In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Convention for Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Biomedicine: Convention on Human Rights and BiomedicineCouncil of EuropePreambleThe Member States of the Council of Europe, the other States and the European Community signatories hereto,Bearing in mind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948;Bearing in mind (...) the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 4 November 1950;Bearing in mind the European Social Charter of 18 October 1961;Bearing in mind the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966;Bearing in mind the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data of 28 January 1981;Bearing also in mind the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 20 November 1989;Considering that the aim of the Council of Europe is the achievement of a greater unity between its members and that one of the methods by which that aim is to be pursued is the maintenance and further realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms;Conscious of the accelerating developments in biology and medicine;Convinced of the need to respect the human being both as an individual and as a member of the human species and recognising the importance of ensuring the dignity of the human being; [End Page 277]Conscious that the misuse of biology and medicine may lead to acts endangering human dignity;Affirming that progress in biology and medicine should be used for the benefit of present and future generations;Stressing the need for international co-operation so that all humanity may enjoy the benefits of biology and medicine;Recognising the importance of promoting a public debate on the questions posed by the application of biology and medicine and the responses to be given thereto;Wishing to remind all members of society of their rights and responsibilities;Taking account of the work of the Parliamentary Assembly in this field, including Recommendation 1160 (1991) on the preparation of a Convention on bioethics;Resolving to take such measures as are necessary to safeguard human dignity and the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual with regard to the application of biology and medicine;Have agreed as follows:Chapter IGeneral provisionsArticle 1. (Purpose and object)Parties to this Convention shall protect the dignity and identity of all human beings and guarantee everyone, without discrimination, respect for their integrity and other rights and fundamental freedoms with regard to the application of biology and medicine.Each Party shall take in its internal law the necessary measures to give effect to the provisions of this Convention.Article 2. (Primacy of the human being)The interests and welfare of the human being shall prevail over the sole interest of society or science.Article 3. (Equitable access to health care)Parties, taking into account health needs and available resources, shall take appropriate measures with a view to providing, within their jurisdiction, equitable access to health care of appropriate quality. [End Page 278]Article 4. (Professional standards)Any intervention in the health field, including research, must be carried out in accordance with relevant professional obligations and standards.Chapter IIConsentArticle 5. (General rule)An intervention in the health field may only be carried out after the person concerned has given free and informed consent to it.This person shall beforehand be given appropriate information as to the purpose and nature of the intervention as well as on its consequences and risks.The person concerned may freely withdraw consent at any time.Article 6. (Protection of persons not able to consent)1. Subject to Articles 17 and 20 below, an intervention may only be carried out on a person who does not have the capacity to consent, for his or her direct benefit.2. Where, according to law, a minor does not have the capacity to consent to an intervention, the intervention may only be carried out with the authorisation of his or her representative or an authority or a person or... (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 355-366.

Biobanking in Europe has made major steps towards harmonization and shared standards for the collection and processing of data and samples stored in biobanks. Still, biobanks and researchers face substantial legal difficulties in the field of data protection and sample management. Data protection law was harmonized almost 15 years ago while rights in samples fall under the competence of the Member States of the EU. Despite the Data Protection Directive the field of data protection shows a substantial degree of (...) deviation as public health was excluded from the harmonization. Biobanks seem to have substantially fewer difficulties to cope with in terms of the legal requirements in the field of sample management. This paper discusses the legal framework, experiences of different biobanks in Europe and potential ways forward. It also highlights the need for a health economic analysis of the costs and benefits of privacy protection in Europe. At the moment, policymakers seem to build their decisions on an insufficient evidence base which underestimates the potential value of biobanks for European public health. Within the past few years little progress has been achieved with regards to the development of a unified legal framework in Europe, The diversity in the legal system is also reflected in the different approaches of ethics committees towards biobanking. To secure the responsible and effective use of data and samples, more efforts are needed to come up with pathways for a solution. (shrink)

