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The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the creation of safe academic (education and research) environments that offer proper protections to adult academics and staff, so that academia and society at large may benefit from the fruits of safe workplaces. Not all academic environments are entirely safe, and there are recorded cases of victims of harassment and sexual abuse.

Given that co-workers in a laboratory, or research subjects in a research project, may be victims of harassment or sexual abuse, and that the same individuals may then become co-authors or anonymized research subjects, respectively, in academic papers, there is a need to appreciate what structural protection exists for such victims at the post-publication level. What should academia do with the literature of legally recognized sex offenders who have published in peer-reviewed and indexed academic journals?

Currently, there is no specific guidance by ethics organizations (e.g., Committee on Publication Ethics and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) to deal with this issue, so protective mechanisms for adult victims, as well as punitive measures against perpetrators at the post-publication stage, are needed.

There may be career-altering repercussions – personal, professional and reputational – for co-authors of legally recognized sex offenders in papers published in peer-reviewed and indexed journals. There may also be life-altering outcomes to victims of sexual abuse who are the study subjects of such papers. Thus, a robust form of post-publication protection (and justice) based on unbiased and independent ethical and legal investigations, coordinated by editors, publishers and research institutes, needs to be established.

This paper aims to explore the role played by the National Archives of South Africa in human rights promotion and protection. The study examined the challenges that archivists encounter when undertaking archival functions, such as acquisition, appraisal and access provision, that contribute to forming documentary archives crucial for human rights promotion and protection.

A review of literature dealing with acquisition, appraisal and access was used in this research. It was supplemented with interviews.

This paper provides recommendations of benefits in the field of archives management with a focus on the areas of acquisition, appraisal and access. The transformational discourse in the jurisdiction of archives management challenges archival institutions to be active players in selecting historical and cultural archives’ significance that is significant in human rights protections. However, despite judicial requirements that recommend the importance of archives, there is evidence that archival functions such as appraisal, acquisition and access are not being fully used, resulting in national archives institutions that are subject to irregularities that contribute to an unbalanced archives collection.

The paper was limited only to the National Archives of South Africa.

The paper makes practical implications concerning the acquisition, appraisal and providing access to human rights records.

Sufficient funding resource allocation ought to be provided to advance human rights promotion.

This paper offers informed recommendations to address the challenges of acquisition, appraisal and access provision of archive materials. The availability of archives materials reinforces the community by aiding to protect legal rights and prevent human rights violations. It was, thus, necessary to establish whether the National Archives of South Africa is actively building the archives collections that are important for human rights promotion and protection.

Migrant women face unique difficulties, such as labour discrimination, limited sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services, obstacles to family reunification, gender-based violence (GBV) and human trafficking. ¹ The European Commission's labour integration approach currently fails to account for these difficulties. Civil society organisations (CSOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) attempt to fill these gaps but lack capacity and funding. The European Commission's current approach does not respect human dignity and impedes the migrant community's integration and inclusion. This chapter discusses sexual assault and gender-based violence, which may be disturbing to some readers.

This issue is relevant and important because migrant women comprise a large portion of the migrant population ² and are a vital part of the migrant community. The methodology used in this chapter is a human security framework with a people-centred approach to policy that empowers those impacted by it. Research for this chapter was conducted using news articles, academic articles, UN reports and publications. Based on this, the European Commission must take a holistic and binding approach that protects the rights and dignity of migrant women.

There are multiple approaches that the European Commission can take to incorporate human dignity into its policies towards women and migration, such as applying international conventions and implementing policies that account for migrant women. All approaches must be realistic and required of all member states.

Currently, consumers of financial products and services have become more vulnerable to predatory financial institutions, especially in the aftermath of Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, financial consumers like the persons with disabilities (PWDs) should be equipped with knowledge and skills to help them to evaluate complex financial products on offer in financial markets, especially in developing countries to avoid being victims of fraudulent lending. The purpose of this study is to establish whether customized financial literacy mediates the relationship between financial consumer protection and financial inclusion of PWDs’ owned MSMEs in rural Uganda post Covid-19 pandemic.

