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What happens to a fund that is listed pursuant to a product specific rule filing once the fund is eligible to operate under Rule 6c-11 and elects to list on Nasdaq under Rule 5704?

Publication Date: Apr 10 2020 The SEC will withdraw the existing approval order and the fund will become subject to the requirements of Rule 6c-11 and Nasdaq Rule 5704....




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How can a company rely on the COVID-19 exception to shareholder approval requirements?

Publication Date: May 4 2020 On May 1, 2020, Nasdaq adopted Rule 5636T, operative through, and including, June 30, 2020, to provide listed companies with a temporary exception from certain shareholder approval requirements. A Company must submit an application to Nasdaq’s Listing Qualifications Department demonstrating that the transaction satisfies the requirements in Rule 5636T and must provide the Notification Form: Listing of Additional Shares (“LAS Form”) required by...





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Security and Prosperity in Asia: The Role of International Law

1 November 2019

The 'Security and Prosperity in Asia' conference looked at the impact of international law in the Asia-Pacific with a focus on regional economic and security issues such as the South China Sea disputes.

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Singapore skyline at sunset, 2016. Photo: Getty Images.

About the Conference

At a time of geopolitical uncertainty and with multilateralism under pressure, this conference brought together diverse actors to explore the evolving role of international law on critical security and economic issues in the Asia-Pacific. From trade agreements to deep-sea mining, cyberwarfare to territorial disputes, the breadth of the discussion illustrated the growing reach of international law in the region.

Hosted by the International Law Programme and the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House on 27 March 2019, the conference focused on three themes: trade and investment, maritime security and governance, and emerging security challenges. What trends are emerging in terms of engagement with international law in the region, and how can international standards play a greater role in encouraging collaboration and reducing tensions? And, with the eastward shift in geopolitical power, how will Asia-Pacific states shape the future of international law?




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Unending Cycles of Abuse: The Practice of Bacha Bazi in Afghanistan

Research Event

6 February 2020 - 6:00pm to 7:00pm

Chatham House | 10 St James's Square | London | SW1Y 4LE

Event participants

Charu Lata Hogg, Associate Fellow, Asia-Pacific Programme, Chatham House
Hameed Hakimi, Research Associate, Asia-Pacific Programme and Europe Programme, Chatham House
Chair: Champa Patel, Head of Asia-Pacific Programme, Chatham House

Afghanistan has suffered decades of armed conflict resulting in a heavily armed and militarized society involving multiple armed actors and with children being disproportionately affected by the conflict. In March 2019, the Afghanistan government criminalized the harmful practice of bacha bazi, or ‘boy play’, which triggers a range of human rights violations against boys and young men. However, recent research conducted by the All Survivors Project and Youth Health and Development Organisation demonstrates that the practice is widely prevalent due to poverty, prevailing gender norms and widespread impunity. This event will look at research that was conducted in the four provinces of Balkh, Herat, Kandahar and Kabul following interviews with over 100 key informants, 24 survivors and with 13 focus group discussions. 

The event will be preceded by the screening of a documentary on the practice of bacha bazi in Afghanistan which includes interviews with survivors, key government officials and NGOs. The speakers will discuss how an increase in the intensity of conflict in recent years has removed protection mechanisms and increased the vulnerability of all children to conflict-related sexual violence.

Event attributes

Chatham House Rule

Lucy Ridout

Programme Administrator, Asia-Pacific Programme
+44 (0) 207 314 2761




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The institutionalization of the Indo-Pacific: problems and prospects

