State succession to investment treaties: mapping the issues

Following recent decisions in Sanum v Laos and World Wide Minerals v Kazakhstan, investment lawyers have begun to engage with the legal rules governing State succession to treaties. As State succession is one of the more technical and controversial areas of general international law, this engagement can present challenges; however, the issues are too important to be ignored. This article maps out the most pressing questions of State succession that investment lawyers have faced, or are likely to face in the future. It identifies the three most salient problems — viz the succession of new States to ICSID membership and to old BITs, and the impact of cession of territory on investment protection. With respect to each of these three problems, the article analyses the general regime of State succession and its application to the investment law context, highlighting uncertainties in the law and proposing ways of dealing with them

Three questions about “informal regulation”

In the grand debates of international law, the jus ad bellum is often proclaimed dead, and just as often praised as the “cornerstone” of the contemporary legal order. Both perspectives tend to ignore that the jus ad bellum is not static, but a body of law that states adjust over time. In an important contribution, Monica Hakimi proposes to look at one particular aspect of such adjustment, a concept she frames as “informal regulation” through Security Council action. This essay engages with Hakimi's approach. It inquires whether this approach is as “informal” as Hakimi suggests, and asks whether “informal regulation”—rather than constituting a new category of state activities to study—is not already part of conventional approaches to the jus ad bellum. Proceeding from Hakimi's analysis, the comment assesses whether there is room for “informal regulation” beyond the Security Council

Decodability Attack against the Fuzzy Commitment Scheme with Public Feature Transforms

The fuzzy commitment scheme is a cryptographic primitive that can be used to store biometric templates being encoded as fixed-length feature vectors protected. If multiple related records generated from the same biometric instance can be intercepted, their correspondence can be determined using the decodability attack. In 2011, Kelkboom et al. proposed to pass the feature vectors through a record-specific but public permutation process in order to prevent this attack. In this paper, it is shown that this countermeasure enables another attack also analyzed by Simoens et al. in 2009 which can even ease an adversary to fully break two related records. The attack may only be feasible if the protected feature vectors have a reasonably small Hamming distance; yet, implementations and security analyses must account for this risk. This paper furthermore discusses that by means of a public transformation, the attack cannot be prevented in a binary fuzzy commitment scheme based on linear codes. Fortunately, such transformations can be generated for the non-binary case. In order to still be able to protect binary feature vectors, one may consider to use the improved fuzzy vault scheme by Dodis et al. which may be secured against linkability attacks using observations made by Merkle and Tams

Perfect Fingerprint Orientation Fields by Locally Adaptive Global Models

Fingerprint recognition is widely used for verification and identification in many commercial, governmental and forensic applications. The orientation field (OF) plays an important role at various processing stages in fingerprint recognition systems. OFs are used for image enhancement, fingerprint alignment, for fingerprint liveness detection, fingerprint alteration detection and fingerprint matching. In this paper, a novel approach is presented to globally model an OF combined with locally adaptive methods. We show that this model adapts perfectly to the 'true OF' in the limit. This perfect OF is described by a small number of parameters with straightforward geometric interpretation. Applications are manifold: Quick expert marking of very poor quality (for instance latent) OFs, high fidelity low parameter OF compression and a direct road to ground truth OFs markings for large databases, say. In this contribution we describe an algorithm to perfectly estimate OF parameters automatically or semi-automatically, depending on image quality, and we establish the main underlying claim of high fidelity low parameter OF compression

A modified lookdown construction for the Xi-Fleming-Viot process with mutation and populations with recurrent bottlenecks

Let $\Lambda$ be a finite measure on the unit interval. A $\Lambda$-Fleming-Viot process is a probability measure valued Markov process which is dual to a coalescent with multiple collisions ($\Lambda$-coalescent) in analogy to the duality known for the classical Fleming Viot process and Kingman's coalescent, where $\Lambda$ is the Dirac measure in 0. We explicitly construct a dual process of the coalescent with simultaneous multiple collisions ($\Xi$-coalescent) with mutation, the $\Xi$-Fleming-Viot process with mutation, and provide a representation based on the empirical measure of an exchangeable particle system along the lines of Donnelly and Kurtz (1999). We establish pathwise convergence of the approximating systems to the limiting $\Xi$-Fleming-Viot process with mutation. An alternative construction of the semigroup based on the Hille-Yosida theorem is provided and various types of duality of the processes are discussed. In the last part of the paper a population is considered which undergoes recurrent bottlenecks. In this scenario, non-trivial $\Xi$-Fleming-Viot processes naturally arise as limiting models.Comment: 35 pages, 2 figure

Three new East African Moths

Volume: XII

Do systemic collaboration and network governance matter? Living Labs beyond user-driven innovation

Despite the emergence and fast expansion of Living Lab (LL) around the world, little research has been conducted on the concept of LL from the perspective of both technological and social innovation and network governance. This paper critically reviews literature on the LL concept and other ‘innovation labs’ involving cross-border collaboration between private, public, and third sectors. Furthermore, we develop a framework outlining key analytical dimensions (context and aims, innovation types, stakeholders, partnership models, supporting, institutional environments, collaboration and network governance practices) and discuss findings from a study of an international sample of 120 LLs

Impact of Exchange Rate Deregulation on Manufacturing Sector Performance in Nigeria

The study examined the impact of exchange rate deregulation on manufacturing output performance in Nigeria over the period 1980 to 2016. The normalized co-integration technique was used to test for long-run relationship between exchange rate and manufacturing output while the granger causality test was used to ascertain the direction of causality between them. Also, the error correction mechanism (ECM) was used to calculate the speed of adjustment of the model to short-run disequilibrium condition. The empirical findings revealed that exchange rate has non-significant positive long-run effect on manufacturing industry output. However, unidirectional causal impact of exchange rate on manufacturing output was established using the pairwise granger causality test. Based on the above result, it is recommended that in discharging the mandate of exchange rate management, the monetary authorities should aim at stabilizing exchange rate through the use of appropriate monetary policy tools as well as support export diversification programmes in order to enhance foreign exchange inflow