CYPRUS JUSTICE FACES 'SERIOUS EFFICIENCY CHALLENGES' SAYS EU

 Cyprus Mail 30 September 2020 - by Jean Christou

The EU’s first-ever report cards for member states, the Rule of Law Reports, issued on Wednesday, honed in on justice reforms in Cyprus, saying the system was experiencing serious efficiency challenges and a nearly complete lack of digitalisation but overall the island appeared to receive a decent ‘pass mark’.

The Commission has described the reports as “a new preventive tool”.

The aim is to look at key developments across the EU – positive and negative – as well as the specific situation in each member state to identify possible problems in relation to the rule of law as early as possible, as well as best practices. “It is not a sanctioning mechanism,” the Commission said, and does not make recommendations to member states.

Areas covered by the report include justice systems, anti-corruption frameworks, media pluralism and freedom, and other institutional issues linked to checks and balances.

However, a Reuters report on Tuesday said the report comes as the bloc is looking to link access to EU money, including a new €750 billion coronavirus recovery fund, to respecting the rule of law.

According to the individual country reports, the Cypriot justice system has been undergoing a number of structural changes and reforms since 2019 with the aim of overcoming important challenges as regards its efficiency and quality, in particular as regards digitalisation.

“The justice system is experiencing serious efficiency challenges,” the report said, and “a nearly complete lack of digitalisation” with no electronic information on case progress and no electronic case management system.

It said civil, commercial and administrative judicial proceedings remain very lengthy and the clearance of backlogs of delayed cases, which have accumulated in the courts, is a pressing task in the reform process.

There was also very limited information about the judicial system available for the general public, the report added.

Hence, the level of perceived judicial independence is average. Among the general public, 55 per cent consider judicial independence to be ‘fairly and very good’, a share that slightly decreased in 2020. The corresponding figure among companies is 48 per cent and has been decreasing in recent years.

The time needed to resolve civil, commercial and administrative cases in first instance courts (737 days in 2018, compared to 1,118 in 2017) still remains among the highest in the EU, the report said.

“In administrative justice, efficiency gains at first instance, reflected in a reduced length of proceedings (487 days in 2018 compared to 2,162 days in 2017) and higher clearance rates (around 219 per cent in 2018 compared to around 74 per cent in 2017),” it added.

However, very lengthy proceedings in the final instance (2,156 days in 2018) remain.

The report noted that an action plan to address these efficiency challenges has been adopted and its implementation is ongoing, “albeit with some delay”.

Reforms include the establishment of new specialised courts, the restructuring of the courts, the creation of a training school for judges, the revision of the rules of civil procedure and measures to address the backlog of cases. There is also a pending reform on the establishment of a Supreme Constitutional Court and of a High Court. Many of these reforms are still under discussion or are experiencing delay. A review of the Law Office is also ongoing with a view to enhancing its capacity, including separation of functions and recruitment procedures.

Elsewhere, Cyprus has made some progress in tackling and investigating corruption, including high-profile cases, the EU said. Key legislation for the prevention of corruption is still pending but lobbying and whistle-blower protection remain unregulated by law and an independent anti-corruption authority remains to be established.

While Codes of Conduct exist for members of the Government, public officials and prosecutors, but there are no similar provisions for the members of the House of Representatives. A code is currently being debated by MPs.

The report also notes that in Cyprus, freedom of expression and the right of access to information find legal and formal protection in the Constitution. Secondary legislation expressly protects the right of journalists to protect their sources and fosters media pluralism in the radio and television sector, it added. However, an issue of concern is that there is no framework guaranteeing ownership transparency in the written press and digital media sectors, which makes it difficult to identify and verify ultimate owners or crossownership in these sectors.

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Ellipsis

This is my last post as a guest blogger on Legal History Blog in September 2020. Thank you for engaging with me this past month.

In a report on a Muslim endowment known as a waqf in Penang, a scholar of Islamic law pointed out that certain paragraphs in a report quoting a translation of a will of a Peranakan (mixed Malay and Gujarati in this case) merchant in 1892 contained ellipsis, a series of three points with spaces between them which he took to mean that some part of the will had been deliberately removed. The translator told him that ellipsis punctuation marks were common in academic and legal writing and that parts of the will were omitted in the report as “it conveyed the same meaning.” Certainly, this is common form but did it really convey “the same meaning”? Any detail omitted would change the meaning of the text even if a little. Yet, ellipses are common in translations of legal documents. They are found all over Powers of Attorney, wills and codicils that I encountered in the colonial archives. Every layer of translation necessitated more ellipses in fact such that translations became progressively, and I must say, alarmingly, shorter. Ellipses is what interest me most. Not in the sense of what is hidden, but what is understood to be missing. How did groups of people across time and space come to understand what is not being said in law reports, and come to accept legal conventions regarding such deliberate omissions? When was the moment that particular words, formats and punctuation were understood to be code for something else? How was this knowledge transmitted, and to whom? Who gets to see the code, and who does not?

