The Union Government of India Introduces the Death Penalty for Child Rape
When news broke out two weeks ago of the horrors committed in the brutal rape of two girls in the small towns of Kathua and Unnao, all legislative consideration of...
Criminal Justice and Fair Trial
Ms X v Mahmood Farooqi: A Dangerous Precedent for Interpreting Consent in Rape Cases in India
In a recent case before the Indian Supreme Court, Ms X v Mahmood Farooqi, the court refused to overturn a Delhi High Court decision which set a dangerous precedent that...
A Theatre of Death: Challenging the Death Penalty in India (with Anup Surendranath)
The death penalty was written into the colonial penal code in India when the country was under British direct rule, and it stayed on the books after independence. Today India...
First Criminal Conviction under Belgium’s Anti-Sexism Act
A man who made sexist remarks to a female police officer was sentenced to pay a €3,000 fine and became the first person to be convicted under Belgium’s 2014 Anti-Sexism...
The Hidden Cost of the Death Penalty in India
The death penalty needs to have significant social benefits, not attainable with the next most severe form of punishment, life imprisonment, for it to be justified. Existing arguments already show...
International Law, Right to Privacy and Marital Rape in India
In an order dated 6/11/2017, the High Court of Gujarat described marital rape as “a disgraceful offence that has scarred the trust and confidence in the institution of marriage”, proposing...
Criminal Justice and the Death Penalty in India: An Opinion Study with 60 Former Supreme Court Judges
The Centre on the Death Penalty at National Law University, Delhi conducted an opinion study with 60 former Indian Supreme Court judges to understand their perspectives on India’s criminal justice...
Addressing Gender Violence: The Urgent Need for Introspection by the ICC
The International Criminal Court (ICC) will celebrate its twentieth anniversary in 2018. While this torchbearer of hope has done much good, it has not quite fully achieved in addressing crimes...
Haralambous: The Supreme Court, Closed Proceedings and the Common Law, Round Three
The right to a fair trial is undoubtedly one of the most sacrosanct rights in most modern legal systems, and is manifested in one of the most important articles in...
The Philippines’ War on Drugs
When Rodrigo Duterte took to office as President of the Philippines on June 30 2016, he sought to fulfil, among his many other deadly campaign promises, his promise to cleanse...
Levenstein: A Case to End Prescription of All Sexual Offences in South Africa
Widely considered the most progressive constitution in the world, the South African Constitution contains an inclusive and wide reaching Bill of Rights. Amongst these rights, the Bill guarantees every citizen...
The need to consider victim’s voices in the sentencing of offenders: Director of Public Prosecutions v Oscar Leonard Carl Pistorius
On 24 November 2017, the South African Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) handed down a unanimous decision increasing the sentence of convicted murderer Oscar Pistorius from six, to fifteen years...
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