SmartPLS 4.0 was used to construct the measurement and structural equation models to test whether customized financial literacy significantly mediates the relationship between financial consumer protection and financial inclusion of PWDs’ owned MSMEs in rural Uganda post Covid-19 pandemic.

The results revealed a partial mediating effect of customized financial literacy in the relationship between financial consumer protection and financial inclusion of PWDs’ owned MSMEs in rural Uganda post Covid-19 pandemic. Conducting customized financial literacy increases financial consumer protection by 12 percentage points to promote financial inclusion of PWDs’ owned MSMEs in rural Uganda post Covid-19 pandemic.

This study focused only on customized financial literacy and financial consumer protection to promote universal financial inclusion of PWDs’ owned MSMEs post Covid-19 pandemic. Future studies may use data collected from other vulnerable groups amongst the unbanked population in developing countries, Uganda inclusive. In addition, this study also collected only quantitative data from the selected population. Further studies can be conducted using key informant interviews and focused group discussion to get the perceptions of the PWDs on being protected from exploitation by unscrupulous financial institutions.

The findings from this study can help policymakers in developing countries like Uganda to revise the existing consumer protection law to include strong clauses on protection of people with special needs like the PWDs. The law must ensure that they are not exploited by financial institutions because of their conditions. The law ought to make sure that the PWDs are educated about their rights in the financial market place and all information on financial products offered by financial institutions should be simplified and interpreted to them before they make consumption decisions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the present study is amongst the first few studies to provide a meticulous and unique discourse on the ever increasing role of financial literacy combined with consumer protection to reduce consumption risks within the financial markets, especially in developing countries in the aftermath of global pandemic shocks. This study uses the social learning theory, theory of reasoned action and theory of planned behaviour to elucidate how customized financial literacy can enhance consumer protection to increase financial inclusion of groups with special needs like the PWDs who have become more susceptible to exploitation by unscrupulous financial institutions in under-developed financial markets, especially in post Covid-19 pandemic.

Is more child participation always better for child rights advocacy? That is the question I examine, in this chapter, as I analyse advocacy for child rights in India that led to the adoption of the landmark Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (the ‘POCSO Act’). Through ethnographic fieldwork with non-government organisations (NGOs) and a narrative analysis of interviews and awareness material, I tell the story of how a combination of adult-led but child-participatory advocacy brought about a new, de-tabooised way of talking about child sexual abuse. By applying the theoretical lens of ‘critical child rights studies’, I suggest how we can conceptualise a critical perspective on child participation in child rights advocacy. First, adults’ multiple and, at times, conflicting roles in children’s lives – as advocates, protectors, and abusers – needs to be recognised. Second, children should participate in advocacy activities where they can have meaningful influence and be part of the conversation. This may not necessarily occur in adult spaces, where their participation remains token. Finally, I argue that child participation should never turn into a responsibilisation of children.

The purpose of this article is to provide a critical account of the hate crime (HC) paradigm by exploring its historical legal definition and the limitations in addressing the multiple and structural discriminations faced by minority groups. Specifically, the article focuses on the case of Italy, where in recent years a fierce debate over a proposed law on HC against LGBT+ and disabled people ended in its rejection due to neoconservative and Catholic opposition.

Drawing on critical socio-criminological literature on HC, the paper analyses the Italian debates and socio-legal context over the past two decades regarding discrimination against LGBT+ groups and its (lack of) criminalization. It also provides a secondary analysis of recent data on violence and discrimination against LGBT+ people, collected by the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA).

The analysis of the debate and the data collected shows that the criminal definition of HC is insufficient to capture the wider range of social and cultural violence and discrimination against LGBT+ people. Indeed, data analysis shows the effect of the low level of recognition of rights on the propensity of people to denounce and of social practitioners to recognize, discrimination and violence against LGBT+ people. It is therefore argued that the discussion on HC should move beyond the criminalization of individual violence to be entrenched in a broader reflection over the lack of recognition of sexual citizenship rights which perpetuates the vulnerability of LGBT+ people.

