Meaning of Delinquent
• One who fails or neglects to perform his duty; an offender or transgressor; one who commits a fault or a crime; a culprit.
Failing in duty; offending by neglect of duty. Asynchronous Completion Token
The Asynchronous Completion Token design pattern efficiently dispatches processing actions within a client in response to the completion of asynchronous operations invoked by the client.
Also Known As Active Demultiplexing [PRS+99]
Example Consider a distributed Electronic Medical Imaging System (EMIS)
[PHS96] consisting of multiple components, such as image servers, which store and retrieve medical images [JWS98].1 The performance and reliability of an EMIS is crucial to physicians, medical staff, and patients using the system. Therefore, it is important to monitor the state of EMIS components carefully. Specialized agent components address this need by propagating events from other EMIS components, such as image servers, back to management applications. Administrators can use these management applications to monitor, visualize, and control [PSK+97] the EMIS’s overall status and performance.
For example, a management application can request that an agent notify it every time an image server on a host accepts a new network connection. Typically, such a request is issued by invoking an
1. Other components in a distributed EMIS include modalities, clinical and diagnostic workstations that perform imaging processing and display, hierarchical storage management (HSM) systems, and patient record databases [BBC94].
© Douglas C. Schmidt 1998, 1999, all rights reserved, © Siemens AG 1998, 1999, all rights reserved
26.11.1999 ACT.doc asynchronous operation on one or more agents in the system. When an agent on a particular host detects a new connection to the image server, it sends a completion event to the management application so that it can depict the new connection graphically on its monitoring console display.
However, a management application may have requested many different agents to send it notifications asynchronously for many types of events, each of which may be processed differently in the management application. For each completion event, therefore, the management application must determine the appropriate action(s), such as updating an administrators display or logging the event to a database. One way a management application could match up asynchronous operation requests with their subsequent completion event responses would be to spawn a separate thread for each event registration operation it invoked on an agent. Each operation would block synchronously, waiting for its agent’s responses. The action and state information required to process agent responses could be stored implicitly in the context of each thread's run-time stack.
Unfortunately, this synchronous multi-threaded design incurs several drawbacks. For example, it may lead to poor performance due to context switching, synchronization, and data movement overhead.2 As a result, developing management applications using separate threads to wait for each operation completion response can yield inefficient and overly complex solutions. Yet, the management application must associate service responses with client operation requests efficiently and scalably to ensure adequate quality of service for all its agents.
Context An event-driven system where clients invoke operations asynchronously on services and subsequently process the responses.
Problem When a client invokes an operation request asynchronously on one or more services, each service indicates its completion by sending a response back to the client. For each such completion response, the client must perform the appropriate action(s) to process the results of
2. The Example section of the Reactor pattern (97) describes the drawbacks of synchronous multi-threading in more detail.
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Asynchronous Completion Token 3
© Douglas C. Schmidt 1998, 1999, all rights reserved, © Siemens AG 1998, 1999, all rights reserved the asynchronous operation. Thus, we must define a demultiplexing mechanism to associate service responses with the actions to be performed by the client. To address this problem we must resolve the following three forces:
• When a service response arrives back at a client, it should spend as little time as possible determining the action(s) and state needed to process the completion of the associated asynchronous operation. In particular, searching a large table to associate a response with its request can be unacceptable if the performance of the client degrades significantly.
• It is hard for a service to know what information its clients need to process operation completions because it does not necessarily know the context in which clients invoked asynchronous operations.
Therefore, it should be the responsibility of the client, not the service, to determine what actions and state to associate with completion responses. • There should be as little communication overhead as possible between client and service to determine which action to perform in the client when the asynchronous operation completes. This is particularly important for clients that communicate with services over bandwidth-limited communication links, such as modem connections or wireless networks.
Solution Associate application-specific actions and state with responses that indicate the completion of asynchronous operations. For every asynchronous operation that a client invokes on a service, create an asynchronous completion token (ACT) that uniquely identifies the actions and state necessary to process the operation’s completion, and pass the ACT along with the operation to the service. When the service replies to the client, its response must include the ACT that was sent originally. The client can use the ACT to identify the state needed to process the completion actions associated with the asynchronous operation.
