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Global Legal Monitor: Recent Highlights

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I am always impressed by breadth of issues and number of jurisdictions covered every day in the Global Legal Monitor (GLM).  Just in the stretch of the last four months, including February through May 2014, 157 articles were published, covering recent developments in various countries and areas of law.

Photo by Chris Carlson
Photo by Chris Carlson

Here is the list of the top ten most viewed articles published in the last four months:

  1. Taiwan: Law on Food Safety Amended
  2. Kenya: Parliament Passes Comprehensive Marriage Bill, Changes Process for Contracting Customary Marriages
  3. Nigeria: Supreme Court Invalidates Igbo Customary Law Denying Female Descendants the Right to Inherit
  4. OHADA: Revised Uniform Act on Companies

While preparing a post like this, one of the things I like to do is browse through the articles published during a certain period to identify recurring themes (the GLM makes this easy because it allows searching for items in different ways, including by author, topic and jurisdiction).  In doing so I noticed that the issue of children’s rights was one of the recurring themes in the articles published in the last four months.  Articles in this category discussed recently-adopted laws in Brazil making sexual exploitation of children a heinous crime, subject to harsher penalties, and banning foreigners convicted of pedophilia from entering the country; a plan in Indonesia to revise child protection laws, including increased the penalties imposed on people convicted of child abuse; a recent law in Kenya setting a minimum marriageable age of 18 years, which is applicable to all forms of marriage including Islamic and customary marriages; a proposal before a provincial assembly in Pakistan that would ban child marriage; and a multilateral United Nations treaty, which recently took effect, allowing children to file complaints directly with the United Nations.

Another recurring theme was the issue of immigration and immigrant benefits.  Articles in this category discussed a government-commissioned report in Finland calling for the extension of universal health benefits to undocumented immigrants, who are currently eligible for free emergency care only; an initiative in the Netherlands to combine the procedure for the issuance of residence and work permits for certain qualifying foreign nationals; a recent policy issued in Norway imposing restrictions on the type and accessibility of welfare assistance available to undocumented immigrants; and a recent ruling in Sweden in which the Administrative Supreme Court refused to review a case of an immigrant facing deportation on suspicion of terrorist tendencies, dismissing the claim that he was entitled to a review because his minor son, under his sole custody, is a Swedish citizen.

Finally, the Global Legal Monitor also featured a string of election themed articles.  These articles described various issues, including the power of an interim President in Egypt to issue a law regulating parliamentary elections; proposals in France aimed at preventing politicians from holding more than one of certain political offices concurrently; a lawsuit filed by a political party challenging a ruling of Indonesia‘s general elections commission that had disqualified its members from participating in provincial elections; a decree in Italy ending direct public financing of political parties; a proposal in Mexico criminalizing certain election-related acts, including ineligible voting, multiple voting, and voter roll tampering; a Constitutional Court ruling in Thailand invalidating the country’s recent general election; and Tunisia‘s recently adopted election law that will govern the country’s presidential and parliamentary elections.

Updated most days, the Global Legal Monitor is easy to access.  You can read more Global Legal Monitor articles by going to the Law Library website.  You can also sign up to receive email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feeds.  In addition, links to some GLM articles are tweeted via the Law Library’s Twitter account, @lawlibcongress, using the hashtag #GlobalLegalMonitor.  Stay connected!

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