Biobanking in Europe has made major steps towards harmonization and shared standards for the collection and processing of data and samples stored in biobanks. Still, biobanks and researchers face substantial legal difficulties in the field of data protection and sample management. Data protection law was harmonized almost 15 years ago while rights in samples fall under the competence of the Member States of the EU. Despite the Data Protection Directive the field of data protection shows a substantial degree of (...) deviation as public health was excluded from the harmonization. Biobanks seem to have substantially fewer difficulties to cope with in terms of the legal requirements in the field of sample management. This paper discusses the legal framework, experiences of different biobanks in Europe and potential ways forward. It also highlights the need for a health economic analysis of the costs and benefits of privacy protection in Europe. At the moment, policymakers seem to build their decisions on an insufficient evidence base which underestimates the potential value of biobanks for European public health. Within the past few years little progress has been achieved with regards to the development of a unified legal framework in Europe, The diversity in the legal system is also reflected in the different approaches of ethics committees towards biobanking. To secure the responsible and effective use of data and samples, more efforts are needed to come up with pathways for a solution. (shrink)

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery (in painting, photography, prints, film, and design) of race construction primarily in Scandinavia and the empires of Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Russia at a time when the disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and publications on race were debating competing theories of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. These regions, while on the periphery of continental Europe, largely marginalized in the scholarship of nineteenth-century art history, and ignored (...) by Edward Said (Orientalism 1978), have been central locations for theorizing white identity and for containing diverse ethnic populations that have generated substantive ethnographic study and regional conflicts since the eighteenth century. This anthology explores art that engaged with ethnography and anthropology to shape visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures, both indigenous (Roma, Sámi, Inuit, and Celts) and migrant or colonial (Muslims and Blacks), chiefly between 1850 and 1930, but extending into the early twenty-first century. The essays in this book contribute to postcolonial research by documenting colonial-style treatment of minority groups and by seeking to qualify binary systems through explorations of anomalies, complexities, and contradictions that emerge when seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts. This book presents a range of different artistic voices that responded to ethnographic and anthropological information by producing images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued that information. The authors seek to uncover instances of connections and variability, to establish the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and to challenge the certainties of racial categorization. (shrink)

"The enterprise initiative is probably the most significant political and cultural influence to have affected Western and Eastern Europe in the last decade. In this book, academics from a range of disciplines debate Mary Douglas's distinctive Grid Group cultural theory and examine how it allows us to analyse the complex relation between the culture of enterprise and its institutions. Mary Douglas, Britain's leading cultural anthropologist, contributes several chapters."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Summary It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century after her death in 1797 due to the negative impact of her husband William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) on her posthumous reputation. By providing the first full-scale reception history of Wollstonecraft in continental Europe in the long nineteenth century—drawing on rare book research, translations of understudied primary sources, and Wollstonecraft scholarship from the nineteenth century to (...) the present—this article applies a revised Rezeptionsgeschichte approach to tracing her intellectual influence on the woman question and organised feminism in Europe. Although the Memoirs and post-revolutionary politics everywhere dampened and even drove underground the reception of her persona and ideas in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft's reception in nineteenth-century continental Europe, like the United States, was more positive and sustained in comparison to the public backlash she faced as a ‘fallen woman’ in her homeland of Britain through the bulk of the Victorian era. (shrink)

Concerning race and its intertwinements with gender, sexual orientation, class, accents, or ability there is a scarcity of social psychological research in Europe. With an intersectional approach studying racism in Europe it is possible to detect specific experiences of discrimination. The prevalent understanding of European racism is connected to migration from the former colonies to the European metropoles and the post-Second-World-War immigration of ‘guest workers.’ Thus, the focus of this research is on work-related discrimination. Against the background of (...) a short historical review, we present the results of the few existing studies on intersectional discrimination within the labor market in Europe and discuss their implications. The pattern of findings is more complex than the assumption that individuals belonging to two or more marginalized social categories are always the most discriminated ones. Gender, sexual orientation, and origin rather interact with the specific job context. These interactions determine whether minority individuals are discriminated against or even preferred over individuals belonging to the majority group. We argue that considering the stereotype content model and social-identity theory helps to structure the sometimes contradictory results of intersectionality research. Therefore, the review presents new perspectives on racism in Europe based on current research, develops hypotheses on the interplay of intersecting identities, and identifies four novel research questions based on racist attributions considering situational variables: These are the role of concrete job contexts in explaining discrimination, the influence of different stereotypes regarding marginalized groups, the explanatory value of sexual orientation as well as class or socioeconomic-status and age in terms of some patterns of results. (shrink)

