretos ocorridos nos Estados Unidos, Reino Unido e Canadá, com o objetivo de auxiliar na elucidação de parâmetros claros para a melhor resolução da controvérsia em questão, ante a razoável expectativa de que, em breve, conflitos semelhantes surgirão no Brasil. / [en] There is a conflict of rights between homosexuals and individuals who follow religions that preach that homosexuality is contrary to the laws of God and marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman. This conflict was intensified after the legalization of same-sex marriage. On the one hand, homosexual individuals have the right to equality, which means they must not be discriminated on basis of sexual orientation; on the other hand, religious individuals have the right to believe in a religion and act according to their beliefs. This paper will examine three situations that might cause conflict: the refusal to celebrate or contribute to a same-sex wedding, because of one s religious views on marriage; the refusal to assist a homosexual patient or a same-sex couple, by a psychologist or counselor whose religious beliefs prevent them from affirming homosexuality or assisting a same-sex union; the religiously motivated refusal to print materials that promote same-sex marriage or other LGBT interests. This dissertation will look at foreign studies on the matter, and will examine ten judicial decisions on cases that occurred in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, in order to help create clear parameters to resolve the controversy, which is likely to soon arise in Brazil.