         One can see why ellipsis invoked this reaction. In 1892, Penang was part of the British colony known as the Straits Settlements. It is easy to ascribe sinister motives to a translation of a document that was originally produced during the British colonial period and whose translation in 2020 still subscribed to colonial legal norms. Already compromises to the institution of the waqf had kicked in with the English Common Law of Trusts, being denied perpetuity, a requirement according to Islamic law.    

While close to submitting my book manuscript last year which became Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia, I read Katharina Pistor’s The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. I came to realize that a lot of things that postcolonial nation-states inherited were not substantive laws necessarily, but rather laws that have been encoded in specific ways. These coded forms, including English law of trusts at the confluence of law and economics, had been applied to waqfs during the colonial period. A trust is a form of preemptive asset-shielding, Pistor writes. These codes are what prove to be resilient and useful through time. As cadres of legal practitioners painstakingly gained knowledge of legal codes, they understandably became more invested in preserving them. We come to rely on these legal experts who were able to decipher these established codes, much like how the translator in Penang in the middle of 2020 informed his colleague about the use of ellipsis as a norm of legal reporting while the latter was much more concerned with the Islamic law of waqfs which had been coded as a modified common law trust 128 years before in Penang.

The most interesting stories lie between the dots, historians might be tempted to suggest but the dots collectively encode so much information such that they are endowed with the capacity to protect and act in specific ways. In order to view the extent of this capacity, legal historians have to adopt a broad view across legal domains and jurisdictions to tell more unexpected stories.

 

Pistor, Katharina. The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

 

Nurfadzilah Yahaya

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Moore on Anti-Federalists and Implementing Article III

Tyler Moore, a 2011 graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center and a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Notre Dame, has posted Trimming the Least Dangerous Branch: the Anti-Federalists and the Implementation of Article III, which is forthcoming in the Tulsa Law Review:

The traditional narrative of events following the ratification debates has connected the Bill of Rights with the Anti-Federalists and the Judiciary and Process Acts of 1789 with the Federalists. Although the scholarly consensus has turned against the Bill of Rights part of this story, most scholars continue to portray the first Congress’s implementation of Article III as a victory for the Federalists. In this article, I trace the development of the Anti-Federalists’ theory of federal/state power and its application to the judiciary in an effort to show why the second part of the above narrative also has it wrong.

Here is the short version. Having adopted the same conception of federalism as an underappreciated faction of delegates at the Constitutional Convention, Anti-Federalist writers like “Brutus” argued that some mechanism was needed to prevent the states from being swallowed up by federal judicial overreach. Despite Alexander Hamilton’s attempts in Federalist Nos. 78-83 to downplay this danger and emphasize the necessity of a robust system of federal inferior courts with general “arising under” jurisdiction, it was the Anti-Federalists’ arguments that continued to resonate in the state ratifying conventions and beyond. Oliver Ellsworth, the Connecticut Federalist who was the primary draftsman of the Judiciary and Process Acts, had shown his sympathy with Brutus all along. And the bare bones, state-dependent inferior court structure he helped create is testimony to this sympathy. Like the Bill of Rights, then, the Anti-Federalists’ influence on the original federal judiciary was a vicarious one. But unlike the Bill of Rights, this victory tracked their theory of federalism and gave them a meaningful structural change that could protect the states against a national consolidation. 

--Dan Ernst

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Central Intelligence 2016 Dual Audio BluRay 480p 300MB 720p 1.1GB

 Central Intelligence 2016  Dual Audio BluRay    480p 300MB 720p 1.1GB 

   

 

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LIFE EXPECTANCY ACROSS EU REGIONS

 in-cyprus 30 September 2020 - by Maria Bitar

In 2018, the life expectancy of a newborn in the EU was 81.0 years according to data by Eurostat.

This figure was 5.5 years higher for women (83.7 years) than men (78.2 years).

Similarly, female life expectancy was higher than male life expectancy in every NUTS level 2 region with available data.

In 2018, the 10 regions in the EU with the highest levels of female life expectancy at birth were all located in Spain or France.

The Spanish capital region had the highest female life expectancy (88.1 years), while the top 10 regions were completed by six more Spanish regions and three French regions.

Some of the highest levels of male life expectancy at birth were recorded in northern and central Italy, with a peak of 82.7 years in Provincia Autonoma di Trento.

On average, a person aged 65 years living in the Comunidad de Madrid could expect to live a further 23.2 years.

