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This chapter addresses evidence-related recommendations for the consideration of the UN treaty bodies. Written by three practitioners from the civil society sector, with direct experience of the individual communication procedure before the UNTBs, it also benefited from input from all the contributors to the volume, which it concludes. Part I offers normative reflections. It deals with legal questions, including: What should the applicable standard be when determining human rights claims? How should this standard vary according to the type of claim and the stage of the proceedings? In what circumstances and under which conditions should the burden of proof be shifted from the complainant to the respondent state? Part II deals with organisational, and thus more mundane issues, but it highlights how proper identification and communication of the applicable evidentiary concepts and norms are essential to a transparent, accessible and fair system, therefore necessitating proper resourcing.
Chapter 2 develops the book’s theoretical contribution: a model explaining how partisan inclusion fosters de facto autonomy in electoral management bodies. The chapter distinguishes between de jure independence, which is often established through constitutional or legal reforms, and de facto autonomy, which emerges only when political actors perceive electoral management bodies as legitimate, transparent, and predictable. It outlines how partisan engagement can build trust, reduce informational asymmetries, and create mutual constraints that deter manipulation. The chapter presents an “institutional pathways” approach, detailing how some electoral commissions have followed a process of legal reform, stakeholder embedding, and administrative routinization that lead to autonomous practice. It further examines how consultation mechanisms, conflict-resolution procedures, and internal accountability practices reinforce autonomy over time. The chapter concludes with a set of comparative expectations linking variation in inclusion to observable differences in election quality and crisis resilience across “cases”.
This chapter offers an overview of contemporary pro-oil mobilization in Canada and the United States. Through analysis of ninety-five organizations, the chapter looks at patterns in the scale, issues, and levels of transparency common among pro-oil advocacy groups. These data show that contestation today often happens at the state or provincial level and typically emphasizes multi-issue, long-term campaigns. Furthermore, many of these organizations demonstrate at least nominal financial transparency, with more than half naming sponsors on their websites. This level of revelation is largely absent on social media, however, with very few campaigns mentioning their sponsors on X or Facebook. Groups that are nominally finically transparent also employ misrepresentative coalitions, buried attribution, passive voice, and reputational laundering to make their funding sources harder to track in practice.
Edited by
Monika Zalnieriute, Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences,Agne Limante, Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences
This chapter focuses on AI and its impact on transparency in judicial decision-making. Transparency is one of the core values of the rule of law, and essential for maintaining the trust and accountability of the judiciary and justice system as a whole. Drawing upon semi-structured expert interviews with members of judiciary and legal profession, case law and real-life examples of AI tools, the chapter considers four questions: why transparency matters in the context of judicial decision-making; the information that judges must have and communicate to satisfy the demands of transparency; whether they have access to this information; and, if not, what we might do about this deficit. We argue that two complementary solutions can strengthen judicial transparency in the age of AI: (1) a regulatory framework that mandates disclosure of specific information pertaining to the code and variables used in AI tools; and (2) robust use of the due process duty to provide adequate reasons for a judicial decision that depends upon the output of a predictive tool. These steps are essential to reconcile judicial use of AI with the need for transparency, as a foundational aspect of justice and rule of law.
The book’s final chapter returns to issues of transparency, arguing that so- called front groups tend to be open secrets of sorts, with their funders or founders rarely fully hidden from view. The chapter demonstrates that oil companies today are apt to use financial transparency as a strategic asset, framing themselves as amplifiers of citizen speech. As oil companies embrace a more open model of citizen organizing, critiques or policy interventions that call for exposing the sponsors of pro-oil campaigns see their relevancy wane. The chapter closes by exploring how scholars and environmental activists might use the empirical insights of previous chapters, particularly the top-down control, internal political fissures, and affective experience of risk by joiners in pro-oil campaigns, to create more just and effective grassroots interventions in climate politics.
Open science initiatives have gained traction in recent years. However, open peer-review practices, i.e., reforms that (i) modify the identifiability of stakeholders and (ii) establish channels for the open communication of information between stakeholders, have seen very little adoption in economics. In this paper, we explore the feasibility and desirability of such reforms. We present insights derived from survey data documenting the attitudes of 802 experimental/behavioral economists, a conceptual framework, a literature review, and cross-disciplinary data on current journal practices. On (i), most respondents support preserving anonymity for referees, but views about anonymity for authors and associate editors are mixed. On (ii), most respondents are open to publishing anonymized referee reports, sharing reports between referees, and allowing authors to appeal editorial decisions. Active reviewers, editors, and respondents from the US/Canada are generally less open to transparency reforms.
The oil industry today sponsors dozens of citizen advocacy organizations. Often called 'front groups' or 'astroturf,' they have become key actors in fossil fuel companies' political efforts across the US and Canada. People for Oil digs into these groups and the day-to-day ways they shape our energy future. Drawing on interviews with pro-oil organizers and citizen joiners, Tim Wood explains why these groups form, why people join, and how these organizations intervene in governance. He shows that while we tend to think of all corporate grassroots mobilization as financially secretive, many campaigns today are openly sponsored and long-lasting. This allows industry lobbyists to stake a claim to representing citizen voice. By making sense of the backstage logics and affective politics of pro-oil organizing, People for Oil equips readers to better understand important new players in today's climate and energy politics.