Although 'populism' has become something of a buzzword in discussions about politics, it tends to be studied by country or region. This is the first book to offer a genuine cross-regional perspective on populism and its impact on democracy. By analyzing current experiences of populism in Europe and the Americas, this edited volume convincingly demonstrates that populism can be both a threat and a corrective to democracy. The contributors also demonstrate the interesting similarities between right-wing and left-wing populism: both (...) types of populism are prone to defend a political model that is not against democracy per se, but rather at odds with liberal democracy. Populism in Europe and the Americas offers new insights into the current state of democracy from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. (shrink)

When the Belmont Report was published in 1979, the European research ethics community was very small, even if we take this community to include everyone who was working in research ethics academically or professionally, and the report itself made very little impact in European medical journals.1 If we try to trace Belmont’s later reception history in Europe and in much of the bioethics literature worldwide, we find that it is most often quoted either as a landmark in the history (...) of research ethics, without any further explication of its actual content; as a forerunner of the principle-based approach to biomedical ethics developed by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in The Principles of Biomedical Ethics ; or... (shrink)

Psychotherapy was an invention of European modernity, but as the 20th century unfolded, and we trace how it crossed national and continental borders, its goals and the particular techniques by which it operated become harder to pin down. This introduction briefly draws together the historical literature on psychotherapy in Europe, asking comparative questions about the role of location and culture, and networks of transmission and transformation. It introduces the six articles in this special issue on Greece, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Russia, (...) Britain and Sweden as well as its parallel special issue of History of Psychology on ‘Psychotherapy in the Americas’. It traces what these articles tell us about how therapeutic developments were entangled with the dramatic, and often traumatic, political events across the continent: in the wake of the Second World War, the emergence of Communist and authoritarian regimes, the establishment of welfare states and the advance of neoliberalism. (shrink)

Islam in Europe delves into the daily routines of European Muslim communities in order to provide a better understanding of what it means to be a European Muslim today. Instead of positing particular definitions of being Muslim, this volume invites and encourages a diverse body of 735 informants from Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK to reflect on who they are and on the meaning and place Islam has in such considerations. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and suggesting (...) novel ways of seeing the phenomenon of European Islam and the continent's Muslim communities, Islam in Europe examines how through their practices, discourses, face to face and mediated interaction, European Muslims construct notions or identity, agency, solidarity and belonging, or how they negotiate and redefine religion, tradition, authority and cultural authenticity. Theoretically and methodologically innovative, Islam in Europe makes a significant contribution to better understanding European Islam and Europe's Muslims. (shrink)

Agroecology has been proposed as a key building block for food sovereignty. This article examines the meaning, practices and potentials of ‘transformative agroecology learning’ as a collective strategy for food system transformation. Our study is based on our qualitative and action research with the European Coordination of Via Campesina to develop the European Agroecology Knowledge Exchange Network. This network is linked to the global network of La Via Campesina and builds on the strong experiences and traditions of popular education in (...) Latin American peasant movements. Rather than focusing on agroecology education as a process of individual learning, we analyse how a transformative agroecology education can be strengthened as a critical repertoire of action used by social movements to advance food sovereignty. Our analysis contributes a new theory of transformative agroecology learning based on four key characteristics or qualities: horizontalism; diálogo de saberes ; combining practical and political knowledge; and building social movement networks. While these different elements of transformative agroecology learning were present across EAKEN, they were unevenly developed and, in many cases, not systematized. The framework can help to strategically and reflexively systematize and strengthen a transformative agroecology learning approach as a key building block for food sovereignty. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of the fragility of Western liberal democracies, the divisions in Western society as a whole and within particular countries, and the loss of faith in the Western model of civilization. My focus will be (1) on the initial enchantment of the Eastern European countries (with special emphasis on Romania) with the West European models of freedom, democracy, lifestyle, and living standards, which explains why these countries overwhelmingly voted in favor of joining the European Union after (...) the fall of Communism; and (2) on their subsequent disenchantment with how far liberal democracies could go, and their general discontent with the restrictions and preconditions imposed on them for obtaining EU funding for their economic development. In dealing with the issue of globalism, nationalism and identity, I will elaborate on the role of identity, personal and national, in the creation of roots, stability, self-esteem, hard work and progress, with reference to the manifestations of populism in Europe. Finally, I will consider the positive effects Eastern countries with their traditionalism and religious values could have on their Western counterparts, in order to revive and sustain their initial enchantment and diminish their disenchantment with Europe, the European Union, and Western civilization. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the challenge European states have imposed on themselves, namely, to provide state-of-the-art health care equally to all and for less than market price. Continued endorsement of that challenge in these states hinges on their character as media democracies: the public is moved by a supposed morally warranted expectation that all should receive adequate health care at no significant personal cost. The structural and economic constraints that hamper such forms of healthcare delivery result in systems that are (...) financially inefficient and fail to provide the quality of treatment patients are led to expect. This essay examines the tension between secular moral claims to social solidarity and the actual limits of accessibility to healthcare services. Its critical focus addresses both the difficulties that result from politicians invoking high moral ideals while framing their decisions around short-term political advantage, and the transformation of the Enlightenment’s secular aspirations into a political ideology that distorts such moral ideals. This essay concludes that the commitments to very particular notions of equality and human dignity, which frame contemporary Europe’s provision of publicly subsidized health care, have given rise to a governance that is morally incoherent and unsustainable. This failure of public health care in Europe can thus be read as one more belated manifestation of the epistemological and moral failure of the Enlightenment’s secularizing project, a failure which should invite contemporary Europeans to honestly face the moral challenge of postmodernity. (shrink)