In 2018, an EU resident who had survived to the age of 65 could expect to live, on average, a further 20.0 years.

The highest levels of life expectancy at this age were recorded in a band of regions running from northern Spain through much of western and southern France and into northern and central parts of Italy, as well as the north-western Greek region of Ipeiros.

In Cyprus, on average, a person aged 65 years could expect to live a further 20.5 years (19.1 for men and 21.8 for women), while the corresponding figure for Greece was a further 20.6 years (19.1 for men and 21.9 for women).

A more detailed analysis of NUTS level 2 regions reveals that in 2018, a person at the age of 65 living in the Comunidad de Madrid could expect to live a further 23.2 years on average, while the corresponding figure for Île de France was a further 23.0 years.

In contrast, life expectancy at 65 years was considerably lower in the vast majority of regions in eastern and Baltic Member States.

The lowest levels of life expectancy at 65 years were recorded in two Bulgarian regions — where a 65 year-old person could expect to live, on average, a further 15.7 years.

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WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 30 - CORONAVIRUS GLOBAL UPDATE

 in-cyprus 30 September 2020 - by Maria Bitar

World Bank President David Malpass said he was seeking board approval for a $12 billion coronavirus vaccine financing plan to help poor and developing countries secure vaccine doses, as part of the $160 billion coronavirus aid financing pledged by the bank.

EUROPE

* Italy is likely to extend a state of emergency to help keep the health crisis under control, a senior official said.

* Finland and Poland slapped new curfews on bars and restaurants, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the country would restrict the size of gatherings and fine people who flout tracking rules.

* Hundreds of junior Spanish doctors took to the streets of Barcelona to demand better working conditions as they struggle against a second wave of infections.

AMERICAS

* US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday she hoped to have a coronavirus aid deal with the White House this week, after speaking with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

* Walt Disney said on Tuesday it will lay off roughly 28,000 employees, mostly at its US theme parks, where attendance has been crushed by the pandemic, especially in California where Disneyland remains closed.

* New York City will impose fines on people who refuse to wear a face covering as the rate of positive tests for the novel coronavirus climbed above 3% for the first time in months, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

* Canada’s federal authorities and its two biggest provinces promised new measures to combat a second wave that is notching up as many cases as during the pandemic’s peak in April.

* Colombia will extend a selective quarantine for the duration of October.

* Mexico’s confirmed coronavirus cases rose to 738,163 on Tuesday, according to updated data from the health ministry, along with a total reported death toll of 77,163. Authorities reported 4,446 new cases along with 560 deaths on Tuesday, but the true figures are likely significantly higher due to little testing.

ASIA-PACIFIC

* India’s coronavirus case tally surged to 6.23 million after it reported 80,472 new infections in the last 24 hours, data from the health ministry showed on Wednesday.

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

* Israel’s parliament approved a government-backed edict on Wednesday likely to stifle protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over alleged corruption and his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS

* Regeneron Pharmaceuticals said its experimental two-antibody cocktail reduced viral levels and improved symptoms in non-hospitalised patients with mild-to-moderate COVID-19.

* Results from an early safety study showed Moderna Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate appeared safe and showed signs of working in older adults, researchers said.

* Germany’s CureVac NV said it has started a mid-stage study testing its experimental coronavirus vaccine and plans to begin a decisive global trial with about 30,000 volunteers in the fourth quarter.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

* The US recovery from the coronavirus-linked recession has been more robust than expected, a top Federal Reserve policymaker said, though he added it could be about three years before the economy regains its full strength.

(Reuters)

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BRITISH PEACEKEEPER COVID POSITIVE, UNFICYP CONFIRMS

 in-cyprus 30 September 2020 - by Constantinos Tsintas

A British peacekeeper has tested positive for coronavirus and has already been isolated, said UNFICYP’s press spokesman Aleem Siddick, confirming yesterday’s relevant health ministry statement, part of the daily announcement of new cases.

‘We can confirm that one of our peacekeepers, from the UK, has tested positive for Covid’, Siddick said, adding that the patient had been asymptomatic and was immediately isolated following the positive test.

He noted that UNFICYP had concluded relevant contact tracing to prevent the spread of the virus and was working closely with Cyprus authorities for strict adherence to all the protocols for the prevention and risk limitation protocols.

Siddick stressed that all new UNFICYP staff go through a total of 28 days in quarantine, 14 prior to their departure for Cyprus and a further two weeks following their arrival.

Five UNFICYP peacekeepers have tested positive since March 2020, four of which have made a full recovery.

The spokesman stressed that the mission’s priority is to ensure that all military staff are COVID free and UNFICYP is in line with all the UN Secretary General and Cyprus directives.

