by Konstantina Georgaki, Emmanuel Giakoumakis, and Alessandro Rollo

In June 2015, the European Court of Human Rights delivered the final judgment in the Delfi case, where it upheld the decision of an Estonian court to fine a news portal for hosting anonymous defamatory comments. This controversial judgment has a chilling effect on freedom of expression in cyberspace and paves the way for a slippery slope leading to online censorship. The key policy issue is striking a balance between freedom of expression and other protected interests, including privacy, reputation and national security. This paper argues that holding Internet Service Providers (ISPs) liable for third-party content places a disproportionate burden on them and destabilises the architecture of Web 2.0 to the detriment of human rights. To this end, we argue that a new regulatory approach is necessary to address the rights of ISPs in the attempt to balance freedom of expression with new developments in the need for protection of personal data.

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by Hannah Smith

Limited water resources, weak states and ethnic tensions across Central Asia lead many analysts to believe that the region will bear witness to the world’s first war over water. Through drawing on fieldwork, this study takes the example of the geographically isolated village of Barak (a Kyrgyz exclave) to demonstrate how water resources are manipulated strategically at a local level. This has profound consequences for communities and presents clear violations of basic human rights. The internationally community must act at a micro level to ensure that water does not become another tool of war.

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by Simon Damkjaer

The water resources community remains stuck in a futile debate of whether water constitutes a human right or a commodity, which is resolved through the content of General Comment 15: water constitutes a human right, which puts conditions on economic approaches to water and its commodification. Instead, it is time to
address the issue of globally adopted misrepresentative water scarcity metrics that misleadingly show increasing conditions of scarcity, which risks biasing the argument towards the commodification of water. Redefining these metrics to portray hydrologic realities, will more precisely inform the formulation of water policies and help advance solutions to global water problems.

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by Zaria Gorvett

The race to out-tech the enemy has been fuelling scientific discovery for thousands of years, generating some extraordinary inventions and thrusting humanity forwards into a modern age. In the wake of a succession of defence budget cuts in the UK and abroad, this article considers the legacy of military research.

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by Kai Ruggeri

What are the policy implications of patients who travel abroad to receive required medical care? Is there the possibility for a coordinated international response? These questions and many more are discussed by Kai, who highlights the clear lack of evidence on what is referred to as Global Health Access Policy (GHAP) to address the multitude of political, medical, and ethical issues surrounding this phenomenon. Kai suggests that dealing with the situation requires an understanding of its consequences for human welfare and outlines how his research group at Cambridge is engaging with the debate through evidence.

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