Structure The following participants form the structure of the Asynchronous
Completion Token pattern:
A service provides some type of functionality.
A client invokes operations on a service asynchronously.
4
© Douglas C. Schmidt 1998, 1999, all rights reserved, © Siemens AG 1998, 1999, all rights reserved
26.11.1999 ACT.doc
An asynchronous completion token (ACT) is a value that identifies the actions and state necessary for a client to process the completion of an asynchronous operation invoked on a service. The client passes the ACT to the service when it invokes an operation; the service returns the ACT to the client when the asynchronous operation completes. Services can hold a collection of ACTs to handle multiple client requests simultaneously. For a client, an ACT can be an index into a table or a direct pointer to memory. To the service, however, the
ACT is simply an opaque value that it returns unchanged to the client. The following UML class diagram illustrates the participants of the
Asynchronous Completion Token pattern and the relationships between these participants:
Class
ACT
Responsibility
• Identifies actions and state necessary for a client to process the completion of an asynchronous operation invoked on a service
Collaborator
Class
Client
Responsibility
• Invokes operations on a service asynchronously Collaborator
• Service
• ACT
Class
Service
Responsibility
• Provides application functionality
Collaborator
Client Service operation () calls operations
Asynchronous
Completion
Token
1..* 1..*
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Asynchronous Completion Token 5
© Douglas C. Schmidt 1998, 1999, all rights reserved, © Siemens AG 1998, 1999, all rights reserved
Dynamics The interactions in the Asynchronous Completion Token pattern are as follows:
• Before invoking an asynchronous operation on a service, the client creates the ACT associated with the operation.
• When invoking an operation on the service, the client passes the
ACT to the service.
• Clients can continue executing while the service performs the operation asynchronously.
• When the asynchronous operation completes, the service sends a response to the client that contains the original ACT. The client uses the ACT to regain any necessary state and apply the application-specific completion actions for that operation.
Implementation There are four steps involved in implementing the ACT pattern.
1 Define the ACT representation. An ACT representation must be meaningful for the client and opaque to the service. The following are three common ACT representations:
• Pointer-based ACTs. ACTs are often represented as pointers to programming language constructs, such as pointers to abstract base class objects in C++ or references to abstract base class objects in Java. When a client initiates an operation on a service, it creates the ACT and casts it to a void pointer. The pointer is then passed to the service along with the asynchronous operation call.
Pointer-based ACTs are primarily useful for passing ACTs among clients and services running on homogeneous platforms. Thus, it is necessary to use portability features, such as typedefs or
: Client
: ACT
: Service
ACT operation() notify() ACT
Other
client processing 6
© Douglas C. Schmidt 1998, 1999, all rights reserved, © Siemens AG 1998, 1999, all rights reserved
26.11.1999 ACT.doc macros, to ensure a uniform representation of pointers throughout heterogeneous distributed systems.
• Object reference-based ACTs. When implementing distributed object computing middleware using CORBA, developers can represent ACTs as object references. Upon receiving an object reference-based ACT back from a service, a client can use the
CORBA _narrow() operation to downcast the ACT to a type that is meaningful to it. CORBA object references provide a standard, portable, and interoperable means to communicate ACTs between clients and services. Naturally, object references may be inappropriate if CORBA is not used as the middleware platform.
• Index-based ACTs. Rather than using pointers or object references to represent ACTs, it is possible to implement them as indices into a table accessible by the client. Any state and actions can be associated with the appropriate index into the table. When a response arrives from the service, the client simply uses the ACT to access the corresponding entry in the table. This technique is particularly appropriate for languages, such as FORTRAN, that do not support pointers. Index-based ACTs are also useful for associating ACTs with persistent entities, such as database identifiers or offsets into memory-mapped files.
2 Determine how to pass the ACT from the client to the service. This step is typically straightforward. Clients can pass ACTs as explicit or implicit parameters in asynchronous operation requests. Explicit parameters are defined in the signature of the asynchronous operations. Implicit parameters are typically stored in a context or environment that’s passed transparently to the service.3 In the
Example Resolved section we show an example of how ACTs can be explicit parameters to service methods.
3 Determine a mechanism for holding the ACT at the service. Once the
ACT is received by a service, it must hold on to the ACT while performing the designated client operation. If a service executes synchronously, the ACT can simply reside in the run-time stack while
3. The CORBA service context field [OMG98d] is an example of an implicit parameter. 26.11.1999 ACT.doc