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EUROPA DONNA CONCERNED OVER DRUG SHORTAGE FOR BREAST CANCER PATIENTS

 Cyprus Mail 30 September 2020 - by Evie Andreou

Europa Donna Cyprus expressed concerns on Wednesday over drug shortages that affect the treatment of cancer patients.

The breast cancer awareness group said they had received complaints from cancer patients, that drugs for metastatic breast cancer, while already approved by the Health Insurance Organisation (HIO) are not available to patients.

Faslodex, which is an injectable drug given monthly to women with breast cancer, as well as morphine, which is given to cancer patients in general, is currently in short supply, it said, and as a result, patients miss their treatments.

Europa Donna Cyprus said they contacted the Health Insurance Organisation (HIO) but have not received explanations, while it has yet to receive an official response about this.

They called on the HIO to promptly resolve the problem. The shortage of these drugs is putting patients’’ health at risk, they said.

 

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EXPATS RANK CYPRUS 44th FROM 60 DESTINATIONS ON ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

 Cyprus Mail 30 September 2020 - by Annette Chrysostomou

Cyprus has been is ranked 44th out of 60 destinations for sustainability and the environment, expats have voted.

Expats and global minds community InterNations published its first Environment and Sustainability rankings on Wednesday, revealing the best and worst countries for the sustainable expat.

Finland, Sweden and Norway top the list while India, Kuwait and Egypt come last.

The ranking is based on eight factors, expats’ satisfaction with the availability of green goods and services, air quality, water and sanitation, energy supply and local waste management and recycling infrastructure.

It also includes their perception of how much the government supports policies to protect the environment and how interested the local population is when it comes to environmental issues.

Cyprus ranks among the bottom 20 for all subcategories except for quality of environment, where it is number 33.

The country does particularly well with regard to its air quality, for which it is ranked 26th.

Some 68 per cent of expats reported they rate this positively.

Around 81 per cent said they like the natural environment but more than one in five, 21 per cent, are dissatisfied with the water and sanitation infrastructure.

Thirty-four per cent do not agree the government supports policies to protect the environment and 44 per cent of expats say the population is not very interested in environmental issues, with one British respondent saying “garbage is left just anywhere”.

“There is little awareness about environmental issues”, an Italian echoed.

In addition, 43 per cent are unhappy with local waste management and recycling efforts, compared to 28 per cent globally.

Moreover, 28 per cent of respondents are unhappy with the country’s energy supply, and only 42 per cent rate the availability of green goods and services positively.

For a country to be featured in the rankings, a sample size of at least 75 survey respondents per country was necessary. In 2020, 60 destinations met this requirement, with more than 15,000 expats taking part in total, representing 173 nationalities and living in 181 countries or territories.

With around four million members in 420 cities around the world, InterNations is the largest global community and a source of information for people who live and work abroad. InterNations offers global and local networking and socialising, both online and face to face.

For more information see www.internations.org

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LARNACA SHOWS OFF ITS UNDERWATER TREASURES IN NEW VIDEO

 Cyprus Mail 30 September 2020 - by Annette Chrysostomou

The Larnaca tourism board made a move to promote diving tourism on Wednesday, presenting shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea in a newly-released video.

According to the board’s monthly newsletter, people, and not only lovers of diving tourism are invited to “immerse themselves” in the fascinating world of living marine life located in the area of ​​Larnaca through the new video clip.

Entitled ‘Larnaca’s fascinating underwater world’, the video visits five of the most popular shipwrecks and diving sites, including sea caves, to show why the area is known as a diving destination.

The video begins with HMS Cricket, an old British ship carrying weapons that is upside down on the seabed. The ship survived World War I, was then used as a target for the British Air Force RAF in Larnaca Bay and finally sank in 1947 due to bad weather.

It is surrounded by a rich marine life including octopuses, slugs, snails, lionfish, starfish and sea bream.

 

The next two vessels shown in the clip are the ones recently acquired by Larnaca, the LEF1 and Elpida which were launched in December 2019 and have already begun to attract marine life.

Elpida sank to a depth of 32 metres while LEF1 is at a depth of just 13 metres, as the aim is to create the first swimming reef in Cyprus with it.

In the caves located in the sea area of ​​Pyla, divers can enjoy stalagmites, stalactites and gorges while larger fish and other creatures can be found among the rocks.

The video also shows the legendary shipwreck Zenovia, one of the top diving destinations in the world.

“The ship is located in the port of Larnaca and fascinates with the huge variety of marine life it has, including lionfish, barracuda, sea slugs and snails, starfish, turtles and octopuses,” the tourist board commented.

Divers can also tour the cargo of the ship which consists of trucks and thousands of eggs.

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