Should CAH in Females Be Classified as DSD?

Great controversies and misunderstandings have developed around the relatively recently coined term disorders of sex development or DSD. In this article we question the wisdom of including XX individuals with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) in the DSD category and develop arguments against it based on the published literature on the subject. It is clear that females with CAH assigned the female gender before 24 months of age and properly managed retain the female gender identity regardless of the Prader grade. Females with CAH and low Prader grades have the potential for a normal sexual and reproductive life. Those with greater degrees of prenatal androgen exposure (Prader grades IV and V) raised as females also identify themselves as females but experience more male like behavior in childhood, have a greater rate of homosexuality and have greater difficulty with vaginal penetration and maintaining pregnancies. Improvement in surgical techniques, better endocrinological, psychological and surgical follow up may lessen these problems in the future. Given the fact that the term DSD includes many conditions with problematic gender identity and conflicts with the gender assigned at birth, it may be appropriate exclude females with CAH from the DSD classification

Education and Promotion of Human Rights from a European and American Perspective

From introduction: "The relationship between education and implementation of programs for the protection of rights and freedoms has been substantiated by the numerous documents produced by international conferences on human rights, such as; the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights , the 1978 UNESCO International Congress in Vienna on the Teaching of Human Rights , the Congress in Seville in 1986 and in Malta in 1987, the Seminar in Geneva in 1988 celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the World Conference in Vienna on Human Rights in 1993, the Montreal International Congress on Education for Human Rights and Democracy on 1993 , and many others."(...

The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the American Constitutional Development

The thorough examination of the influence of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen on constitutions has long awaited proper implementation. The importance of the French act has never been questioned but its multi-sided impact has not been satisfactorily evaluated. With respect to the American Constitution, this problem merits a specially comprehensive study. Although the American and French politics at the end of the eighteenth century were carefully examined, the links between the constitutional developments of both countries has never been researched exhaustively. The reasons seem to be threefold. First, with exception of the American Constitution, the French Declaration preceded all other written constitutions in the world and the influence of the French act on the European constitutions seemed to be the primary subject of attention. Second, the sequence in which the American Constitution and the French Declaration were adopted naturally favored the claim of American parentage of the French act. This conclusion seemed to undermine the originality of the French Declaration and irritate the historians who believed that the key ideas of the Declaration were rooted in the philosophy of the French Enlightenment. Moreover, the American draftsmen emphasized the continuity of their constitutional works and eventually looked for roots in the British rather than in the French constitutional ideas and traditions. For these reasons, the American contribution to the process of drafting the French Declaration and the subsequent influence of the French act on the American constitutional development, particularly the formation of the American Bill of Rights, has never received desired attention

Determinants of property rights in Poland and Ukraine: the polity or politicians?

North (1994) famously remarked that ‘it is the polity that defines and enforces property rights’. This paper traces the development of property rights in Poland and Ukraine and explores their divergence over the past three centuries using North's framework of economic calculation. In each country, the distribution of political power and political institutions had a profound impact on property rights. Indeed, while it was the Polish polity that defined the evolution of property rights from 1386 to 1795 and then from 1989 onward, due to diffusion of power, it was Ukrainian politicians that controlled the destiny of property rights for most of Ukraine's history. This situation has not changed despite the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, and recent moves in Poland show how tenuous property rights are in the face of political opposition

Fundamental Constitutional Rights in the New Constitutions of Eastern and Central Europe

The goal of this article is to review the efforts of the drafters. This study analyzes the process of drafting the new bills of rights against the background of the Western experience. The paper consists of two parts. The first examines the genesis of American and European constitutional protection of human rights, including the socialist concept of the bill of rights. The second is an analysis of basic constitutional rights as provided in several new constitutions and constitutional drafts of the countries of former Soviet dominance. The article also examines the actual records of these countries in human rights protection. The conclusions provide some observations on the likelihood of whether the drafters of new constitutions will reach some identifiable consensus, the possibility of a new constitutional model of human rights protection surfacing, and the applicability of the Western concepts of human rights to the East-Central European experience