InSITE
A Current Awareness Service of
Cornell Law Library

ISSN 1521-9046

ARCHIVE

Vol. 16, no. 17
May 2, 2011
InSITE highlights selected law-related World Wide Web sites in two ways: as an annotated publication issued electronically and in print; and as a keyword-searchable database.

The law librarians at Cornell evaluate potentially useful Web sites, select the most valuable ones, and provide commentary and subject access to them. These information can be accessed as following:

    1. Current Issue
    2. Archived Issues
    3. Searchable Database
    4. RSS Feeds RSS FEED of the Current Issue Editions [What is RSS?]
    5. E-mail subscription: send the following request to lyris@cornell.edu:
      join INSITE-L 'your name'
      where your name(include the quotation marks) is the name you want to be available to the list's administrator. You must send this message from the e-mail address where you want to receive the e-list's messages
    6. In print format for the Cornell Law School community

Clean Clothes Campaign
    URL: http://www.cleanclothes.org/
    Based in the Netherlands, the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) was founded in 1989. CCC is an alliance of trade unions, NGOs, and other entities in 15 European countries and works to “ensure that the fundamental rights of workers are respected.” The Campaign lobbies governments and businesses, educates consumers, while teaming with workers in their quest for rights and improved working conditions. By partnering with over 200 organizations, CCC assists garment workers in achieving their goals. The website conveys the activities of CCC, while also providing relevant information resources. Highlights of CCC’s work are organized under two tabs: Urgent Actions and Campaigns, with the urgent actions focused on issues in need of an immediate response. For both, the reader is provided with an extensive explanation of the issue and with action steps that they can take. Issues currently in focus on the site include an urgent action item on the arrest of a Cambodian trade union leader, and a campaign to remedy the malnutrition of women garment workers in several countries. The Resources section of the site provides more in-depth discussion of issues and projects. These publications are organized into themes of working conditions, corporate accountability, and gender. CCC’s newsletter is available, as well as photos documenting Campaign activities and promotional videos.
    [Author: M. Morrison]
United Nations Legal Publications Global Search
    URL: http://untreaty.un.org/cod/globalsearch/dtSearch/Search_Forms/dtSea
    rch.html
    The United Nations Global Search engine provides a cross-database search option for researchers interested in easily locating multiple types of UN legal publications pertaining to a particular topic. Documents are organized into “indexes,” and it is important to note that an index or combination of indexes must be selected in order to generate a successful search. Selection of indexes allows for searching across all documents at once, in individual publications such as yearbooks, International Court of Justice judgments, arbitral awards, or any combination thereof. There is a detailed set of search instructions with clear explanations of the proffered search options, including ones that are not entirely self-explanatory, such as “stemming” and “fuzzy searching.” The variations are extensive and highly sophisticated, thereby providing for well-constructed searches that generate excellent results. The list of search results is set forth in a side bar on the left side of the page. This leaves the search instructions open on the right, providing quick reference and making it easy to modify one’s query. The results list ranks materials by a relevancy score, provides the title and size of each document, and the number of “hits” or times the search term appears in the document. Typical of UN databases, materials are provided in PDF format. Each document opens in a side bar on the right side of the page, obscuring the search instructions, but keeping the list of search results visible on the left for reference. Search terms are highlighted throughout the document and buttons in the toolbar provide for easy navigation between them. The only weakness of the resource is that the website often freezes, but this may be a passing glitch.
    [Author: A. Emerson]
Worker-participation.eu
    URL: http://www.worker-participation.eu/
    Worker-participation.eu, a project of the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), promotes workers’ rights and worker participation in all levels of corporate governance in the European Union. Article 27 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union includes worker participation as a fundamental right. This website offers a wealth of useful research materials. The section on National Industrial Relations has two useful tools: a translation dictionary for trade union terms (English to German, German to English, French to German, and German to French) and an encyclopedia-type tool that describes industrial labor relations in each of the EU countries and throughout Europe as a whole, discussing topics such as unions, collective bargaining, and worker health and safety. This tool is also available in map format, and can be used to compare selected countries and topics. The section on European Works Councils provides a link to ETUI’s European Works Councils Database of more than 3000 documents and council directives, along with FAQs and facts gathered from the database. The site offers extensive information about established and planned European Companies; most of the information about individual companies is available after free registration, but some information requires a paid subscription to access. This section also has a tool to compare EU member countries’ transposition into their own laws of the European Companies (SE) Directive, and links to legal documents and papers. The website also has laws and information about EU corporate governance, the EU Framework for Information, Consultation, and Participation Rights, and the European Social Dialogue. Throughout the site there are links to scores of organizations involved with labor and employment law in the EU along with other resources. Updates to the site are posted in the ‘What’s new?’ part of the About section; the site is updated frequently. Worker-participation.eu is an information-rich resource that everyone involved with EU labor and employment law should bookmark.
    [Author: I. Haight]


InSITE contributors: A. Emerson, I. Haight, M. Morrison, J. Pajerek (editor)
© 2011 Cornell Law Library

The contents of this publication and any recommendations therein are the opinions of the authors and do not reflect the views of Cornell University.