Despite advances in impact assessment (IA) practice in Arctic regions, persistent challenges remain. This article examines how baseline information needs and associated uncertainties are presented and understood in the regulatory context of IA. The focus is on marine-related information needs in the Nunavut IA process. The method used a document review of operational IA reports and focus groups with the Nunavut Impact Review Board – the agency responsible for IA in the territory. The results show that information challenges are largely linked to the availability, suitability and accessibility of data; while challenges to addressing information needs are related to broad capacity constraints, as well as responsibility, and cooperation among parties to the process. Similar to other settings, in Nunavut, there is a need to develop better guidance for parties regarding information uncertainties in IA and how such may be addressed. To help address information needs, there is also a need to clarify the roles, responsibilities and expectations of all parties (e.g. Inuit organisations, proponent, government and communities), as well as improving coordination and advancing collaboration, while also addressing capacity constraints.

The terms creolization and hybridity are neither parallel nor interchangeable. The former cannot be fully understood without taking into account its historical background and geographical context so that creolization is a phenomenon of exchange and transformation that is indispensable to understanding the New World experience. Hybridity, on the other hand, claims to provide a framework for avoiding the binaries of colonialist thinking, enabling agency particularly in postcolonial contexts involving subaltern subjects. Such a reading posits contact and chaos, cultural relativity, exchange and transformation as key tools in a polyvalent system of thought. The resulting nonbinary, archipelagic framework leads to the concept of archipelic rather than continental thought, transcending the universalist presumptions of the either/or and revising and rewriting traditional notions of boundary and location.

Gaetano Donizetti's versatile production unfolded over three decades (1818–43) and was staged in the foremost Italian and European theatres. In this article I question his self-borrowing as a chiefly economic practice, offering novel keys to reading his re-use of existing materials. In the introductory section, I offer a preliminary discussion of the coeval discourse on Donizetti's self-imitation as it surfaces in the press, which appears to follow in the footsteps of that on Rossini's. I then look at his self-borrowings across genres, dwelling on the ways in which he re-functionalized earlier serious passages within comic frames, almost inevitably to achieve a parodic effect. After discussing the links between parody and diegetic music – one of his favourite contexts for employing older materials – I turn to Donizetti's serious production, advancing the hypothesis that his recourse to self-borrowing could take on semantic connotations. In so doing, in the second part of the article I focus on selected case studies grouped into three thematic areas, which – similarly to, and occasionally in connection with diegetic music – all involve the suspension of a character's habitual idioms: deception, rituals and madness. The article includes extended examples from the composer's Linda di Chamounix (Vienna, Kärntnertortheater, 1842), Sancia di Castiglia (Naples, Teatro San Carlo, 1832), Il paria (Naples, Teatro San Carlo, 1829), Marino Faliero (Paris, Théâtre-Italien, 1835), Enrico di Borgogna (Venice, Teatro San Luca, 1818), and Anna Bolena (Milan, Teatro Carcano, 1830). My ultimate concern is to demonstrate that Donizetti's use of self-borrowing could perform a dramatic function, deliberately connoting the altered modes of expression of the characters to which the earlier piece is associated.

This paper argues that abortion access is an important subject for bioethics scholarship and reflects on the relationship between legal frameworks and access to care. The author uses the example of the United Kingdom to examine the benefits and limitations of abortion-permissive legal frameworks in terms of access. These are legal frameworks that enable the provision of abortion but subject to restrictions. An abortion-permissive regime—first in Great Britain and then in Northern Ireland—has gone some way to improving access to care over time. However, aspects of the regime (that lead to its description as permissive rather than supportive of abortion) have the potential to endanger abortion access in the future and so legal reform is necessary.

The practice of solitary confinement (SC) is established within the literature as a common occurrence of torture within the prison system, andmany international and national human rights organizations have called for its abolition. A somewhat more contentious topic in the literature is the practice of force feeding (FF) of hunger-striking prisoners. The paper aims to make a case against FF by establishing a parity argument that states the following: If SC is considered an immoral practice (and indeed it should be), it should follow that FF is morally impermissible as well. In conclusion, this paper will argue that FF of hunger-striking prisoners is a violation of their fundamental moral rights and constitutes cruel and inhumane treatment and, therefore, should be abolished.

Non-human animal chimeras, containing human neurological cells, have been created in the laboratory. Despite a great deal of debate, the status of such beings has not been resolved. Under normal definitions, such a being could either be unconventionally human or abnormally animal. Practical investigations in animal sentience, artificial intelligence, and now chimera research, suggest that such beings may be assumed to have no legal rights, so philosophy could provide a different answer. In this vein, therefore, we can ask: What would a chimera, if it could think, think about? Thinking is used to capture the phenomena of a novel, chimeric being perceiving its terrible predicament as no more than a laboratory experiment. The creation of a thinking chimera therefore forces us to reconsider our assumptions about what makes human beings (potentially) unique (and other sentient animals different), because, as such, a chimera’s existence bridges our social and legal expectations about definitions of human and animal. Society has often evolved new social norms based on different kinds of (ir)rational contrivances; the imperative of non-contradiction, which is defended here, therefore requires a specific philosophical response to the rights of a thinking chimeric being.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling triggered a global debate about access to abortion and the legislative models governing it. In the United States, there was a sudden reversal of federal guidance about pregnancy termination that is unprecedented in Western and high-income countries. The strong polarization on the issue of abortion and the difficulty of finding a point of compromise lead one to consider the experiences of countries that have had different paths. Italy stands as a candidate for being a partially alternative model because it allows abortion up to 12 weeks, but without considering it a subjective right. The legislation in place since 1978 aims to balance the interests of the fetus and those of the woman. An issue often raised concerning Italian law is that of conscientious objection granted to doctors. Many gynecologists declare themselves objectors, and this makes access to abortion more difficult in some regions of Italy. After discussing this issue and envisaging different ways to deal with it, the article concludes by highlighting new dilemmas about a possible divorce between the law and medical ethics in different directions and offers some avenues to begin setting up a response.