In the context of some criticism about social responsibility education in business schools, the paper reports findings from a survey of CSR education (teaching and research) in Europe. It analyses the extent of CSR education, the different ways in which it is defined and the levels at which it is taught. The paper provides an account of the efforts that are being made to mainstream CSR teaching and of the teaching methods deployed. It considers drivers of CSR courses, particularly (...) the historical role of motivated individuals and the anticipation of future success being dependent on more institutional drivers. Finally it considers main developments in CSR research both by business school faculty and PhD students, tomorrow''s researchers and the resources devoted to CSR research. The conclusion includes questions that arise and further research directions. (shrink)

With the recent Clinical Trials Directive, a degree of harmonisation into research ethics committees across Europe, including the time taken to assess a trial proposal and the kinds of issues a committee should take into account, has been introduced by the European Union . How four different member states—Hungary, Portugal, Sweden and the UK—have chosen to implement the directive is shown. Although this has resulted in four very different ways of structuring RECs, similar themes are present in all four (...) cases, such as centralisation of control over RECs within member states, harmonisation of REC procedures across the EU and increased role of political decision making with regard to such committees. (shrink)

This article looks at the role of the European Union in promoting substantive equality for men and women in the European labour market. For this purpose it looks at the assumptions about gender roles and gender divisions of labour enshrined by EU directives on maternity rights and parental leave. The article presents a theoretical discussion of the role of EU policies in protecting women's rights and thus promoting a socioeconomic model that allows men and women to reconcile work and family (...) life. The main policies at the heart of this research are the 1992 Pregnant Worker Directive, the 1996 Parental Leave Directive, the 1992 Childcare Recommendations and the 2000 Council Resolution on Balanced Participation in Work and Family Life. The article thus assesses the gender biases of EU policies and the ensuing implications for the future of gender relations and socioeconomic trends in Europe. (shrink)

Controversy often follows when patents are obtained in a pioneering area of technology. Patent filing activity in the field of regenerative medicine and in relation to stem cells in particular has not escaped opprobrium, although it is instructive to compare the nature of the debates that are taking place over the patenting of stem cells in the US and Europe. In the US, debate over the early patent applications made by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has been intense2, but (...) at least it appears to have been grounded firmly in patent law principles. In Europe, the debate has skewed away from the basic patent law tenets of novelty, inventiveness and industrial utility and has entered something of a twilight zone, with the European Patent Office serving as a diffident forum for difficult moral and ethical arguments about the destruction of human embryos and the commercial exploitation of human life. (shrink)

The article of Alla Aristova «Migrant crisis in Europe: challenges for interreligious relations» identifies and classifies main features of the current wave of migration from the Muslim countries to Europe, its differences from the previous migration inflows of the last century, and the potential impact on inter-religious relations, social and religious processes in European society.

This work is a collection of contributions by different European authors discussing the work of US-American philosopher-theologian John D. Caputo. Though Caputo is by now a well-known figure in the USA, reception of his work in European academic contexts varies widely from place to place. This volume thus brings together fourteen theologians and philosophers in or from Europe to “gather Catholic and Protestant voices around Caputo’s work to evaluate the match with the European context” and, in so doing, “add (...) to the European reception of Caputo’s radical theology” (1–2). Some might wonder if Caputo, though clearly a leading contemporary thinker, quite lends himself to this kind of reading as a “primary”. (shrink)

While Peirce claimed that he was not well acquainted with aesthetics, he always was interested in that field. In spite of the fact that Peirce did not develop the issue in depth, aesthetics is located in his general framework as the foundation for the other normative sciences. Perhaps the trips through Europe and the contemplation of so many works of art and of historic places left in his memory the impressions that are at the basis of the importance that (...) Peirce would assign to art and aesthetics in his later years. (shrink)

Since the path-breaking work of Karl Deutsch on security communities and Ernst Haas on European integration, it has been clear that international institutions may create senses of community and belonging beyond the nation state. Put differently, they can socialize. Yet the mechanisms underlying such dynamics have been unclear. This volume explores these mechanisms of international community building, from a resolutely eclectic stand point. Rationalism is thus the social theory of choice for some contributors, while others are more comfortable with social (...) constructivism. This problem-driven perspective and the theoretical bridge building it are the cutting edge in international relations theory. By providing more fined-grained arguments on precisely how international institutions matter, such an approach sheds crucial light on the complex relationship between states and institutions, between rational choice and social constructivism, and, in our case, between Europe and the nation state. (shrink)

This book describes the state of astrobiology in Europe today and its relation to the European society at large. With contributions from authors in more than 20 countries and over 30 scientific institutions worldwide, the document illustrates the societal implications of astrobiology and the positive contribution that astrobiology can make to European society. The book has two main objectives: 1. It recommends the establishment of a European Astrobiology Institute (EAI) as an answer to a series of challenges relating to (...) astrobiology but also European research, education, and society at large. 2. It also acknowledges the societal implications of astrobiology, and thus the role of the social sciences and humanities in optimizing the positive contribution that astrobiology can make to the lives of the people of Europe and the challenges they face. (shrink)

In a clear, accessible journalistic style, generously illustrated with examples, the two authors report on the variety of responses found in each country & on ...

In recent years, historians have rediscovered the religious dimensions of the Enlightenment. This volume offers a thorough reappraisal of the so-called “Catholic Enlightenment” as a transnational Enlightenment movement. This Catholic Enlightenment was at once ultramontane and conciliarist, sometimes moderate but often surprisingly radical, with participants active throughout Europe in universities, seminaries, salons, and the periodical press._ In _Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History_, the contributors, primarily European scholars, provide intellectual biographies of twenty Catholic Enlightenment figures across (...) eighteenth-century Europe, many of them little known in English-language scholarship on the Enlightenment and pre-revolutionary eras. These figures represent not only familiar French intellectuals of the Catholic Enlightenment but also Iberian, Italian, English, Polish, and German thinkers. The essays focus on the intellectual and cultural factors influencing the lives and works of their subjects, revealing the often global networks of intellectual sociability and reading that united them both to the Catholic Enlightenment and to eighteenth-century policies and projects. The volume, whose purpose is to advance the understanding of a transnational "Catholic Enlightenment," will be a reliable reference for historians, theologians, and scholars working in religious studies. "This is a compelling collection on an important subject. Its transnational and biographical approach helps one to see eighteenth-century Catholicism and the Enlightenment itself in fresh and interesting ways." — Darrin M. McMahon, Florida State University_. (shrink)

Clinical ethics has developed significantly in Europe over the past 15 years and remains an evolving process. While sharing our experiences in different European settings, we were surprised to discover marked differences in our practice, especially regarding the position and role of patients. In this paper, we describe these differences, such as patient access to and participation or representation in ethics consults. We propose reasons to explain these differences, hypothesizing that they relate to the historic and sociocultural context of (...) implementation of clinical ethics consultation services (Cecs), as well as the initial aims for which each structure was established. Then, we analyse those differences with common ethical arguments arising in patient involvement. We conclude that there is no unique model of best practice for patient involvement in clinical ethics, as far as Cecs reflect on how to deal with the challenging ethical issues raised by patient role and position. (shrink)