Asynchronous Completion Token 7
© Douglas C. Schmidt 1998, 1999, all rights reserved, © Siemens AG 1998, 1999, all rights reserved the service processes the operation. Thus, if a service is running in a different thread or process than its client, its operations can execute synchronously, while still providing an asynchronous programming model to the client [SV98].
Services that process client operations asynchronously, however, may need to handle multiple requests simultaneously. In this case, the service must maintain a collection of ACTs in a data structure that resides outside the scope of the run-time stack. The Manager pattern [PLoPD3] can be used to implement the collection of ACTs.
4 Determine a demultiplexing mechanism to dispatch the ACT back to the client. In some applications, when a client initiates an asynchronous operation request on a service, the ACT is returned just once, usually with the response. In other applications, however, ACTs from a single request may be returned multiple times. For instance, in our EMIS example, the client can use the same ACT to demultiplex and dispatch many agent responses that are associated with the same registration, such as a ‘connection established’ notification request.
In both the single and multiple response models, the following are common demultiplexing strategies used to dispatch ACTs back to a client when an asynchronous operation completes:
• Callbacks. In this strategy, a client specifies a function or object/ method that can be dispatched by a service, or a local service proxy if the service is remote, when an operation completes [Ber95]. The
ACT value itself can be returned as a parameter to the callback function or object/method.
Callbacks can be delivered to a client synchronously or asynchronously. In the synchronous approach, the client application typically waits in an event loop or reactor (97). When the response returns from the service it is dispatched to the appropriate callback. In the asynchronous approach the callback is invoked via a signal handler [POSIX95]. Thus, clients need not explicitly wait for notifications by blocking in an event loop. The
Example Resolved section shows an example of the synchronous callback approach using objects.
• Queued completion notifications. In this strategy, the client ‘pulls’ the ACT from a completion queue at its discretion.4 ACT notifications are placed in a completion queue by a service or a local ser8
© Douglas C. Schmidt 1998, 1999, all rights reserved, © Siemens AG 1998, 1999, all rights reserved
26.11.1999 ACT.doc vice proxy. Windows NT overlapped I/O and I/O completion ports
[Sol98] use this approach, as described in the Known Uses section.
Regardless of how the ACTs are returned to the clients, once they are returned, the job of the service is complete. Clients are responsible for processing the responses from completed operations and freeing any resources associated with the ACT.
Example
Resolved