John Rawls has held up as a model of public reason the U.S. Supreme Court. I argue that the Dobbs Court is justifiably criticized for failing to respect public reason. First, the entire opinion is governed by an originalist ideological logic almost entirely incongruent with public reason in a liberal, pluralistic, democratic society. Second, Alito’s emphasis on “ordered liberty” seems completely at odds with the “disordered liberty” regarding abortion already evident among the states. Third, describing the embryo/fetus from conception until birth as an “unborn human being” begs the question of the legal status of the embryo/fetus, as if an obiter dictum settled the matter. Fourth, Alito accuses the Roe court of failing to exercise judicial restraint, although Alito argued to overturn Roe in its entirety. In brief, the Dobbs opinion is an illiberal, disingenuous, ideological swamp that swallows up public reason and the reproductive rights of women.

Pattern-based reasons are reasons for action deriving not from the features of our own actions, but from the features of the larger patterns of action in which we might be participating. These reasons might relate to the patterns of action that will actually be carried out, or they might relate to merely hypothetical patterns. In past work, I have argued that accepting merely hypothetical pattern-based reasons, together with a plausible account of how to weigh these reasons, can lead to disastrous consequences. However, in this article, I argue that this problem is not limited to hypothetical pattern-based reasons: it turns out that there are analogous issues for reasons deriving from actual patterns. I then suggest that we can avoid this problem by adopting a different account of the weight of pattern-based reasons.

In June 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade. The European Court of Human Rights is also expected to decide on several abortion cases. In this paper, the interpretative approaches of both courts are compared. Whereas the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decided on an originalist approach to the Constitution, the highest European court has always regarded the European Convention on Human Rights as a living instrument. As a result, domestic laws regulating the interruption of pregnancy are seen by the Strasbourg court as interferences with a fundamental right, the right to respect for private life. Although member states of the Council of Europe enjoy a wide margin of appreciation with regard to the circumstances in which abortion will be permitted, its highest court put forward the state’s positive obligation to secure pregnant women’s right to effective respect for their physical and psychological integrity in several landmark judgments. In this way, it ensures the existence of effective mechanisms in countries with a poor record of implementing the right to a lawful abortion. Albeit at a minimum, the Strasbourg court offers protection, whereas the U.S. Supreme Court no longer does.

In 2021, the debate about the spaces in which Europe’s Muslim citizens should be permitted to wear religious veils was reanimated by the introduction of new prohibitions introduced in Switzerland and France, and the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union in joined cases C-804/18 and C-341/19. This article examines the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights concerning veiling. We argue that veil bans reduce the ability of Muslim women to actualize themselves as citizens by limiting their capacity to develop their identity through autonomous action. As such, we argue, the right ultimately at stake—which should protect rights in respect of veiling—is the right to a private life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and judicial and popular conceptions of veiling should be reoriented to accommodate this view. Doing so, we argue, highlights the full range of functions that veiling implicates—including religious but also secular identarian concerns and exposes how a usually expansive right has been curtailed in cases involving veiling.

The increasing focus on business and human rights (BHR) in civil society and policymaking has not been matched by research on corporate actions to respect and protect human rights. The lack of research on BHR is especially acute outside of Western Europe and Anglo-centric contexts. This paper seeks to investigate how the largest Russian firms conceptualize and fulfil their human rights obligations under the UN Guiding Principles and the extent to which internationalization of those firms may have impacted these behaviours. I use a unique dataset created from a sample made of the 100 largest firms listed on the Moscow Stock Exchange. Using the theoretical construct of institutional conflict, I find that cross-listing on other stock exchanges and the extent to which firms frame their broader social responsibility issues as ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable development’ rather than ‘corporate social responsibility’ has a substantial impact on firm attention to human rights. While this attention is encouraging, firm disclosure of actions taken to mitigate against violations and protect human rights is extremely limited and the strength of domestic institutional pressures has resulted in very little firm action in the face of the extreme and widespread human rights violations being committed in Ukraine by Russia.

Miranda de Ebro was created in 1937 to imprison Republicans and foreigners who fought with the International Brigades in Spanish Civil War. From 1940, the camp was used only to concentrate detained foreign refugees with no proper documents. More than 15 000 people, most of them from France and Poland, were kept there until the camp was closed in January 1947. Playing both sides of the international divide, fascist Spain at various points in time allowed passage and was a country of refuge both for those escaping Nazism and for Nazis and collaborators who, at the end of World War II (WWII), sought to escape justice. Treatment of each of these groups passing through Miranda was very different: real repression was meted out to the members of the International Brigades (IB), tolerance shown towards those escaping Nazism, and protection and active cooperation given to former Nazis and their collaborators. For the first time, data about foreign physicians imprisoned in Miranda de Ebro were consulted in the Guadalajara Military Archive (Spain). From 1937 to 1947, 151 doctors were imprisoned, most of them in 1942 and 1943, which represents around 1% of the prisoners. Fifty-two of the doctors were released thanks to diplomatic efforts, thirty-two by the Red Cross, and ten were sent to other prisons, directly released or managed to escape. All of them survived. After consulting private and public archives, it was possible to reconstruct some biographies and fill the previous existing gap in the history of migration and exile of doctors during the Second World War.