Siddharth Sijoria - 8th May 2019
On 1st April, a 5-4 majority of the United States Supreme Court reiterated that while the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, this does not guarantee a right to a painless death. In Bucklew v Precythe, the Court heard a challenge to the method of execution by lethal injection ‘as […]
Joseph Johnson - 1st May 2019
Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 allows police officers at ports or border areas to question individuals for the purpose of determining whether they are a terrorist, as defined in s.40(1)(b). That power may be exercised ‘whether or not [the officer] has grounds for suspecting’ that a person is a terrorist (Schedule 7, paragraph 2(4)). […]
Richard J. Goldstone and Amanda Hukanović - 30th April 2019
The Appeals Chamber of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (MICT) recently delivered the long-awaited judgement in the appeal of Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić. A trial chamber of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) had delivered its judgment on 24 March, 2016. It held that Karadžić, President of the territory known […]
Saeed Bagheri - 25th April 2019
While nearly three weeks have passed since local elections were held in Turkey on 31st March 2019, the Turkish Supreme Electoral Council has not issued any statement on the election results in two major cities of the country – Istanbul, and the Turkish capital, Ankara. According to Article 79 of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey (1982), election […]
Ewelina U. Ochab - 24th April 2019
In March 2019, a Home Office letter rejecting an asylum application made the headlines of the biggest media outlets in the UK and abroad. It was not the case itself that attracted this attention but the arguments in the letter that have weighed in on the debate whether Christianity is a peaceful religion. The response […]
Helen Kehoe - 23rd April 2019
Ireland has an extensive history of systemic human rights abuses of women and children, encompassing multiple institutional settings and spanning most of the 20th century: Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, industrial schools and the non-consensual practice of symphysiotomy in hospitals. The legal responses of the state have been fragmented, generally narrow in approach, and often the subject of […]
Lisa Kadel and Christian Schliemann - 19th April 2019
The Canadian corporation Gabriel Resources wanted to establish Europe’s largest gold mine in Rosia Montana, Romania. Local villagers and Romanian civil society resisted the corporation and the state, due to perceived disregard for their human rights and environmental concerns. After a long battle they prevented the project. As a response Gabriel Resources sued Romania for […]
Mwai Daka - 18th April 2019
Recent reports and video footage of the political unrest in Sesheke’s Parliamentary by-elections have brought to light the disproportionate use of force by Zambia’s police, who opened fire at the opposition party, the United Party for National Development (UPND) and its supporters, during a political rally. These events have brought the uneasy relationship between President […]
Martin Kwan - 15th April 2019
A death sentence against a convict with an intellectual disability (ID) would violate the Eighth Amendment’s proscription of cruel and unusual punishments, because it would serve no penological purpose. In the recent US Supreme Court (SC) decision of Moore v Texas, the issue was (once again, having been litigated before in 2017) the correctness of the […]
Karen Yeung - 8th April 2019
The capacity to collect, store and process digital data in real-time on cloud servers, and to subject vast data sets to train and feed machine learning algorithms, have enabled the development of machines capable of making decisions across an almost limitless array of applications. These ‘algorithmic decision-making’ (ADM) systems range from systems that offer guidance […]
Eliana Barrera and Leonardo Cofre - 5th April 2019
878 deaths of children under the care of the Chilean National Children’s Service are currently under criminal investigation. This revelation was followed by the submission of a complaint under the communications procedure of the Committee of the Rights of the Child (CRC), resulting in a damming report in June 2018 on the serious and systematic violation of children’s rights by […]
Adilya Zhilgildina - 5th April 2019
Teenage pregnancy rates in Kazakhstan are high, with 3443 births in 2017, much higher than during the Soviet period. As a means to decrease the prevalence of teenage pregnancy, the Vice Minister of Healthcare has proposed a more liberal abortion regime by making abortions more accessible to teenagers, providing access to birth control and introducing […]