This paper contributes to the international socio-criminological debate on HC. It argues for a comprehensive framework that recognizes the structural nature of discrimination and violence against vulnerable groups by framing discrimination and violence against LGBT+ people as a citizenship right rather than a criminal justice issue.

Granting ‘sanctuary’ in the United States to those fleeing poverty and violence is rooted in a deep history of hospitality and compassion. As we are witnessing a rise in xenophobia accompanied by policies of exclusion, we also see a rising number of ‘sanctuary jurisdictions’ limiting their cooperation with immigration authorities that many communities consider are using extremely harsh and punitive measures to detain and deport irregular migrants. As this chapter will demonstrate, there has been a dramatic increase through ‘immigration federalism’ of the number of these jurisdictions in cities, states and municipalities since the first practices of ‘sanctuary’ in the 1980s as result of the waves of forced migration due to the civil wars in Central America. The author also proposes that those entities granting ‘sanctuary’ to irregular migrants should also apply practices of ‘compassionate migration’ as described in the chapter to expand their protections further and include them in their communities.

This chapter explores what it means for adults to claim child rights. Focussing on activism against institutional child abuse, it considers the question of what happens to the mobilisation of child rights discourse when the person claiming those rights is no longer a child. In other words, how is the concept of child rights used retrospectively and what does this reveal, both about childhood and about child rights? The chapter begins with the contention that childhood needs to be understood as not only a concept that speaks to the lives of children, their experiences, and their place within the social structure. Rather, we suggest that a more expansive view enables recognition of the enduring significance of childhood in adults’ lives. We illustrate this argument with examples of the formation of collective identities based on childhood experiences, before turning to the ways that child rights are marshalled by adults in activism, in commissions of inquiry, and in the legal sphere. Throughout the chapter, we consider issues of temporality. We explore the ways in which adult survivors of childhood abuse retrospectively claim rights denied to them in the past and we examine how activism, official inquiries, and legal mechanisms position adults in relation to their childhood selves. We then consider some of the dilemmas that arise with retrospective rights claims; particularly questions of retroactivity in relation to responsibility and redress for past abuse. Finally, we explore the temporal repositioning of childhood and how past and present is bridged. This occurs through survivor activism and, in more formal mechanisms such as inquiries, by focussing on how people are represented as child victims in the past and survivors in the present.

This study aims to determine experimentally factors affecting the satisfaction of retail stock investors with various investor protection regulatory measures implemented by the Government of India and Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). Also, an effort has been made to gauge the level of satisfaction of retail equities investors with the laws and guidelines developed by the Indian Government and SEBI for their invested funds.

To accomplish the study’s goals, a well-structured questionnaire was created with the help of a literature review, and copies of it were filled by Punjabi retail equities investors with the aid of stockbrokers, i.e. intermediaries. Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Mohali-area intermediaries were chosen using a random selection procedure. Xerox copies of the questionnaire were given to the intermediaries, who were then asked to collect responses from their clients. Some intermediaries requested the researcher to sit in their offices to collect responses from their clients. Only 373 questionnaires out of 1,000 questionnaires that were provided had been received back. Only 328 copies were correctly filled by the equity investors. To conduct the analysis, 328 copies, which were fully completed, were used as data. The appropriate approaches, such as descriptives, factor analysis and ordinal regression analysis, were used to study the data.

With the aid of factor analysis, four factors have been identified that influence investors’ satisfaction with various investor protection regulatory measures implemented by government and SEBI regulations, including regulations addressing primary and secondary market dealings, rules for investor awareness and protection, rules to prevent company malpractices and laws for corporate governance and investor protection. The impact of these four components on investor satisfaction has been investigated using ordinal regression analysis. The pseudo-R-square statistics for the ordinal regression model demonstrated the model’s capacity for the explanation. The findings suggested that a significant amount of the overall satisfaction score about the various investor protection measures implemented by the government/SEBI has been explained by the regression model.