8 January 2020 , Volume 96, Number 1

Kai He and Huiyun Feng

Although the term ‘Indo-Pacific’ has become popular in the foreign policy discourse of some countries, we have yet to see any significant institution-building in the Indo-Pacific region. Borrowing insights from functional institutionalism and political leadership studies of international regimes, we introduce a ‘leadership–institution’ model to explore the problems and prospects of institutionalizing the Indo-Pacific. Through a comparative case study of the institutionalization of the Asia–Pacific vs the Indo-Pacific, we argue that two crucial factors contributed to the slow institutionalization of the Indo-Pacific as a regional system in world politics: the lack of ideational leadership from an epistemic community and the weak executive leadership from a powerful state. While ideational leaders can help states identify and expand common interests in cooperation, executive leadership will facilitate states to overcome operational obstacles in cooperation, such as the ‘collective action’ problem and the ‘relative gains’ concern. The future of institution-building in the Indo-Pacific will depend on whether and how these two leadership roles are played by scholars and states in the region. In the conclusion, we discuss the challenges of institutionalizing the Indo-Pacific and highlight China as a wild card in the future of Indo-Pacific regionalism.




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Asian States Must Rethink Their Approach to Digital Governance

17 January 2020

Vasuki Shastry

Associate Fellow, Asia-Pacific Programme
Too many governments in the region are focusing on control and surveillance instead of citizens’ rights.

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Kashmiri students use the internet at a tourist reception centre in Srinagar, after internet facilities were suspended across the region in December 2019. Photo: Getty Images.

Asia’s political class learnt many lessons on digital governance in 2019, not all of them positive.

The prolonged protests in Hong Kong and India, led by disaffected young citizenry and enabled by social media tools, powerfully demonstrated how things could spiral out of control when the virtual and the real streets come together.

Not surprisingly, governments across the region are taking a step back. Instead of placing the citizen at the heart of digital public policy – with privacy, trust, security and inclusion as drivers of digital governance – Asian governments are focusing instead on surveillance and command and control, which contradicts the spirit of a decentralized Internet and undermines citizen’s rights.

Asia’s digital governance is fragmenting from the global norm and morphing into two platforms with remarkably similar characteristics.

One is a China-driven model aptly called the Great Firewall where surveillance of citizens is an explicit objective and any external material deemed to be subversive is kept out. A complementary model has also emerged more recently, which can best be described as China-light, which seeks to emulate the control aspects of the Great Firewall.

There are of course overlaps between emulators of the China model (this list includes Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos) and those pursuing China-light (Singapore, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia). A common thread running through these two approaches, which differ only in intensity and scope, is the belief that the state is best positioned to police social media and protect the rights of citizens.

This was not how it was supposed to be. A decade ago, Asian political leaders spoke about the virtues of an open internet. Such talk has faded, and a narrowing of Asia’s digital space is taking place against a backdrop of an intensifying trade war between America and China, where regional supply chains run the risk of a decoupling into distinct Sino and American spheres, upending Asia’s durable economic model of the past few decades.

Digital fragmentation in the world’s fastest growing region, with five G20 members, will complicate efforts to build global governance and standards.

Asia’s digital landscape

Asian governments, including democratic ones, have developed an unhealthy obsession with what their citizens are up to on a daily basis. Their solution is round-the-clock monitoring in cities and towns, powered by new surveillance technologies.

Name tagging and facial recognition to track movement of citizens has become pervasive across the region, with China emerging as the preferred source of technology, knowledge, and techniques. While India’s Supreme Court has ruled that privacy is a fundamental right, translating this into concrete citizen’s protections will be difficult with the Modi government eager to emulate China’s approach.

Asian governments are also following China in requiring that their citizen’s data be housed within national borders and are rebelling against the established practice of data offshoring.

In the post-Snowden era and amidst increasing cyber risks, there are rational national security reasons for why governments may want to ring-fence customer data within national boundaries. However, Asian governments are paying little or no attention to how companies are using customer data within national boundaries, with widespread abuses going unchecked.

Global standards are still evolving and there is a strong case here for a uniform regional approach, perhaps via ASEAN or APEC, on standards governing customer privacy, payments, data collection and handling. Big tech companies and platforms operate across much of Asia and a regional approach will curb their current instinct of conducting regulatory arbitrage.

There is a genuine problem in Asia, as elsewhere in the world, with the proliferation of fake news and extremism. But instead of addressing the source of this problem, governments are clamping down by generously expanding the definition of fake news (Singapore) or by shutting down the internet altogether (India, Sri Lanka, and China being serial offenders).

