The prosecution of environmental offences in New Zealand

This paper will examine the background law regarding environmental offences under the Resource Management Act 1991 (NZ), prosecution trends, sentencing for RMA offences (including principles of sentencing, sentencing discretion, legislative guidance, appellate guidance, guideline judgments, and tariffs), the use of costs in conjunction with sentencing, recent appeal judgments, and finally draw conclusions regarding consistency and sentencing in relation to environmental offences. Where relevant comparisons will be made with the Australian jurisdictions

Protecting traditional ethno-botanical knowledge in South Africa through the intellectual property regime

Traditional knowledge has been used, and is increasingly being used, in a wide range of industries for the development of new products. Increasing awareness of the economic value of biological diversity has resulted in industries seeking to exploit traditional knowledge and biodiversity through opportunistic behaviour (biopiracy). This is also happening in South Africa, where numerous industries are developing new products. Recent advances in the field of biotechnology have created the need for greater intellectual property rights protection. The protection of traditional knowledge has however long been ignored as developed nations and large industries have sought to promote self-serving systems of protection. In this paper the example of an indigenous medicinal plant is used to analyse and describe the extent to which patent and trademark protection is able to protect traditional ethno-botanical knowledge in South Africa. The study therefore aims to contribute to an understanding of the value that traditional knowledge holds for the sustainable development and economic growth of communities, and how such knowledge can be protected.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Pattern formation in annular convection

This study of spatio-temporal pattern formation in an annulus is motivated by two physical problems on vastly different scales. The first is atmospheric convection in the equatorial plane between the warm surface of the Earth and the cold tropopause, modeled by the two dimensional Boussinesq equations. The second is annular electroconvection in a thin semetic film, where experiments reveal the birth of convection-like vortices in the plane as the electric field intensity is increased. This is modeled by two dimensional Navier-Stokes equations coupled with a simplified version of Maxwell's equations. The two models share fundamental mathematical properties and satisfy the prerequisites for application of O(2)-equivariant bifurcation theory. We show this can give predictions of interesting dynamics, including stationary and spatio-temporal patterns

Legitimacy and the TRIPS Agreement

TRIPS, legitimacy, World Trade Organization