Consider a scenario where an EMIS administrator uses a management application to monitor and log all connections made to a particular image server. The management application must first invoke an asynchronous operation request that registers with the image server's agent to notify it when connections are established.
Subsequently, when connections are established, completion events are sent by the agent and the management application must efficiently log the data and update its GUI accordingly.
The Asynchronous Completion Token (ACT) pattern supports the use case described above by allowing the management application to pass an opaque value as an ACT when it registers with the agent. For instance, the management application can pass a reference to a state object as the ACT. The state object itself contains references to a logging object and the appropriate GUI window that will be updated when connection notification responses arrive from the agent. The management application can use the state object referenced by the
ACT to update the correct user interface and record the event with the appropriate logging object.

When an event is generated by an EMIS component, the Agent sends the event to the agent_handler, where it is dispatched to the management applications via the recv_event() callback method.
The management application then uses the ACT returned by the agent to access the State object associated with the operation completion in order to decide the appropriate action to process each event completion. Image transfer events are displayed on a GUI window and logged to the console, whereas new connection events are displayed on a system topology window and logged to a database.
Variations Synchronous ACTs. ACTs can also be used for operations that result in synchronous callbacks. In this case, the ACT is not really an asynchronous completion token, but a synchronous one. Using ACTs for synchronous callback operations provides a well-structured means of passing state related to an operation through to a service.
In addition, this approach decouples concurrency policies so that the code that receives an ACT can be used for either synchronous or asynchronous operations.
Chain of service ACTs. A chain of services can occur when intermediate services also play the role of clients that initiate asynchronous operations on other services in order to process the original client’s operation. å For instance, consider a management application that invokes operation requests on an agent, which in turn invokes other requests on a timer mechanism. In this scenario, the management application client uses a chain of services. All intermediate services in the chain— except the two ends—are both clients and services because they receive and initiate asynchronous operations. o
A chain of services must decide which service ultimately responds to the client. Moreover, if each service in a chain uses the ACT pattern
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© Douglas C. Schmidt 1998, 1999, all rights reserved, © Siemens AG 1998, 1999, all rights reserved
26.11.1999 ACT.doc several issues related to passing, storing, and returning ACTs must be considered:
• If an intermediate service does not associate any completion processing with the asynchronous operation(s) it initiates, it can simply pass along the original ACT it received from its previous client. • When completion processing must be associated with an asynchronous operation and an intermediate service can be sure that its clients’ ACT values are unique, the service can use client
ACT values to index into a data structure that maps each ACT to completion processing actions and state.
• If an intermediate service cannot assume uniqueness of client
ACTs, the original ACT cannot be reused to reference intermediate completion actions and state. In this case, an intermediate service must create a new ACT and maintain a table that stores these ACTs so they can be mapped back to their original ACTs when the chain
‘unwinds’.
• If no service in the chain created new ACTs, then the last service in the chain can notify the client. This design can optimize the processing because, in this case, ‘unwinding’ the chain of services is unnecessary.
Non-opaque ACTs. In some implementations of the Asynchronous
Completion Token pattern, services do not treat the ACT as purely opaque values. For instance, Win32 OVERLAPPED structures are nonopaque
ACTs because certain fields can be modified by the kernel.
One solution to this problem is to pass subclasses of the OVERLAPPED structure that contain additional state.
Known Uses Operating system asynchronous I/O mechanisms. The Asynchronous
Completion Token pattern is used by most operating systems that support asynchronous I/O. The techniques used by Windows NT and POSIX are outlined below.
• Windows NT. ACTs are used in conjunction with handles, Overlapped
I/O, Win32 I/O completion ports on Windows NT [Sol98].
When Win32 handles5 are created, they can be associated with completion ports using the CreateIoCompletionPort() system call. Completion ports provide a location for kernel-level services to
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Asynchronous Completion Token 13
© Douglas C. Schmidt 1998, 1999, all rights reserved, © Siemens AG 1998, 1999, all rights reserved queue completion notification responses, which are subsequently dequeued and processed by clients that invoked the operations originally. For instance, when clients initiate asynchronous reads and writes via ReadFile() and WriteFile(), they specify OVERLAPPED structure ACTs that will be queued at a completion port when the operations complete. Clients use the GetQueuedCompletionStatus() system call to dequeue completion notifications, which contain the original OVERLAPPED structure as an ACT.
• POSIX. The POSIX Asynchronous I/O API [POSIX95] uses ACTs for its asynchronous I/O read and write operations. In the POSIX API, results can be dequeued through the aio_wait() and aio_suspend() interfaces, respectively. In addition, clients can specify that completion notifications for asynchronous I/O operations be returned via UNIX signals.
CORBA demultiplexing. The TAO CORBA Object Request Broker
[POSA3] uses the Asynchronous Completion Token pattern to demultiplex various types of requests and responses efficiently, scalably, and predictably on both the client and server, as described below.
• On a multiple-threaded client, for example, TAO uses ACTs to associate responses from a server with the appropriate client thread that invoked the request over a single multiplexed TCP/IP connection to the server process. Each TAO client request carries a unique opaque sequence number (the ACT), which is represented as a 32-bit integer. When an operation is invoked, the client-side
TAO ORB assigns its sequence number to be an index into an internal connection table managed using the Leader/Followers pattern (299). Each table entry keeps track of a client thread that is waiting for a response from its server over the multiplexed connection. When the server replies, it returns the sequence number ACT sent by the client. TAO's client-side ORB uses the ACT to index into its connection table to determine which client thread to awaken and pass the reply.
