Perpetual Impunity: Lessons learned from the global system of rendition and secret detention

It is now well documented that the Blair government was colluding at the highest levels in the global system for the rendition, detention and interrogation of terror suspects, at the same time as repeatedly denying any involvement. This paper seeks to explain why the UK so confidently maintained its position of denial. The main argument is that involvement in the global rendition system was facilitated and protected by an architecture of impunity. That is to say that the global rendition system deliberately consisted of a set of practices that were designed to ensure impunity for those agents involved at various levels, particularly Western governments and their intelligence agencies. Furthermore, if aspects of a state’s involvement were exposed, the architecture of impunity was sufficiently robust that the state could control the level of exposure. For example, the state could allow the light to be shone on certain aspects but could keep others very much in the dark. The state could also take specific actions to mitigate the effects, for example by withholding key information, destroying evidence, or by deflecting attention. Finally, where state involvement was exposed, again because the architecture of impunity was so robust, the authorities were in a strong position to seriously hamstring or avert investigations into wrongdoing. We conclude by offering some reflections on what this tells us about the challenges of holding governments to account for human rights violations of this nature, especially where they arise through a transnational network of state violence/crime

Insulating Universal Human Rights from the ‘Ethical Foreign Policy’ Threat

At the heart of the notion of an ethical foreign policy is the assumption that foreign policy can help deliver liberty and security around the globe. Yet, as Conor Gearty has argued, in our contemporary ‘neo-democratic’ world, liberty and security are not the universal goods they are often considered to be. Rather they are selectively granted, and curtailed for those considered a threat to the status quo. Where liberty and security are curtailed, this is often in the name of the universal freedoms that neo-democracies claim to uphold. When the Blair government was elected in 1997, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook announced that British foreign policy must have an ethical dimension. There has been much debate on whether UK foreign policy under the Blair government can be argued to have been ‘ethical’. The focus of debate has tended to be the UK’s military interventions. Far less attention has been paid to the direct role played by UK authorities, through its intelligence services, in human rights violations under the New Labour and subsequent Coalition governments. This paper seeks to further the debate on the ethics of UK foreign policy since 1997. It does so by offering a detailed account of the UK’s involvement in the CIA’s rendition programme, and shows that the UK was far more involved in rendition and secret detention between 2001 and 2010 than was previously assumed. Threaded through the analysis is an account of the various measures taken by the New Labour subsequent Coalition governments to suppress the evidence of UK involvement. We conclude by offering some reflections on the role human rights organisations, litigators, and investigative journalists are increasingly playing in defending the universalism of rights, for publics that rarely appreciate what is really at stake

The Voice of Which People? Transnational Advocacy Networks and Governance Networks at the United Nations

We can expand our understanding of the politics of global networks and how they relate to the United Nations, by closely examining the concept of a network. There is a long-established International Relations literature focusing on the more institutionalised, international non-governmental organisations. Keck and Sikkink have drawn on the Sociology literature covering social movements in global politics to discuss transnational advocacy networks. It is also necessary to distinguish a third major category: governance networks. They operate to enhance the participation rights of NGOs in intergovernmental organisations. Differences in membership and functions of the two types of networks can be clearly specified analytically, but real-world networks may have some features from each ideal-type. However, if the distinction between them is not understood and respected by those participating in a network, there can be major political conflicts that threaten the legitimacy of the network. Three case-studies – on the NGO Steering Committee at the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, on the World Conference Against Racism and on the World Summit on Sustainable Development – are used to demonstrate how crises can arise when the fundamental contradictions between engaging in collective advocacy and adopting a governance role are not recognised

AGARD Fluid Dynamics Panel Symposium on Applications of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Aeronautics: Proceedings

The Fluid Dynamics Panel of AGARD arranged a Symposium on Applications of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Aeronautics, on 7 to 10 April 1986 in Aix-en-Provence, France. The purpose of the Symposium was to provide an assessment of the status of CFD in aerodynamic design and analysis, with an emphasis on emerging applications of advanced computational techniques to complex configurations. Sessions were devoted specifically to grid generation, methods for inviscid flows, calculations of viscous-inviscid interactions, and methods for solving the Navier-Stokes equations. The 31 papers presented at the meeting are published in AGARD Conference Proceedings CP-412 and are listed in the Appendix of this report. A brief synopsis of each paper and some general conclusions and recommendations are given

Point Line Cover: The Easy Kernel is Essentially Tight

The input to the NP-hard Point Line Cover problem (PLC) consists of a set $P$ of $n$ points on the plane and a positive integer $k$, and the question is whether there exists a set of at most $k$ lines which pass through all points in $P$. A simple polynomial-time reduction reduces any input to one with at most $k^2$ points. We show that this is essentially tight under standard assumptions. More precisely, unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses to its third level, there is no polynomial-time algorithm that reduces every instance $(P,k)$ of PLC to an equivalent instance with $O(k^{2-\epsilon})$ points, for any $\epsilon>0$. This answers, in the negative, an open problem posed by Lokshtanov (PhD Thesis, 2009). Our proof uses the machinery for deriving lower bounds on the size of kernels developed by Dell and van Melkebeek (STOC 2010). It has two main ingredients: We first show, by reduction from Vertex Cover, that PLC---conditionally---has no kernel of total size $O(k^{2-\epsilon})$ bits. This does not directly imply the claimed lower bound on the number of points, since the best known polynomial-time encoding of a PLC instance with $n$ points requires $\omega(n^{2})$ bits. To get around this we build on work of Goodman et al. (STOC 1989) and devise an oracle communication protocol of cost $O(n\log n)$ for PLC; its main building block is a bound of $O(n^{O(n)})$ for the order types of $n$ points that are not necessarily in general position, and an explicit algorithm that enumerates all possible order types of n points. This protocol and the lower bound on total size together yield the stated lower bound on the number of points. While a number of essentially tight polynomial lower bounds on total sizes of kernels are known, our result is---to the best of our knowledge---the first to show a nontrivial lower bound for structural/secondary parameters

Procedure of issuing religious divorce and resolving matrimonial disputes at Shari’ah councils in the UK

Abstract The unavailability of civil courts to hear cases relating to Muslim family law and other related matters persuaded community leaders and religious scholars in the United Kingdom to establish several Sharīʿah councils. This article explores the role played by these councils in resolving matrimonial disputes, especially the process and procedure of issuing an Islamic divorce. Library and empirical research methods were employed. Three main uk Sharīʿah councils were visited wherein mediation and arbitration sessions, as well as monthly meetings, were observed to examine how disputes are handled and decisions made. The study leads to several findings. Mediation and arbitration are the main methods used in the process, and despite the relative success of Sharīʿah councils, they face challenges resulting from the dichotomy and overlapping jurisdictions of Islamic and English family law and the non-alignment of divorce issued by uk courts and religious divorce.</jats:p

Hybrid institutions in the national security constitution: the case of the Commissioners

This paper proposes the concept of a ‘hybrid institution’, defined with reference to certain institutions within the UK's constitutional order which provide oversight of national security processes. It focuses in particular on the Commissioners who have overseen and oversee the use of investigatory powers and the work of the intelligence services. These institutions, as was once said of another hybrid institution – the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation – are designed in order to operate within situations in which ‘potential conflicts between state power and civil liberties are acute, but information is tightly rationed’. They are ‘hybrid’ institutions in that they marry certain of the features characteristic of political institutions with others characteristic of legal institutions. The paper considers the relevant institutions and the role they play within the national security constitution, showing how their hybrid status facilitates the performance of a function which neither fully legal nor fully political institutions could fulfil

A systematic literature review on synchronous hybrid learning : gaps identified

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