As disseminators of news of all stripes, including the fake variant, the big tech firms have a primary responsibility in policing their platforms. However, the regulatory capacity of many Asian governments to monitor this is weak and in crisis situations, governments prefer to shut the pipes altogether.

Digitalization of course is not all about surveillance and holds the promise of driving inclusion. There is considerable hype within Asia on the promise of fintech as an enabler of this inclusion.

Hong Kong and Singapore are licensing new digital banks, India’s UPI (unified payments interface) is reducing friction in domestic payments and China’s BAT companies (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) are disrupting traditional commerce and payments, and seeking to expand in the region.

However, there is an elite focus in many of these initiatives, with the target market being the region’s rising middle class rather than those at the bottom of the income ladder. Making fintech work for all will require micro-initiatives with the support of NGOs, local governments and small enterprises, with the objective of digitalizing microfinance.

Here developing Asia will again benefit from learning from each other and in building regional approaches. India’s Aadhar for example, with appropriate security safeguards, is a model for Asia in terms of building digital identity.

Given differing regional and national objectives, it is difficult to imagine a global accord for digital governance any time soon. However, by signing on to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Transpacific Partnership (CPTPP, the successor to the TPP), Asia has consistently demonstrated its leadership in trade and regional governance.

This is why the region needs to come together to ensure that the promise and potential of digitalization flows evenly and equitably to the region, with the region’s 3.8 billion citizens at the heart, rather than at the margins of sensible public policy.




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Bangladesh: The Trade-Off Between Economic Prosperity and Human Rights

Research Event

11 March 2020 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm

Chatham House | 10 St James's Square | London | SW1Y 4LE

Event participants

K. Anis Ahmed, Publisher, Dhaka Tribune and Bangla Tribune; Author of Good Night, Mr. Kissinger, Co-director, Dhaka Literary Festival
Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia Director, Human Rights Watch
Chair: Ed Cumming, Writer, The Independent

Bangladesh's recent gains in economic and social indices, set against its record of corruption and poor civil rights, has at times been termed the ‘Bangladesh Paradox’. Yet this label is overly simplistic; the current situation proves that these trends can coexist.

The Awami League government, in power since 2009, has increased political stability, delivered unprecedented economic and social advances, and adopted a counter-terrorism strategy to stamp out extremist groups. At the same time, it is criticized for curbing civil rights and failing to hold credible elections. However, as the two previous regimes have demonstrated, the rights situation is unlikely to improve even if the Awami League were replaced.

How did worsening rights become a feature of the state irrespective of its political dispensation? An unresolved contest between political and non-political state actors may hold the key to that puzzle. The perils of the current dispensation have recently manifested in weakening economic indicators, which jeopardize the very stability and social progress for which the country has garnered much praise.

Lucy Ridout

Programme Administrator, Asia-Pacific Programme
+44 (0) 207 314 2761




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Predicting Storm Surge

Storm surge is often the most devastating part of a hurricane. Mathematical models used to predict surge must incorporate the effects of winds, atmospheric pressure, tides, waves and river flows, as well as the geometry and topography of the coastal ocean and the adjacent floodplain. Equations from fluid dynamics describe the movement of water, but most often such huge systems of equations need to be solved by numerical analysis in order to better forecast where potential flooding will occur. Much of the detailed geometry and topography on or near a coast require very fine precision to model, while other regions such as large open expanses of deep water can typically be solved with much coarser resolution. So using one scale throughout either has too much data to be feasible or is not very predictive in the area of greatest concern, the coastal floodplain. Researchers solve this problem by using an unstructured grid size that adapts to the relevant regions and allows for coupling of the information from the ocean to the coast and inland. The model was very accurate in tests of historical storms in southern Louisiana and is being used to design better and safer levees in the region and to evaluate the safety of all coastal regions. For More Information: A New Generation Hurricane Storm Surge Model for Southern Louisiana, by Joannes Westerink et al.




