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admin - 6th May 2013
Last Autumn, the world witnessed a fleeting frenzy when The Gambia’s eccentric President Jammeh resumed executions for prisoners condemned to death. These executions—the country’s first in 27 years—were soon halted amidst international protest, but not before nine lives had been lost. Media reports decried the popular vacation spot, revealing for a moment its more troubled […]
Guest Contributor - 20th March 2013
By John Hirst – Prisoners’ voting rights remain a vexed issue in the United Kingdom. Following the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) decision in Hirst v UK (No 2),the United Kingdom was given until 22 November 2012 to repeal its blanket ban on prisoner voting. The UK failed to comply, resulting in a reprimand […]
Guest Contributor - 20th February 2013
By Vrinda Bhandari – Constitutionally speaking, the death penalty in India is limited to the “rarest of the rare” cases and should be implemented in a time frame which is not “unjust, unfair and unreasonable”. Over the last two decades, hangings had become somewhat of a rarity. Since 2004, an informal moratorium seemed to have […]
Guest Contributor - 10th February 2013
By Clive Stafford Smith I am writing this article in the airport waiting room in Guantánamo Bay, after a week visiting prisoners on this forsaken military base, and prior to returning to the UK for an evening at Wadham College. Back in Oxford, we will discuss the tragic execution of Edward Earl Johnson, a kid […]
Natasha Holcroft-Emmess - 27th November 2012
More than 6000 UK prisoners are currently subject to indefinite detention without means of progressing towards parole. In James, Wells and Lee v UK the European Court of Human Rights held that prisoners serving indeterminate sentences of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) were arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in violation of Article 5(1) ECHR. Under […]
admin - 9th November 2012
If ‘suffrage is the pivotal right’, then it is only fitting that the issue of prisoners’ voting rights has become the turning point of the UK government’s approach to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The last time a Strasbourg judgment provoked such a sharp response by the UK government was probably the 1995 […]
Eirik Bjorge - 9th November 2012
If ‘suffrage is the pivotal right’, then it is only fitting that the issue of prisoners’ voting rights has become the turning point of the UK government’s approach to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The last time a Strasbourg judgment provoked such a sharp response by the UK government was probably the 1995 […]
Reuven (Ruvi) Ziegler - 17th August 2012
In her recent post, Natasha Holcroft-Emmess critiques the European Court of Human Rights Grand Chamber (GC) judgment in Scoppola (no. 3); she rightly notes that the GC has taken a step backwards in terms of protecting prisoners’ voting rights. Unbound by constraints of Strasbourg jurisprudence, I have made elsewhere ‘the case for letting prisoners vote’, arguing […]
Natasha Holcroft-Emmess - 13th August 2012
In Scoppola v Italy (No. 3) (Application no. 126/05, 22 May 2012) the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights once again engaged with the vexed issue of prisoners’ voting rights. Italian legislation permanently disenfranchised prisoners convicted of specific offences against the State and those sentenced to more than five years’ incarceration. The […]