The text of the Sigismund III sentence in the disputes of Kiev burghers with castle craftsmen about refusing them to participate in «munitio a conditio» of the city, the castle burghers under threat of a fine (500 kopecks of the Lithuanian hryvnas) forced to perform fortification works and participation in raising funds in the public order for the defense of the city is published. The decree was issued on February 28, 1622 in Warsaw in Polish. It was included in the collection of letters confirming the Magdeburg Law of Kyiv (from 1544 to 1659) by Polish rulers. Collection of privileges copied at the beginning of the XVIII century for the own needs of Burmese Koz’ma Krychevetc. It was translated from Polish and Latin into Ukrainian by sotnyks A. Trotcyna and M.Yagelnytskyi. The monumental book is stored in the Central State Historical Archive of Kyiv. In the article the linguistic features of the monumental book on the graphic, phonetic and morphological levels are analyzed. Variants in writing that are caused by the written tradition of that time, the lack of normalization of old and new forms, the writers’ idiolect and the influence of Polish and, less often, the Church Slavonic language. The vocabulary has been characterized from the point of view of its origin, the presence of a large number of Polonisms, Latinisms and Germanisms has been noted. In the text translators often used words-doublets and synonyms for clarification of a number of concepts.
In EU law a lot of attention has recently been paid to personal data protection standards. In parallel to the development of the general EU rules on data protection, the Members States also develop cooperation between law enforcement agencies and create new information exchange possibilities, including the processing of personal data of participants in criminal proceedings. The aim of this article is to analyse whether the personal data of victims of crime are safeguarded according to the standards of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. For this purpose, the author analyses two directives: 2012/29/EU, which regulates minimum standards of victims of crime; and 2016/680/EU (also known as the Law Enforcement Directive), which regulates personal data processing for the purpose of combating crime. Based on the example of the Polish legislation implementing both directives, the author comes to the conclusion that the EU legislation is not fully coherent and leaves too much margin of appreciation to the national legislator. This results in a failure to achieve the basic goals of both directives. The author expects the necessary reflection not only from the national legislator, but also from the European Commission, which should check the correctness of the implementation of the directives, as well as from national courts, which should use all possible measures to ensure that the national law is interpreted in the light of the objectives of the directives.
This article analyses the capacity of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance to counteract the democratic governance shortfall. It argues that the tangible impact of the treaty on the states’ practice has been limited by various endogenous and exogenous factors. The former are identified as directly linked to content of the document and refer to the accuracy of the drafting. The latter are rooted outside the text and beyond the character of the Charter and include issues relating to the states’ reluctance to ratify the document, certain constitutional constraints undermining implementation on the national level, and the weak international guarantees of enforcement.
Is the fact that the majority of the population in the Middle East belongs to Islam actually the reason why human rights in Muslim-majority countries appear to be so difficult to work out and enforce? Are Islam and human rights not basically compatible? Historically it cannot be disputed that the thought of human rights first took shape in the European and Western context. Over the course of several centuries, it became widely accepted, and finally the thought of human rights also became a political reality as they were implemented in democratic states and constitutions. However, it would be a wrong conslusion, as for instance has been emphasized by Heiner Bielefeldt, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, to say that the ability to implement human rights, in particular thoughts about freedom and the equality of all people, is a one-sided affair and can only occur in the Western-Christian context. As far as Heiner Bielefeldt is concerned, this historic development, however, justifies neither the assertion that it had to happen as it did, nor does it justify Western representatives’ taking sole occupation of considerations relating to human rights thinking. Viewed from this perspective, human rights cannot boast a “Western” origin or a “Christian” character in a way that they would be incompatible with notions justified by Islam. Having that said, one is still to a large degree able to recognize a desolate situation in matters relating to human rights in Muslim-majority countries. But conflicts between Islam and human rights do not arise automatically out of the religious affiliation of a majority of the people. They certainly do stand out in those places where for political decision-making authorities Sharia law ranks higher than human rights and the granting of human rights is made dependent upon a traditional interpretation of the Sharia. Apart from the societal advocacy of human rights, there is the question as to the framework within which theological assessments of human rights questions occur. The following article aims at pointing to three discernable positions about human rights in the context of Islamic theologians, the a) the inclusive position, b) the pragmatic position, and c) the progressive position.