مطالعات بین المللی

The four principles of medical ethics -- autonomy, justice, non-maleficence, and beneficence -- can be interpreted as being based on a respect for human life.  Human life, however, is also understood to be multidimensional.  Like folk psychology, medical ethics understands there to be physical, social, mental, and metaphysical/spiritual aspects of human nature. These four categories are a very useful framework of analysis for the larger fields of moral and political philosophy.  The four principles of medical ethics are also compatible with four concepts of equality derived from four different moral and legal systems in Western Civilization which had their separate foundations in religion (Canon Law), nature (Roman Law), society (English Common Law), and the individual (Social Contract Theory). There is, thus, a relationship between the concept of a respect for personal dignity and our common humanity in medical ethics and the concept of equality in the Western liberal political tradition. Medical ethics bring some coherence to the moral categories. They are, also, one source of an applied moral philosophy that can enable cross-cultural understanding and dialogue. Medical ethics have, at least, the capacity to provide a well-balanced source of accommodation in a pluralistic global community, without alienation or coercion.

This paper deals essentially with the historical evolution of the concept of human rights and the progressive and pragmatic development of human rights precepts, crystallizing into the present body of human rights law. Our focus is on the place of conflict, revolution and war in this seemingly endless evolution of the concepts of human rights.

Today, the development of international markets has caused a consequential increase in export of products. Industrial companies sell, more and more frequently, a significant portion of the products they produce to buyers domiciled abroad. Therefore, the risk of damage caused by products marketed in this way has increased simultaneously with the occurrence of conflict of laws. The legal framework, which determine the rights and obligations of the parties in an international commercial transaction, must be determined precisely. Considering the diversity of legal systems and the difference between liability regimes, harmonization by means of international agreements is widely recognized as the best solution to ensure the conformity of the legal issues which arise from international commercial transactions. Harmonization of the law on producers' civil liability for damage caused by their products intended for or involved in international sale or distribution could facilitate international trade by a unified system of liability standards. In the absence of an international convention on the liability for defective products, we allow ourselves to make proposal for an international convention on products liability applicable in the context of international trade which might be useful to the editors of this international convention in future.

In this, the concluding episode of the series of our studies into Caspian political geography, I will try to discuss, after briefly assessing the background to what has been known in the past twenty years as ‘the legal regime’ of the Caspian Sea, the latest development in Iran’s perspectives of the shaping of maritime political geography.  In the 1990s, as the world order began to shift, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Caspian Sea’s position in global geopolitics also changed. In debates over geo-legal delimitation of the Caspian Sea in the wake of the Soviet collapse, Iran articulated a position sometimes identifiable with Russia’s initial approach—that the Caspian Sea should be a condominium or an ‘area of common use’ for the littoral states. In late 1996 Tehran argued that the Soviet-Iranian treaties of 1921 and 1940 should determine the legal status of the Caspian Sea as a condominium. Slow progress in hammering out a legal regime on that basis was almost brought to an end for Iran in mid-1990s as outside influence increased over the Caspian oil resources pertaining to states other than Russia and Iran. By 1998 Iranian government shifted its position to a complete curve up of the sea in equal shares for the five coastal states. In May and September 2002, Russia signed protocols demarcating its relevant maritime areas of the Caspian Sea with Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, respectively. Meanwhile, academic delegates from the Caspian littoral states in an international seminar at Mazandaran University on the Caspian Sea - Babolsar, October 19–20, 2003 - issued a declaration, on the initiative of this author which put forward a solution on the basis of  a) creation of a strip of offshore zone 25–45 miles from the coastline into the sea to allow an exclusive economic zone for each of the five littoral states, &b) creation of a common use zone in the remaining body of the sea to allow equal rights of use for commercial, navigational and other maritime activities by each of the five . In the latest development, together with the other four states, Iran signed on September 29, 2014, a declaration whereby it was agreed that: there will be two fixed zones determining the legal status of the sea: a zone of state sovereignty and a zone with exclusive fishing rights. These two zones will be 25 nautical miles: a 15 miles territorial sea for each state from their shoreline, and a 10 mile exclusive fishing zone.

Avec l'avènement du groupe Etat Islamique (E.I.), plus communément appelé "DAECH",  un exode massif de ressortissants de pays européen a eu lieu vers le Moyen-Orient, principalement l’Irak et la Syrie afin de participer à cette guerre sainte. Le DAECH a commis de nombreuses atrocités à l’égard des chrétiens d’orient, persécutions, meurtres, esclavages sexuels,… Pourtant jusqu’ici tous ces crimes demeurent impunis. Il semblerait que la Cour Pénale Internationale pourrait être saisie sur base de crime contre l’Humanité à l’égard des chrétiens d’orient.

The unpredictability nature of politics has made it fit to marry with quantum theory which by definition stands upon this characteristic. In recent years, “chaos and quantum theories” have attracted academics and scholars as alternative research methodology across a wide range of social science discipline including politics and international relations. Traditionally, we understand political phenomena and international relations in terms of positivist approaches based upon Newtonian worldview, which is mechanistic and reflecting “systemic determinism” governed by eternal universal laws. This is how we used to explain for instance the concept of “Balance of Power” and a host of other theories during the cold war. The post cold war period, and most particularly the unpredictability of the September 11 events, proved the methodological insufficiency and inadequacy of this approach. In recent years many authors have questioned the wisdom of continuing to rely on the Newtonian philosophy to deal with the emerging problems in world affairs and domestic issues which no longer respond to the conventional epistemological and ontological views of the past. Reliance on mere cause and effect, two dimensional “space and time,” political determinism, structure, interaction, order, sovereignty and the like are not responsive to our present methodological requisites. This paper is an attempt to explain the matter through a new methodological approach built on chaos and ‎quantum theories