A study could be conducted to analyse the perspective of various stakeholders towards the disclosures made and norms followed by corporate houses. The current study may be expanded to cover the entire nation because it is only at the state level currently. It might be conceivable to examine how investments made in the retail capital market affect investors in rural areas. The influence of reforms on the functioning of stock markets could potentially be examined through another study. It could be possible to undertake a study on female investors’ knowledge about retail investment trends. The effect of digital stock trading could be examined in India. The effect of technological innovations on capital markets can be studied.

This research would be extremely useful to regulators in developing policies to protect retail equities investors. Investors are required to be safeguarded and protected to deal freely in the securities market, so they should be given more freedom in terms of investor protection measures. Stock exchanges should have the potential to bring about technological advancements in trading to protect investors from any kind of financial loss. Since the government has the power to create rules and regulations to strengthen investor protection. So, this research will be extremely useful to the government.

This work has societal ramifications. Because when adequate rules and regulations are in place to safeguard investors, they will be able to invest freely. Companies will use capital wisely and profitably. Companies should undertake tasks towards corporate social responsibility out of profits because corporate houses are part and parcel of society only.

Many investors may lack the necessary expertise to make sound financial judgments. They might not be aware of the entire risk-reward profile of various investment options. However, they must know various investor protection measures taken by the Government of India & Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to safeguard their interests. Investors must be well-informed on the precautions to take while dealing with market intermediaries, as well as in the stock market.

The study aimed to listen to refugee survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and/or torture and explore what justice meant to them in exile. This study argues that what the survivors who participated in this research wanted was “viable justice”. The research was funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust.

Using a survivor-focussed justice lens combined with a trauma-informed approach, narrative interviews were held with 41 women and 20 men refugee survivors living in refugee settlements in Northern Uganda. The researchers also conducted semi-structured interviews with 37 key informants including refugee welfare councils, the UN, civil society, non-government and government organisations. Thematic analysis of the data resulted in the following themes being identified: no hope of formal justice for atrocities that occurred in South Sudan; insecurity; lack of confidence in transitional justice processes in Ugandan refugee settlements; abuse and loss of freedom in refugee settlements; and lack of access to health and justice services in refugee settlements.

This study argues that what the survivors who participated in this research wanted was “viable justice”. That is justice that is survivor-centred and includes elements of traditional and transitional justice, underpinned by social justice. By including the voices of both men and women survivors of SGBV and/or torture and getting the views of service providers and other stakeholders, this paper offers an alternative form of justice to the internationally accepted types of justice, which offer little relevance or restitution to refugees, particularly where the crime has been committed in a different country and where there is little chance that perpetrators will be prosecuted in a formal court of law.

The research findings are based on a small sample of South Sudanese refugees living in three refugee settlements in Northern Uganda. Thus, wider conclusions should not be drawn. However, the research does suggest that a “viable justice” approach should be implemented that is gender and culturally sensitive and which could also be trialled in different refugee contexts.

Improvements in refugee survivors’ dignity, resilience and recovery are dependent upon the active engagement of refugees themselves using a “survivor-focussed approach” which combines formal and community-based health services with traditional and transitional justice responses.

The provision of a “viable justice approach” ensures those who have experienced SGBV and/or torture, and their families, feel validated. It will assist them to use their internal, cultural and traditional resilience and agency in the process of recovery.

The research findings are original in that data was collected from men and women survivors of SGBV and/or torture and service providers. The empirical evidence supports this study’s recommendation for an approach that combines both formal and survivor-focussed approaches towards health and viable justice services to meet the needs of refugees living in refugee settlements. This is a response that listens to and responds to the needs of refugee survivors in a way that continues to build their resilience and agency and restores their dignity.