Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2020 June 25

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June 25

2020 Serbian parliamentary election

Why would there be voting results in Kosovo? Obviously the Serbian government wants Kosovars to vote in Serbian elections, since it considers Kosovo part of Serbia, but since the government of Kosovo doesn't consider itself part of Serbia, and since it's administering Kosovo currently, I don't understand why/how the election would have happened in Kosovo. Nyttend backup (talk) 13:23, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

PS, I'd expect things to look like this map of the last election in Georgia, another country that claims a significantly large region that's functionally independent. Nyttend backup (talk) 13:32, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Maybe because Serbia is not Georgia? Merely because two places on earth share one thing in common (a breakaway region of limited international recognition) doesn't mean they share everything in common (such as how they run elections within that region). It's entirely possible that Serbia still conducted the election in that region, for example using absentee or mail-in balloting. While I am not sure of the exact nuances of how Serbia managed the 2020 election, it does not take much imagination to envision a plethora of possibilities and there does not have to be only one way that the world works; not everything works the exact same way it does in Georgia. The world is a diverse, complicated place with lots of room for different things in it. --Jayron32 17:53, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Jayron, the next time I see such a patronising response, I will be requesting sanctions: this is a reference desk, not a place where you get to show your intellectual superiority. Nyttend backup (talk) 19:39, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

At least you and I won't ever be accused of intellectual superiority. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:52, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

The map in 2020 Serbian parliamentary election and reproduced above is of the results of the 2016 Serbian parliamentary election, so I have removed it from the 2020 article. DuncanHill (talk) 18:25, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Am having trouble finding a reference that answers the question, but some of the facts reported on this blog suggest that the Serbian government did have the power to run polls, even if not everyone was happy about it, and that Kosovars were also interested in taking part, with turnout on the high end for elections in the region. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 18:39, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

There are 8,253 polling stations, plus 140 for the Serbian community in Kosovo, whose independence Serbia does not recognise, and 42 for voters abroad.

Former Kosovo PM Albin Kurti said that “allowing Serbian elections in Kosovo while local elections in two municipalities are cancelled for months due to covid19 is unacceptable”.

The OSCE’s preliminary reports show that in Kosovo 55,178 people voted, which makes a total of nearly 58 per cent of all registered voters in the former Serbian province.

Have any countries other than Canada banned the shark fin trade?

In 2019 federal legislation came into effect in Canada with the purpose of banning the trade in shark fins. Subsection 32.1(1) of the Fisheries Act [1] now provides: "No person shall import into Canada or export from Canada, or attempt to so import or export, any shark fins or parts of shark fins that are not attached to a shark carcass except in accordance with a permit issued under subsection (2)." This was enacted by section 18.1 of An Act to amend the Fisheries Act and other Acts in consequence, S.C. 2019, c. 14 [2]. I found one news report which asserts that Canada "became the first country in the world to impose a wholesale ban on the import and export of shark fins".[3] But other news articles say that Canada was merely the first G20 country to do so [4][5] or the first G7 country [6]. This phrasing suggests that at least one country (not in the G20 or G7) banned the shark fin trade before Canada. If so, which? Also, the Wikipedia article shark finning#United States says that 20 years ago in the USA, an Act of Congress prohibited the importation of shark fins without the associated carcass. [7] But isn't that the same thing Canada has done? Yet the USA is in the G20 and G7, so are those news articles wrong (in saying Canada was the first country in the world, the G20, or the G7 to ban the shark fin trade)? The Government of Canada's own news release from when the new legislation was passed [8] does not mention anything about Canada being the first to take this action. Mathew5000 (talk) 23:43, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

@Mathew5000: It is confusing. The article states that Canada banned it in 1994 (which would have been before the US in 2000), but Canada also did a ban again in 2019. I suspect there are some nuances to the rules that may not be readily apparent with a casual read. RudolfRed (talk) 00:38, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

In 1994 Canada banned shark finning, which other countries have done too (for example by making it a condition of any fishing licence that the holder not engage in shark finning), but my question is about the ban on the trade (import and export) of shark fins. Did the US do that in 2000, as the Wikipedia article shark finning suggests? Or was that US measure perhaps only referring to product brought in on the fishing boats directly, while it was still permitted to bring in shark fins by air? (I assume that the new legislative provisions in Canada's Fisheries Act encompass all importation of shark fins, including by airplane, although I'm not 100% certain.) I don't know. Mathew5000 (talk) 03:33, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

I have on no information on the question being asked, but I'd like to point out that just because a report says Canada was the first country in the G20 to do something, it doesn't mean that it wasn't the first in the world. It might not have been, but it also might be that the reporter didn't have time to find out what the other 175 or so countries in the world had done, and chose to state only what they knew. --76.71.5.208 (talk) 07:01, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

There are lists of countries that have policies/laws related to shark fins, with years of enactment, at Animal Welfare Institute and Humane Society International. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 13:43, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the responses so far. I came across an article in National Geographic from four months ago talking about an incident in the United States [9]. It refers to shark fins found having been imported into the United States by cargo plane, and it says that as much as 40% of the load was illegal (because of the particular species of shark). Clearly, then, there is no general federal US law against importing shark fins (without the associated carcass). The discussion about federal US law in the Wikipedia article shark finning#United States should be clarified. Mathew5000 (talk) 21:32, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

I found out from Oceana Canada that other countries have banned trade in shark fins similarly to Canada, for example: the Bahamas (2011), the Marshall Islands (2011), Malaysia (2011), Cook Islands (2012), Brunei (2013), and the United Arab Emirates (2014). Mathew5000 (talk) 19:52, 30 June 2020 (UTC)