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Improving Stents - Part 2

Stents are expandable tubes that are inserted into blocked or damaged blood vessels. They offer a practical way to treat coronary artery disease, repairing vessels and keeping them open so that blood can flow freely. When stents work, they are a great alternative to radical surgery, but they can deteriorate or become dislodged. Mathematical models of blood vessels and stents are helping to determine better shapes and materials for the tubes. These models are so accurate that the FDA is considering requiring mathematical modeling in the design of stents before any further testing is done, to reduce the need for expensive experimentation. Precise modeling of the entire human vascular system is far beyond the reach of current computational power, so researchers focus their detailed models on small subsections, which are coupled with simpler models of the rest of the system. The Navier-Stokes equations are used to represent the flow of blood and its interaction with vessel walls. A mathematical proof was the central part of recent research that led to the abandonment of one type of stent and the design of better ones. The goal now is to create better computational fluid-vessel models and stent models to improve the treatment and prediction of coronary artery disease the major cause of heart attacks. For More Information: Design of Optimal Endoprostheses Using Mathematical Modeling, Canic, Krajcer, and Lapin, Endovascular Today, May 2006.




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Improving Stents - Part 1

Stents are expandable tubes that are inserted into blocked or damaged blood vessels. They offer a practical way to treat coronary artery disease, repairing vessels and keeping them open so that blood can flow freely. When stents work, they are a great alternative to radical surgery, but they can deteriorate or become dislodged. Mathematical models of blood vessels and stents are helping to determine better shapes and materials for the tubes. These models are so accurate that the FDA is considering requiring mathematical modeling in the design of stents before any further testing is done, to reduce the need for expensive experimentation. Precise modeling of the entire human vascular system is far beyond the reach of current computational power, so researchers focus their detailed models on small subsections, which are coupled with simpler models of the rest of the system. The Navier-Stokes equations are used to represent the flow of blood and its interaction with vessel walls. A mathematical proof was the central part of recent research that led to the abandonment of one type of stent and the design of better ones. The goal now is to create better computational fluid-vessel models and stent models to improve the treatment and prediction of coronary artery disease the major cause of heart attacks. For More Information: Design of Optimal Endoprostheses Using Mathematical Modeling, Canic, Krajcer, and Lapin, Endovascular Today, May 2006.




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Predicting Climate - Part 2

What.s in store for our climate and us? It.s an extraordinarily complex question whose answer requires physics, chemistry, earth science, and mathematics (among other subjects) along with massive computing power. Mathematicians use partial differential equations to model the movement of the atmosphere; dynamical systems to describe the feedback between land, ocean, air, and ice; and statistics to quantify the uncertainty of current projections. Although there is some discrepancy among different climate forecasts, researchers all agree on the tremendous need for people to join this effort and create new approaches to help understand our climate. It.s impossible to predict the weather even two weeks in advance, because almost identical sets of temperature, pressure, etc. can in just a few days result in drastically different weather. So how can anyone make a prediction about long-term climate? The answer is that climate is an average of weather conditions. In the same way that good predictions about the average height of 100 people can be made without knowing the height of any one person, forecasts of climate years into the future are feasible without being able to predict the conditions on a particular day. The challenge now is to gather more data and use subjects such as fluid dynamics and numerical methods to extend today.s 20-year projections forward to the next 100 years. For More Information: Mathematics of Climate Change: A New Discipline for an Uncertain Century, Dana Mackenzie, 2007.




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Predicting Climate - Part 1

What.s in store for our climate and us? It.s an extraordinarily complex question whose answer requires physics, chemistry, earth science, and mathematics (among other subjects) along with massive computing power. Mathematicians use partial differential equations to model the movement of the atmosphere; dynamical systems to describe the feedback between land, ocean, air, and ice; and statistics to quantify the uncertainty of current projections. Although there is some discrepancy among different climate forecasts, researchers all agree on the tremendous need for people to join this effort and create new approaches to help understand our climate. It.s impossible to predict the weather even two weeks in advance, because almost identical sets of temperature, pressure, etc. can in just a few days result in drastically different weather. So how can anyone make a prediction about long-term climate? The answer is that climate is an average of weather conditions. In the same way that good predictions about the average height of 100 people can be made without knowing the height of any one person, forecasts of climate years into the future are feasible without being able to predict the conditions on a particular day. The challenge now is to gather more data and use subjects such as fluid dynamics and numerical methods to extend today.s 20-year projections forward to the next 100 years. For More Information: Mathematics of Climate Change: A New Discipline for an Uncertain Century, Dana Mackenzie, 2007.




