Development International Law – Part 11

Penetrating the Zombie Collective: Spam as an International Security Issue
Andrea M. Matwyshyn
SCRIPTed: a Journal of Law, Technology & Society
Volume 3, Issue 4, December 2006 p.370-388

Since the mid 1990’s, spam has been legally analyzed primarily as an issue of balancing commercial speech with consumers’ privacy. This calculus must now be revised. The possible deleterious consequences of a piece of spam go beyond inconvenient speech and privacy invasion; spam variants such as phishing and “malspam”(spam that exploits security vulnerabilities) now result in large-scale identity theft and remote compromise of user machines. The severity of the spam problem requires analyzing spam foremost as an International Security issue, expanding the debate to include the dynamic impact of spam on individual countries’ economies and the international system as a whole. Spam creation is becoming a flourishing competitive international industry, generating a new race to the bottom that will continue to escalate. Although the majority of spammers reside in the United States and a majority of spam appears to originate in the U.S., spam production is being increasingly outsourced to other countries by U.S. spammers. Similarly, as U.S. authorities begin to prosecute, spammers are moving offshore to less regulated countries. Therefore, spam presents an international security collective action problem requiring legislative action throughout the international system. A paradigm shift on the national and international level is required to forge an effective international spam regulatory regime. Spam regulation should be contemplated in tandem with the development of data security legislation and closing pre-existing doctrinal gaps in contract, computer crime and jurisdiction law, harmonizing all these bodies of law simultaneously across the international system to form a coherent international data control regime.

ADJUDICATING THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC RIGHTS IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONSTITUTION: TOWARDS ‘DEFERENCE LITE’?
DM Davis
South African Journal on Human Rights
Volume 22, Part 2, 2006 p.301

The record of adjudicating the socio-economic rights in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 reveals a judicial and academic retreat into Administrative law and the occasional, mechanistic application of international law. The Constitutional Court has been reluctant to impose additional policy burdens on government or exercise supervision over the executive. This approach has its source not only in the restrictive legal repertoire employed by the Court, but also in the political and economic context in which current legal practice is located. The Constitution invites a transformation of Legal concepts . This requires breaking down the division between negative and positive rights, in addition to the adoption of different remedies. The focus should move from ss 26, 27 and 28 of the Constitution towards the distributional implications of all constitutional rights. There is already a small but significant body of decisions of the Court which support the development of more fused conception of rights, including the recognition that the concept of legality may impose positive obligations on the state.

Agricultural Genetic Engineering, International Law and Development
Philippe Cullet
Indian Journal of International Law
Volume 46, Number 3, July-September 2006 p.388

Nico Schrijver et Friedl Weiss, dir., International Law and Sustainable Development : Principles and Practice, Leiden, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2004
Jean-Frédéric Morin
Revue québécoise de droit international
Volume 17, Number 2, 2004

What Caused The Multiplicity Of International Courts And Tribunals?
Firew Kebede Tiba
Gonzaga Journal of International Law
Volume 10, Issue 2, 2006-2007

The proliferation of international courts and tribunals alias, the multiplicity of international judicial forums, is one of the topical issues in international law. This development in the realm of international dispute settlement comes, according to Phillipe Sands, at the fourth phase in the development of international adjudication. International disputes prior to 1899 were adjudicated almost exclusively between States, with some exceptions.

Author: international

Mentioned in these Entries

Administrative law, Development International Law, International Security, Legal concepts.