DEVELOPMENTS

From historic blizzards to flooding, headlines in 2010 have been dominated by extreme weather—even environmental chaos.  One of the latest victims of Mother Nature’s wrath is Russia, which has experienced its hottest summer in 130 years.

There have been several thousand heat-related deaths in Moscow alone, where the summer’s daily temperatures have hovered around 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  Between June and July 2010, the relentless heat spawned a total of 27,724 fires, destroying approximately 2,000 homes and leaving 1,000 Russian villagers displaced.  The resulting smoky haze–coupled with Moscow’s notorious smog—enveloped the city’s 10 million residents.  By August, reports estimated that the heat wave would kill at least 15,000 and cost the Russian economy $15 billion.  

The unfolding events debunk the myth that Russia is a climate change “winner.”  The “winner” theory posits that Russia stands to gain from increased global temperatures because it could reduce heating costs, lengthen its agricultural season, and access the mineral and energy resources currently buried beneath the Arctic tundra.  A 2007 report issued by the UNDP foreshadowed the crisis, concluding that climate change would not improve conditions in Russia, but rather would exacerbate its existing environmental, economic, and social issues. 

DEVELOPMENTS

Trans-national adoptions, considered by many to be a joyous experience for childless people looking to adopt, can sometimes turn into nightmarish scenarios not only for the adoptive parent involved, but also for the sending and receiving countries.

Usually when an adopted child is discovered to have behavioral or health-related problems, the adoptive parents address the situation by consulting a family medical practitioner. However, occasionally situations have been dealt with less responsibly. This is the case of Artem Saveliev, a seven-year-old Russian child adopted by Torry Ann Hansen of Shelbyville, Tennessee. After Torry Ann Hansen decided that caring for the child was too much to bear, the boy was sent back to Moscow by his adoptive grandmother, Nancy Hansen. Artem was sent with a note expressing Ms. Hansen’s desire to sever the adoption, as Artem displayed severe behavioral issues. Torry Ann Hansen claims that the orphanage in Eastern Russia had lied about Artem’s behavioral problems that had the tendency to lead to violent outbreaks by the child and that he posed a danger to Ms. Hansen’s family, including her ten-year-old son Logan.

DEVELOPMENTS

Although human rights are inherent in all individuals by virtue of their humanity, citizenship has been called “the right to have rights” because of the primary role that states play in protecting human rights.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, provides that everyone has a right to a nationality and that no one is to be arbitrarily deprived of it (Article 15).  But with the creation and development of the European Union and EU citizenship status, some argue that the importance of holding the citizenship or nationality of a certain State has significantly diminished and that in the EU, “citizenship as a legal status and as a bundle of rights has moved beyond the boundaries of a nation-state.”

To the extent that customary international law and certain treaties, conventions, and charters, both by the UN and the EU, expressly prohibit discrimination based on race (including ethnicity), or national or social origin, or in some conventions, nationality (among other things) -- and this prohibition applies to everyone regardless of citizenship or other legal or illegal status -- that position may have some merit.  These legal instruments, however, for the most part have not resulted in conferring specific enforceable rights and protections on stateless persons or otherwise eliminated statelessness.  This is in large part because within the EU (and universally), the decision of who becomes a citizen remains nearly exclusively within the purview of individual States as a matter of national sovereignty.  The EU does not have the authority to require Member States to naturalize anyone.  Furthermore, citizenship in the EU derives from being a citizen of a Member State: no one acquires EU citizenship without already being a citizen of a Member State.  

The European Union (EU) currently consists of 27 Member States, with Romania and Bulgaria becoming members most recently in 2007.  The greatest enlargement occurred in May 2004 with the accession of 10 States (Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia).  Croatia, Macedonia, and Turkey are candidate countries. Serbia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo are potential candidate countries.  With respect to the issue of statelessness, one group of note within the Member States of the EU and other European countries are the Roma, an ethnic minority living throughout Europe, but concentrated in Central Eastern Europe.