Web archives are an exhaustive source for humanities research. They are, however, hard to navigate and research with material from web archives is often opaque as no existing software for exploring web archives provide researcher with the possibility to track their pathways around the archive. This article presents an extension of the Open-Source software SolrWayback, which provides researchers with a navigation tracking feature that supports a more reproducible and transparent methodology for documenting how a web archive collection has been explored as part of research. The functionality has been developed from a user- and test-driven approach, where the needs of contemporary historians have decided how the feature was implemented. This user-centered approach provides new functionality for a piece of software that has primarily been developed by archiving institutions.
This study elicits iconicity ratings for Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) from L1 HKSL Deaf signers and L1 Cantonese hearing non-signers, as well as non-signer guessing accuracy, and compares these norms with other sign languages. Iconicity ratings were collected for 972 HKSL signs from Deaf signers and hearing non-signers and correlated with guesses made by hearing non-signers in three guessing paradigms, that is, three-alternative forced choice (3AFC) translation selection, 3AFC video selection and an open-ended (open cloze) response task. HKSL signs were rated for iconicity comparably to American Sign Language (ASL) and Israeli Sign Language (ISL), with Deaf signers rating signs with higher iconicity overall. We also correlated HKSL iconicity ratings across signs with synonymous translations from languages with available ratings, ASL (634 signs), ISL (158 signs) and British Sign Language (99 signs). Guessing accuracy was found to correlate with higher HKSL iconicity ratings. As for semantic transparency, 3AFC guessing results indicate that many signs are in fact ‘translucent’, whereby inference based on the context provided by answer choices allows hearing non-signers to select the target answer with high accuracy. Our open-ended guessing task yielded considerably lower accuracy; however, accurate responses (2,183 of 15,228) were found to correlate with higher iconicity ratings.
In recent epistemology, introspection principles are commonly rejected. One of the central reasons for this is the adoption of Williamson’s anti-luminosity arguments (1996, 2000) and the popularity of the associated epistemic externalist position. This rejection, however, comes with theoretical costs concerning the applications of introspection principles in epistemic and doxastic logic and modeling cooperative behavior. In this paper, I provide a way to solve this dilemma by arguing that the principle KB – expressing one’s privileged knowledge of their beliefs – remains unscathed by Williamson’s argument while saving the important theoretical applications introspective principles are used for. I propose a way of justifying KB and rejecting KK on principled grounds using Byrne’s (Byrne, A. (2005). ‘Introspection.’ Philosophical Topics 33(1), 79–104., Byrne, A. (2018). Transparency and Self-Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) transparency account of introspection, improving upon a previous attempt by Das and Salow (Das, N. and Salow, B. (2018). ‘Transparency and the KK Principle.’ Noûs 52(1), 3–23.). This defense of KB, unlike many in the literature, is consistent with epistemic externalism and allows one to reject the problematic KK principle and maintain that non-introspective knowledge is guided by Williamson’s margin-for-error principle.
Large grant-making philanthropic foundations in the UK and the EU can have a significant influence over environmental law and as such are worthy of more attention from environmental law scholars. Through analysis of publicly available documents, we identify in this paper an absence of consistent transparency by these foundations. This makes their influence hard to understand, hard to research, hard even to see at work in the world. Transparency is complex and challenging, however. And so, rather than berating problematic approaches, we explore through interviews with actors in the field, as well as the academic literature, both the difficulties that foundations experience in pursuing transparent practices and the benefits of transparency. We conclude by identifying some principles for improved visibility of foundation work.
Reproducibility, consistency, and transparency are essential to responsible and ethical scientific inquiry, though practices supporting these qualities are often neglected. However, in many cases data are confidential or otherwise unable to be shared publicly. This tutorial describes a method utilizing generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create synthetic data that are sufficiently similar to the original dataset in such cases where the source data cannot be shared or where the source data are too sparse as to internally validate results.
Methods:
Utilizing an exemplar study that aimed to create a clinical prediction model employing a novel echocardiographic measurement to differentiate between acute coronary syndrome and Takotsubo syndrome, we demonstrate the procedure of fitting a GAN and evaluating the resulting synthetic dataset against the results from the source dataset using conventional analytic methodologies. Further, we include relevant R code and output from this process to aid in implementation.
Results:
The procedure we detail yielded a synthetic dataset that was largely similar to the source data used in univariate descriptive statistics, significance testing comparing variables across datasets, data visualizations, and yielded largely comparable secondary model fit and accuracy metrics.
Conclusions:
We demonstrated that through the implementation of a well-tuned GAN, synthetic data can be generated as a sufficiently faithful simulacrum of the source data for the purposes of internal validation, transparency of method, and reproducibility of analytic results.
