Image credit: Katrin Bolotsova @ Pexels This guest blog is written by Dr Salomėja Zaksaitė, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences, Institute of Law, in Lithuania.  The views expressed are the author’s own.  You can contact Salomėja at: salomeja.zaksaite@teise.org On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered the State of Israel to take all measures to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza (para 86), but the court stopped short of ordering an immediate halt to operations. Clearly, the tragedy in question is so deep, and the suffering so inexhaustible ..read more

(Image credit: UK Government Ministry of Justice) This guest blog is written by Andrew Lika, a recent law graduate at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, UK.  Andrew is an advocate for victims and survivors of domestic abuse. He enjoys writing about social justice issues and is applying for postgraduate study in Criminology.  You can contact Andrew at: andrewlika00@gmail.com.  The criminal justice system in England has long struggled to acknowledge and address the unique needs of women. Despite countless recommendations for improving the system’s response to women ..read more

(Image credit: RDNE Stock project @ Pexels) Why the England and Wales criminal justice system should treat women differently than men, and what the government has done about it. This guest blog is written by Andrew Lika, a recent law graduate at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, UK.  Andrew is an advocate for victims and survivors of domestic abuse. He enjoys writing about social justice issues and is applying for postgraduate study in Criminology.  You can contact Andrew at: andrewlika00@gmail.com.  The Labour government’s commissioning of the Corston Report was ..read more

(Image Credit: Tim O’Farrell @ Pexels) I recently came across an archive of interviews on BBC iPlayer, which were curated by the late TV host Michael Parkinson.  Clicking through further suggested content on the site reveals an amazing library of footage from the last century.  These include episodes from a programme called Face to Face, which ran between 1959 and 1962, and was resurrected again from 1989 to 1998; clips from Late Night Line Up, Man Alive (or its spin-off, ‘The Man Alive Report’), and Press Conference; as well as from talk shows with popular male interviewers Wogan, F ..read more

(Image credit: Getty/Bert Hardy in Manchester Evening News) A guest blog, anonymized to protect the writer’s identity. This is a summarized account of my previous life of a hell on earth in the dark unpublicized shadows of the prison system. It is a journey from abuse to anarchy and finally normality: a path shared by many of my generation. In 1970, as a young boy of 15 given Borstal training, I entered a prison horror story that has stayed with me throughout my life, with occasional accompanying flashbacks and nightmares. The 1970s in Borstal were brutal years, and conditions then bordered on ..read more

Photo by Sora Shimazaki: https://www.pexels.com Last week, the BBC published details of a long-running investigation into an MI5 agent who, it is alleged, terrorised, abused and attempted to kill an intimate partner. The BBC had further located an intimate partner in another country, with similar experiences, and suggestions of active targeting of young women, by this agent, for exploitation. The agent is alleged to be a paid informant or CHIS [covert intelligence intelligence source] for MI5 [the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency], who has infiltrated extremist networks o ..read more

Photo credit: pexels-cottonbro-4551916 Reports from Ukraine in recent weeks evidence that, as in other conflicts around the world and through time, rape is being used as a tool of war. Traditionally, this issue has received minimal attention in the history books. Writing in 1995, Copelon (p.197) observes that: When war is done, rape is comfortably filed away as a mere and inevitable “by-product,” a matter of poor discipline, the inevitable bad behaviour of soldiers revved up, needy, and briefly “out of control”. In 2013, the G8 (an inter-governmental political forum of leading countries from 1 ..read more

Photo: https://www.warrington-worldwide.co.uk/ On 14 July 2020, I wrote a blog here on COVID-19 and accountability, thinking through how we monitor real-time and later review governance of the pandemic. I wrote elsewhere about the difficulties of securing compliance with COVID laws. I would not have imagined at that time that the UK Prime Minister himself would be found to have broken COVID lockdown laws and sanctioned through a fixed penalty notice. The volume of fixed penalty notices, issued as part of Operation Hillman into illegal gatherings in Downing Street and Whitehall, is embarrassing ..read more

Photo by Kristin-Vogt-57686 at Pexels Well, it’s been a year since my last blog which tells you something about juggling work and home life.  I am actually towards the end of three months research leave, a period which should involve a great outpouring of thinking and writing.  But, as other wiser colleagues had told me, and I now realise, you spend the first month of research leave just ‘decompressing’, before being in any state to be creative.  So, I start with reproducing a blog I wrote for the University of Bristol School for Policy Studies in February, initiating a new piec ..read more

What’s Going On? Marvin Gaye (1971) Tamla Records (T 54201) On Monday, I was listening to Eric Nelson, defence attorney for Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who faces three charges of second and third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter for the killing of George Floyd.  Nelson was questioning prosecution witness and Chief of the Minneapolis Police Department Medaria Arradondo, who had fired all four police officers involved in George’s death.  Nelson was attempting to develop an argument that police may find themselves in difficult and dangerous situations and m ..read more