African citizens are increasingly being surveilled, profiled, and targeted online in ways that violate their rights. African governments frequently use pandemic or terrorism-related security risks to grant themselves additional surveillance rights and significantly increase their collection of monitoring apparatus and technologies while spending billions of dollars to conduct surveillance (Roberts et al. 2023). Surveillance is a prominent strategy African governments use to limit civic space (Roberts and Mohamed Ali 2021). Digital technologies are not the root of surveillance in Africa because surveillance practices predate the digital age (Munoriyarwa and Mare 2023). Surveillance practices were first used by colonial governments, continued by post-colonial governments, and are currently being digitalized and accelerated by African countries. Throughout history, surveillance has been passed down from colonizers to liberators, and some African leaders have now automated it (Roberts et al. 2023). Many studies have been conducted on illegal state surveillance in the United States, China, and Europe (Feldstein 2019; Feldstein 2021). Less is known about the supply of surveillance technologies to Africa. With a population of almost 1.5 billion people, Africa is a continent where many citizens face surveillance with malicious intent. As mentioned in previous chapters, documenting the dimensions and drivers of digital surveillance in Africa is
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Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) is constantly gaining ground, both at domestic and international level. New forms of dispute settlement with a mix of public and private components are emerging in fields where this was not the case until recent times, as some contributions to this Zoom-out have attempted to demonstrate. In the field of investment law we have witnessed a somehow opposite trend. Traditionally, disputes in this field have been settled by means of arbitral tribunals established mostly on the basis of bilateral or multilateral investment agreements (IAs) under a variety of arbitration facilities, which are collectively referred to as investor-to-State dispute settlement (ISDS). Traditional ISDS presents many characteristics of ADR, starting from the strong role that private parties play in it (for example when it comes to the appointment of arbitrators). The practice has shown that the system has clear advantages but also undeniable disadvantages. The prevailing opinion in recent years has been that the latter considerably outweigh the former, resulting in what has been termed the backlash against investment arbitration in a volume appeared a few years ago. In this contribution, how-ever, I will not dwell on the details of the crisis that has affected investment arbitration, nor will I engage in a discussion of whether that backlash is entirely justified. My focus will be much more modest. One of the most tangible consequences of this growing dissatisfaction towards investment arbitration is the launch on the part of the EU of a court-like system to settle investment disputes –the now famous investment court system (ICS) –as a replacement to old-fashioned ISDS. The ICS now features in all EU IAs, and has become the standard position of the EU when it comes to dispute settlement in this field. Recently, the ICS has also received the green light of the European Court of Justice (ECJ),raising doubts as to whether traditional ISDS has conclusively been sent to oblivion, at least in the EU. From a political and policy perspective, it is undoubtful that there is a strong stance on the part of the EU and of its Member States against traditional ISDS. This article, however, will focus exclusively on the legal dimension, by examining whether the ECJ’s decision should be read as meaning that investment arbitration is incompatible with the EU legal system. While itis clear that Opinion 1/17 means that the ICS is compatible with EU law, it remains to be seen whether the Court’s finding allows an a contrario reading. Namely, whether it entails the incompatibility with EU law of traditional ISDS. The analysis will start with a brief summary of the events and developments that preceded the creation of the ICS and eventually led to the current situation (Section 2), followed by an examination of the relevant parts of Opinion 1/17 (Section 3). This part will be followed by an appraisal of the possible legal implications of the decision (Section 4). Some conclusions will be offered in the closing section (Section 5) in the attempt to look beyond the boundaries of EU law. Part of topic "The blurring distinction between public and private in international dispute resolution"
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E-discovery projects typically start with an assessment of the collected electronic data in order to estimate the risk to prosecute or defend a legal case. This is not a review task but is appropriately called early case assessment, which is better known as exploratory search in the information retrieval community. This paper first describes text mining methodologies that can be used for enhancing exploratory search. Based on these ideas we present a semantic search dashboard that includes entities that are relevant to investigators such as who knew who, what, where and when. We describe how this dashboard can be powered by results from our ongoing research in the “Semantic Search for E-Discovery” project on topic detection and clustering, semantic enrichment of user profiles, email recipient recommendation, expert finding and identity extraction from digital forensic evidence.
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