Poor public understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) systems has become a matter of acute concern. Even when lacking expert technical knowledge, there are good democratic, economic and other societal reasons for ensuring that the public right to know operates effectively in the AI era. Yet, the trade-secret claims of AI providers and deployers are widely seen as a potential barrier to information disclosure rights and duties, which has provoked calls for areas of significant public interest to be carved out from the protections of trade-secrets law. Such transparency carve-outs are, however, likely to lead to uncertainty, over-inclusion and ineffectiveness. In this article, we argue that the dynamic, public-driven character of the right to know can be better secured through third-party participation and public-interest stewardship innovations in AI transparency.
This Chapter discusses legal and policy options for reforming security exceptions through implementing substantive and procedural mechanisms to maximize joint gains from international trade and investment and the protection of the national security interests of WTO members. In particular, relying on the theories and concepts relevant to this book and the conducted comparative research, this Chapter attempts to reconsider the role of security exception clauses in international economic law and contemplates additional institutional responses to remedy the current flaws in their interpretation and application. What is needed, and what this book seeks to provide, is an analytic perspective for assessing when more restraint on the application of security measures is desirable and when it is not.
This case note analyses the General Court’s judgment in Arysta Lifescience v EFSA (Case T-222/23), which addresses the tensions arising from the disclosure of the lists of co-formulant in the context of the EU risk assessment of pesticides. The decision consolidates the General Court’s interpretation of “information relating to emissions into the environment” under Article 6(1) of Aarhus Regulation, confirming its applicability to the list of co-formulants contained in representative products.
In recent years, the European Union (EU) has introduced several policy measures to better align financial markets with sustainability goals. So far, these policies have mainly aimed to improve how information on the sustainability impacts of investments is collected and transmitted. Policymakers hope that adjustments to the epistemic infrastructure of financial markets will lead to a shift in investments that translates into transformational change in the real economy. The EU’s sustainable finance policies often follow a reflexive law approach and confine themselves to setting procedural and organisational norms. This article analyses the potential and limitations of this approach and argues that sustainable finance policies must be sufficiently detailed and binding to avoid the risk, associated with reflexive law policies, of granting too much discretion to agents with vested interests detrimental to the governance aims. However, detailed and binding policies do not fully realise the advantages in dealing with highly complex and dynamic situations that are often ascribed to reflexive law policies. While sustainable finance policies that address the epistemic infrastructure of financial markets are for various reasons still important, their potential and advantages compared to other governance approaches should not be exaggerated.
In the framework of the common objective of this volume, this chapter focuses on the technological element –expressed in AI– which is usually part of the definition of remote work. This chapter discusses how AI tools shape the organization and performance of remote work, how algorithms impact remote workers rights and how trade unions and workers can harness these powerful instruments to improve working and living conditions. Three hypotheses are considered. First, that AI systems and algorithmic management generate a de facto deepening of the subordinate position of the worker. Second, that this process does not represent technological determinism but instead the impact of human and institutional elements. And finally, that technological resources usually are more present in remote work than in traditional work done at the workplace. These hypotheses and concerns are addressed in several ways: by contextualizing the issue over time, through a multi-level optic centered on the interactions of different levels of regulation, by examining practical dimensions and finally by exploring the implications for unions and worker agency.
After presenting Boyle’s appeal to the Sartrean notion of nonpositional self-awareness in explaining Evans’ “transparency fact” concerning self-knowledge, I argue that his explanation suffers a certain instability. To the extent that nonpositional self-awareness is taken to be a matter of first-order ‘transparent’ orientation to the world, Boyle’s suggestion concerning the character of explicit positional self-knowledge is compromised. On the other hand, to the extent that nonpositional awareness is regarded as a form of genuine self-awareness, his explanation overintellectualizes first-order mental states. I conclude by raising questions regarding Boyle’s success in providing a viable alternative to epistemic accounts of basic self-knowledge.
Edited by
Filipe Calvão, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva,Matthieu Bolay, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland,Elizabeth Ferry, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
Transparency is increasingly promoted as a necessary step to achieve various social and environmental sustainability goals. And yet, the pervasive idea that more transparency leads to more sustainability relies on an assumption that the market can and will transform information about corporate activities into a positive sustainability outcome. Reflecting on Traidcraft Exchange’s “Who picked my tea?” campaign and some of the responses to it, this chapter uncovers some of the assumptions that motivate transparency initiatives and shows how these assumptions serve the interests of powerful actors such as corporations and their investors. In doing so, they reinforce an understanding of sustainability that rewards companies for doing little more than disclosing information they themselves have decided is appropriate to share.
Edited by
Filipe Calvão, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva,Matthieu Bolay, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland,Elizabeth Ferry, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
Organic certification programs aim to promote transparent economic, environmental, and social trade relationships as part of their social mission. Yet, these programs often produce forms of knowledge and accountability that, while more transparent for some groups, are less transparent for others. With a focus on the vanilla supply chain in Madagascar, I ethnographically examine interactions between smallholder vanilla farmers and organic certifying agents. I note how the organic certification process privileges certain practices as transparent, and thus desirable. These include written, quantifiable, and formalized representations of vanilla fields. This focus ignores or undermines local forms of transparency, which often rely on spoken, indirect, and informal market mechanisms. The forms of transparency favored by certification projects have economic consequences, as they open spaces for additional external actors – including certification agencies themselves – to capture profit and value from the vanilla market.