• On the server, TAO uses the Asynchronous Completion Token pattern to provide a low-overhead demultiplexing throughout the various layers of features in an Object Adapter [POSA3]. For
5. For Win32 overlapped I/O, handles are used to identify network connection endpoints or open files. Win32 handles are similar to UNIX file descriptors.
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© Douglas C. Schmidt 1998, 1999, all rights reserved, © Siemens AG 1998, 1999, all rights reserved
26.11.1999 ACT.doc instance, when a server creates an object reference, TAO Object
Adapter stores special object ID and POA ID values in its object key, which is ultimately passed to clients as an ACT contained in an object reference. When the client passes back the object key with its request, TAO's Object Adapter extracts the special values from the ACT and uses them to index directly into tables it manages.
This so-called ‘active demultiplexing’ scheme [PRS+99] ensures constant-time O(1) lookup regardless of the number of objects in a
POA or the number of nested POAs in an Object Adapter.
EMIS network management. The example described in this paper is derived from a distributed Electronic Medical Imaging System (EMIS) developed at Washington University for Project Spectrum [BBC94]. A network management application monitors the performance and status of multiple components in an EMIS. Agents provide the asynchronous service of notifying the Management Application of
EMIS events, such as connection events and image transfer events.
Agents use the Asynchronous Completion Token pattern so that the management application can efficiently associate state with the arrival of events from agents that correspond to earlier asynchronous registration operations.
FedEx inventory tracking. One of the most intriguing examples of the Asynchronous Completion Token pattern is implemented by the inventory tracking mechanism used by Federal Express postal services. A FedEx Airbill contains a section labeled: ‘Your Internal
Billing Reference Information (Optional: First 24 characters will appear on invoice).’ The sender of a package uses this field as an ACT.
This ACT is returned by FedEx (the service) to you (the client) with the invoice that notifies the sender that the transaction has completed.
FedEx deliberately defines this field very loosely: it is a maximum of
24 characters, which are otherwise ‘untyped.’ Therefore, senders can use the field in a variety of ways. For instance, a sender can populate this field with the index of a record for an internal database or with a name of a file containing a ‘to-do list’ to be performed after the acknowledgment of the FedEx package delivery has been received.
Consequences There are several benefits to using the Asynchronous Completion
Token (ACT) pattern:
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© Douglas C. Schmidt 1998, 1999, all rights reserved, © Siemens AG 1998, 1999, all rights reserved
Simplifies client data structures. Clients need not maintain complex data structures to associate service responses with completion actions. The ACT returned by the service contains all the information needed to demultiplex to the appropriate client completion action.
Efficient state acquisition. ACTs are time efficient because they need not require complex parsing of data returned with the service response. All relevant information necessary to associated the response with the original request can be stored either in the ACT or in an object pointed to by the ACT. Alternatively, ACTs can be used as indices or pointers to operation state for highly efficient access, thereby eliminating costly table searches.
Space efficiency. ACTs need not consume much space, yet can still provide applications with sufficient information to associate large amounts of state to process asynchronous operation completion actions. For example, in C and C++, ACTs that are four byte void pointers can reference arbitrarily large objects.
Flexibility. User-defined ACTs are not forced to inherit from an interface in order to use the service's ACTs. This allows applications to pass as ACT objects for which changing the type is undesirable or even impossible. The generic nature of ACTs can be used to associate an object of any type with an asynchronous operation. For instance, when ACTs are implemented as CORBA object references, they can be narrowed to the appropriate concrete interface.
Does not dictate concurrency policies. Long duration operations can be executed asynchronously because operation state can be recovered from an ACT efficiently. Thus, clients can be single-threaded or multithreaded, depending on application requirements. In contrast, a service that does not provide ACTs may force delay-sensitive clients to perform operations synchronously within threads to handle operation completions properly.
There are several liabilities to avoid when using the Asynchronous
Completion Token pattern.
Memory leaks. Memory leaks can result if clients use ACTs as pointers to dynamically allocated memory and services fail to return the ACTs, if the service crashes, for instance. Clients wary of this possibility should maintain separate ACT repositories or tables that can be used for explicit garbage collection if services fail.
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Application re-mapping. If ACTs are used as direct pointers to memory, errors can occur if part of the application is re-mapped in virtual memory. This situation can occur in persistent applications that may be restarted after crashes, as well as for objects allocated out of a memory-mapped address space. To protect against these errors, indices to a repository can be used as ACTs. The extra level of indirection provided by index-based ACTs protects against remappings, because indices can remain valid across re-mappings, whereas pointers to direct memory may not.
Authentication. When an ACT is returned to a client upon completion of an asynchronous event, the client may need to authenticate the
ACT before using it. This is necessary if the server cannot be trusted to have treated the ACT opaquely and may have changed the value of the ACT.
See Also The Asynchronous Completion Token and Memento [GHJV95] patterns are similar with respect to the participants. In the Memento pattern, originators give mementos to caretakers who treat the Memento as ‘opaque’ objects. In the ACT pattern, clients give ACTs to services that treat the ACTs as ‘opaque’ objects. However, these patterns differ in motivation and applicability. The Memento pattern takes ‘snapshots’ of object states, whereas the ACT pattern associates state with the completion of asynchronous operations. Another difference is in the dynamics. In the ACT pattern, the client—which corresponds to the originator in Memento—creates the ACT proactively and passes it to the service. In Memento, the caretaker, that is the client in terms of Asynchronous Completion Token, requests the creation of a memento from an originator, which is reactive.
Credits Thanks to Paul McKenney and Richard Toren for their insightful comments and contributions.

A/RES/48/104 85th plenary meeting 20 December 1993

48/104. Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women

The General Assembly,

Recognizing the urgent need for the universal application to women of the rights and principles with regard to equality, security, liberty, integrity and dignity of all human beings,

Noting that those rights and principles are enshrined in international instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,

Recognizing that effective implementation of the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women would contribute to the elimination of violence against women and that the Declaration on the
Elimination of Violence against Women, set forth in the present resolution, will strengthen and complement that process,

Concerned that violence against women is an obstacle to the achievement of equality, development and peace, as recognized in the Nairobi
Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women, in which a set of measures to combat violence against women was recommended, and to the full implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women,

Affirming that violence against women constitutes a violation of the rights and fundamental freedoms of women and impairs or nullifies their enjoyment of those rights and freedoms, and concerned about the long-standing failure to protect and promote those rights and freedoms in the case of violence against women,

Recognizing that violence against women is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women, which have led to domination over and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of the full advancement of women, and that violence against women is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men,

Concerned that some groups of women, such as women belonging to minority groups, indigenous women, refugee women, migrant women, women living in rural or remote communities, destitute women, women in institutions or in detention, female children, women with disabilities, elderly women and women in situations of armed conflict, are especially vulnerable to violence,

Recalling the conclusion in paragraph 23 of the annex to Economic and
Social Council resolution 1990/15 of 24 May 1990 that the recognition that violence against women in the family and society was pervasive and cut across lines of income, class and culture had to be matched by urgent and effective steps to eliminate its incidence,

Recalling also Economic and Social Council resolution 1991/18 of 30 May
1991, in which the Council recommended the development of a framework for an international instrument that would address explicitly the issue of violence against women,

Welcoming the role that women's movements are playing in drawing increasing attention to the nature, severity and magnitude of the problem of violence against women,

Alarmed that opportunities for women to achieve legal, social, political and economic equality in society are limited, inter alia, by continuing and endemic violence,

Convinced that in the light of the above there is a need for a clear and comprehensive definition of violence against women, a clear statement of the rights to be applied to ensure the elimination of violence against women in all its forms, a commitment by States in respect of their responsibilities, and a commitment by the international community at large to the elimination of violence against women,

Solemnly proclaims the following Declaration on the Elimination of
Violence against Women and urges that every effort be made so that it becomes generally known and respected:

Article 1

For the purposes of this Declaration, the term "violence against women" means any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.

Article 2

Violence against women shall be understood to encompass, but not be limited to, the following:

(a) Physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring in the family, including battering, sexual abuse of female children in the household, dowry-related violence, marital rape, female genital mutilation and other traditional practices harmful to women, non-spousal violence and violence related to exploitation;

(b) Physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring within the general community, including rape, sexual abuse, sexual harassment and intimidation at work, in educational institutions and elsewhere, trafficking in women and forced prostitution;

(c) Physical, sexual and psychological violence perpetrated or condoned by the State, wherever it occurs.

Article 3

Women are entitled to the equal enjoyment and protection of all human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field. These rights include, inter alia:

(a) The right to life;

(b) The right to equality;

(c) The right to liberty and security of person;

(d) The right to equal protection under the law;

(e) The right to be free from all forms of discrimination;

(f) The right to the highest standard attainable of physical and mental health;

(g) The right to just and favourable conditions of work;

(h) The right not to be subjected to torture, or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 4

States should condemn violence against women and should not invoke any custom, tradition or religious consideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination. States should pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating violence against women and, to this end, should:

(a) Consider, where they have not yet done so, ratifying or acceding to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women or withdrawing reservations to that Convention;

(b) Refrain from engaging in violence against women;

(c) Exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate and, in accordance with national legislation, punish acts of violence against women, whether those acts are perpetrated by the State or by private persons;

(d) Develop penal, civil, labour and administrative sanctions in domestic legislation to punish and redress the wrongs caused to women who are subjected to violence; women who are subjected to violence should be provided with access to the mechanisms of justice and, as provided for by national legislation, to just and effective remedies for the harm that they have suffered; States should also inform women of their rights in seeking redress through such mechanisms;

(e) Consider the possibility of developing national plans of action to promote the protection of women against any form of violence, or to include provisions for that purpose in plans already existing, taking into account, as appropriate, such cooperation as can be provided by non-governmental organizations, particularly those concerned with the issue of violence against women;

(f) Develop, in a comprehensive way, preventive approaches and all those measures of a legal, political, administrative and cultural nature that promote the protection of women against any form of violence, and ensure that the re-victimization of women does not occur because of laws insensitive to gender considerations, enforcement practices or other interventions;

(g) Work to ensure, to the maximum extent feasible in the light of their available resources and, where needed, within the framework of international cooperation, that women subjected to violence and, where appropriate, their children have specialized assistance, such as rehabilitation, assistance in child care and maintenance, treatment, counselling, and health and social services, facilities and programmes, as well as support structures, and should take all other appropriate measures to promote their safety and physical and psychological rehabilitation;

(h) Include in government budgets adequate resources for their activities related to the elimination of violence against women;

(i) Take measures to ensure that law enforcement officers and public officials responsible for implementing policies to prevent, investigate and punish violence against women receive training to sensitize them to the needs of women;

(j) Adopt all appropriate measures, especially in the field of education, to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women and to eliminate prejudices, customary practices and all other practices based on the idea of the inferiority or superiority of either of the sexes and on stereotyped roles for men and women;

(k) Promote research, collect data and compile statistics, especially concerning domestic violence, relating to the prevalence of different forms of violence against women and encourage research on the causes, nature, seriousness and consequences of violence against women and on the effectiveness of measures implemented to prevent and redress violence against women; those statistics and findings of the research will be made public;

(l) Adopt measures directed towards the elimination of violence against women who are especially vulnerable to violence;

(m) Include, in submitting reports as required under relevant human rights instruments of the United Nations, information pertaining to violence against women and measures taken to implement the present Declaration;

(n) Encourage the development of appropriate guidelines to assist in the implementation of the principles set forth in the present Declaration;

(o) Recognize the important role of the women's movement and non-governmental organizations world wide in raising awareness and alleviating the problem of violence against women;

(p) Facilitate and enhance the work of the women's movement and non-governmental organizations and cooperate with them at local, national and regional levels;

(q) Encourage intergovernmental regional organizations of which they are members to include the elimination of violence against women in their programmes, as appropriate.

Article 5

The organs and specialized agencies of the United Nations system should, within their respective fields of competence, contribute to the recognition and realization of the rights and the principles set forth in the present Declaration and, to this end, should, inter alia:

(a) Foster international and regional cooperation with a view to defining regional strategies for combating violence, exchanging experiences and financing programmes relating to the elimination of violence against women;

(b) Promote meetings and seminars with the aim of creating and raising awareness among all persons of the issue of the elimination of violence against women;

(c) Foster coordination and exchange within the United Nations system between human rights treaty bodies to address the issue of violence against women effectively;

(d) Include in analyses prepared by organizations and bodies of the United Nations system of social trends and problems, such as the periodic reports on the world social situation, examination of trends in violence against women;

(e) Encourage coordination between organizations and bodies of the United Nations system to incorporate the issue of violence against women into ongoing programmes, especially with reference to groups of women particularly vulnerable to violence;

(f) Promote the formulation of guidelines or manuals relating to violence against women, taking into account the measures referred to in the present Declaration;

(g) Consider the issue of the elimination of violence against women, as appropriate, in fulfilling their mandates with respect to the implementation of human rights instruments;

(h) Cooperate with non-governmental organizations in addressing the issue of violence against women.

Article 6

Nothing in the present Declaration shall affect any provision that is more conducive to the elimination of violence against women that may be contained in the legislation of a State or in any international convention, treaty or other instrument in force in a State.

Vol. 10, No. 1
Combating Roadside Hazards:
INSURANCE INSTITUTE for Highway Safety
January 10, 1975
New Book Develops Legal Strategies
Four Washington attorneys, in a landmark book being published this month, have developed a wide range of strategies for citizens and organizations to harness federal, state and local laws in order to eliminate roadside hazards.
The 592-page book is the result of an exhaustive, two-year study by James F. Fitzpatrick, Michael
N. Sohn, Thomas E. Silfen, and Robert H. Wood, who are with the firm of Arnold & Porter in Washington,
D.C. The study was originated and sponsored by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Entitled, The Law and Roadside Hazards, the book is being published by the Michie Company.
The new book establishes a series of legal frameworks for forcing removal of roadside hazards that already exist along the nations' highways. (Last month, the Center for Auto Safety released a study that exposed inadequate planning by federal and state officials that allows roadside hazards to be built in the first place. See Status Report, Vol. 9, No. 23, Dec. 26, 1974.)
The book points out the "surprising lag in the development of the law in response to the roadside hazard," even though "of the 56,000 highway deaths in 1972, about one-third reportedly occurred when the vehicle collided with a fixed object on or along the road, rolled over (possibly because of steep roadside slopes or dropoffs), or otherwise came to grief after leaving the pavemen1."
Factors that may have contributed to the law's indifference, it says, include "the preoccupation of state and federal governments with new road construction," and "the tendency of private litigants to be concerned essentially with compensation for injuries, rather than eliminating the agent of injuries."
The Law and Roadside Hazards focuses on the responsibility and liability of:
• Highway engineers and consultants accountable for designing roadside hazards.
• Road contractors accountable for faulty construction and failure to eliminate hazards.
• Utility companies accountable for dangerously placed light and utility poles and for concrete and other non-breakaway pole supports.
• Federal, state and local agencies and officials accountable for dangerous guard rails, culverts, signs, embankments, trees, shoulders, and bridge supports, and for poor judgement in failing to correct known roadside hazards.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is an independent, nonprofit, scientIfic and educational organIzatIon. It is de