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Resisting the Spread of Disease - Part 2

One of the most useful tools in analyzing the spread of disease is a system of evolutionary equations that reflects the dynamics among three distinct categories of a population: those susceptible (S) to a disease, those infected (I) with it, and those recovered (R) from it. This SIR model is applicable to a range of diseases, from smallpox to the flu. To predict the impact of a particular disease it is crucial to determine certain parameters associated with it, such as the average number of people that a typical infected person will infect. Researchers estimate these parameters by applying statistical methods to gathered data, which aren.t complete because, for example, some cases aren.t reported. Armed with reliable models, mathematicians help public health officials battle the complex, rapidly changing world of modern disease. Today.s models are more sophisticated than those of even a few years ago. They incorporate information such as contact periods that vary with age (young people have contact with one another for a longer period of time than do adults from different households), instead of assuming equal contact periods for everyone. The capacity to treat variability makes it possible to predict the effectiveness of targeted vaccination strategies to combat the flu, for instance. Some models now use graph theory and matrices to represent networks of social interactions, which are important in understanding how far and how fast a given disease will spread. For More Information: Mathematical Models in Population Biology and Epidemiology, Fred Brauer and Carlos Castillo-Chavez.




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Resisting the Spread of Disease - Part 1

One of the most useful tools in analyzing the spread of disease is a system of evolutionary equations that reflects the dynamics among three distinct categories of a population: those susceptible (S) to a disease, those infected (I) with it, and those recovered (R) from it. This SIR model is applicable to a range of diseases, from smallpox to the flu. To predict the impact of a particular disease it is crucial to determine certain parameters associated with it, such as the average number of people that a typical infected person will infect. Researchers estimate these parameters by applying statistical methods to gathered data, which aren.t complete because, for example, some cases aren.t reported. Armed with reliable models, mathematicians help public health officials battle the complex, rapidly changing world of modern disease. Today.s models are more sophisticated than those of even a few years ago. They incorporate information such as contact periods that vary with age (young people have contact with one another for a longer period of time than do adults from different households), instead of assuming equal contact periods for everyone. The capacity to treat variability makes it possible to predict the effectiveness of targeted vaccination strategies to combat the flu, for instance. Some models now use graph theory and matrices to represent networks of social interactions, which are important in understanding how far and how fast a given disease will spread. For More Information: Mathematical Models in Population Biology and Epidemiology, Fred Brauer and Carlos Castillo-Chavez.




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Providing Power

Researcher: Michael C. Ferris, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Moment Title: Providing Power Description: Michael C. Ferris talks about power grids




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The World’s Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors

Wednesday, April 29, 2020 - 13:30




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euromicron AG improves earnings in first half of 2019

Consolidated sales of EUR 146.7 million EBITDA (before IFRS 16) increased strongly by EUR 3.8 million to EUR 2.1 million Forecast for 2019 as a whole confirmed Working capital ratio declines by 2 percentage points to 10.6% euromicron AG, a medium-sized technology group and specialist for the digital networking of business and production processes, published its preliminary figures for the first half of 2019 today.




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Some of the latest climate models provide unrealistically high projections of future warming

A new study from University of Michigan climate researchers concludes that some of the latest-generation climate models may be overly sensitive to carbon dioxide increases and therefore project future warming that is unrealistically high.




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Algae tasked with producing COVID-19 test kits

Researchers at Western and Suncor are teaming up to use algae as a way to produce serological test kits for COVID-19 - a new process that overcomes shortfalls of existing processes while saving money.




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Citizen science project aims to reveal secret life of bees

In these unprecedented times, we are all spending much more time at home and in our gardens. And, now that spring has well and truly arrived, it's the perfect time to get reacquainted with one of our country's busiest workers - the bee.




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The more we lose biodiversity, the worse will be the spread of infectious diseases

Do biodiversity losses aggravate transmission of infectious diseases spread by animals to humans? The jury is still out but several scientists say there is a "biodiversity dilution effect" in which declining biodiversity results in increased infectious-disease transmission.




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Management of natural assets is key to sustainable development: Inclusive wealth provides the way forward

Sovereign nations typically measure economic success in terms of GDP (income) but this approach is risky as it fails to track and measure the impact of this on nature. Inclusive wealth, on the other hand captures financial and produced capital, but also the skills in our workforce (human capital), the cohesion in our society (social capital) and the value of our environment (natural capital).




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5 vital projects that will continue in 2020

The good thing about BirdLife is that, as a truly global organisation, we're already great at staying connected, even when we're thousands of miles apart. Here are just a few of the ways our work will carry on over the coming months, even if it's from our living rooms.




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The Executive Director's Statement to the 150th Meeting of the Committee of Permanent Representatives

In these unusual and tragic times, I am indeed grateful that we are able to connect virtually to continue the business of environmental governance. While the efforts of all your capitals are correctly focused on preventing human suffering, as parts of the world move slowly towards recovery, the environmental agenda remains one of our most powerful insurance policies in preventing future global pandemics like COVID-19.




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The Startup Pay Premium

Research from Chazen Senior Scholar Christian Moser suggests that who gets hired and how much they get paid could make the difference between a startup’s success and its failure.




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Improving Workplace Safety: What Works

The surprise player in affecting workplace safety overseas? Multinational buyers.




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What is best practice to choose social profile username?




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Terms and conditions, privacy policy




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What Are The Highest Paying Affiliate Programs?




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New Publication: Rules, Procedures and Mechanisms Applicable to Processes under the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety.

New Publication: Rules, Procedures and Mechanisms Applicable to Processes under the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety.




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Press Release: Largest international gathering on Biosafety meets in Bonn to finalize arrangements for the Cartagena Protocol.




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Press Release: International Community to Meet in Germany for a United Nations Conference on Living Modified Organisms and Biodiversity.




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Press release: Agreement reached to work towards a legally binding instrument on Liability and Redress with regard to GMOs.




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Report of the Fourth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity Serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety

Report of the Fourth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity Serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (Advance text)




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New publication - Green Customs Guide to Multilateral Environmental Agreements -including the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety.




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Biosafety Protocol News Vol. 3 Issue 5 - Experiences and Lessons Learned in Capacity-Building




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Biosafety Protocol News Issue 6 - Public Awareness and Participation: Experiences and Lessons Learned from Recent Initiatives




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Notification: Fifth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (COP MOP/5), 11 - 15 October 2010, Nagoya, Japan.




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Summary Outcomes of the Fifth Meeting of the BCH Informal Advisory Committee (BCH IAC). The BCH IAC provides guidance regarding the technical issues associated with the ongoing development of the BCH.




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New Publication: Brochure on the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety: Reducing the environmental risks of modern technology




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Bosnia and Herzegovina accedes to the Protocol. This will bring the number of Parties to 157




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Report of the Group of the Friends of the Co-Chairs on Liability and Redress in the Context of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety on the Work of its First Meeting.




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Fact sheet on the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety for the International Year of Biodiversity - 2010




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Report of the Group of the Friends of the Co-Chairs on Liability and Redress in the Context of The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety on the Work of Its Second Meeting




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Report of the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Risk Assessment and Risk Management Under the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety




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Report of the First Meeting of the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Risk Assessment and Risk Management under the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety




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Report of the Group of the Friends of the Co-Chairs on Liability and Redress in the Context of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety on the Work of its Third Meeting




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Report of the Fifth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity Serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (COP-MOP 5)




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Biosafety Protocol News Issue 8 - Working towards a common goal: Ten years of international cooperation on implementation of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety