Coordinating internal immigration control in the UK

The UK Government has recently introduced measures to intensify the internal migration control regime by improving coordination between immigration authorities and third-party enforcement agents. The following paper describes the internal migration control regime in the UK, focusing on measures developed to impede irregular migrants’ access to work, justice, healthcare, education and housing. It also explores the ways in which coordination between actors comprising the ‘immigration policing family’ is hampered by administrative difficulties and, more fundamentally, by a lack of common goals. In response to these issues, successive UK Governments have introduced sanctions for non-compliant enforcement agents. Despite the fact that these types of sanctions are often discursively linked by immigration authorities to the notion of preventing third parties’ exploitation of irregular migrants, ultimately it is the irregular migrants’ survival which is threatened by the developing control regime

How to increase the butyrate-producing capacity of the gut microbiome : Do IBD patients really need butyrate replacement and butyrogenic therapy?

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To Destroy a People: Sexual Violence as Genocide during Conflict

Sexuality is one of the most central elements of human existence. Throughout history, attacks on women have been common during armed conflict. Frequently military forces have viewed sexual violence as a spoil of war, a punishment to defeated populations, or as the deviance of rogue soldiers. However, there are conflicts in which sexual violence is used as a weapon. In these conflicts, sexual violence evolves from a facet of conflict to genocide. When a military force’s command utilizes systematic and widespread sexual violence as a weapon of war, in both intent and effect, it fulfills every condition of the Geneva Convention standards of genocide. Three cases are analyzed within this thesis: Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, Rwanda during its genocide, and Bosnia during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Motivations for each of the conflicts varied. However, the constant in all three conflicts was the intended elimination of a specific group and the implementation of a policy of sexual violence in order to do so. In order for crimes to be considered genocide they must fulfill one of the following conditions, as stated in Article 2 of the Geneva Conventions, any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: A. Killing members of the group; B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; C. Deliberately inflicting on the group the conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Egregious acts of sexual violence and torture were utilized by all three respective commands in order to murder, incur grievous mental and physical harms, destroy the group’s ability to procreate in the future and impose measures upon the group intended to bring about its end. This work demonstrates that irrespective of the cause of a conflict, when systematic and widespread sexual violence is used as a weapon of war, it is genocide

To Destroy a People: Sexual Violence as Genocide during Conflict

Sexuality is one of the most central elements of human existence. Throughout history, attacks on women have been common during armed conflict. Frequently military forces have viewed sexual violence as a spoil of war, a punishment to defeated populations, or as the deviance of rogue soldiers. However, there are conflicts in which sexual violence is used as a weapon. In these conflicts, sexual violence evolves from a facet of conflict to genocide. When a military force’s command utilizes systematic and widespread sexual violence as a weapon of war, in both intent and effect, it fulfills every condition of the Geneva Convention standards of genocide. Three cases are analyzed within this thesis: Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, Rwanda during its genocide, and Bosnia during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Motivations for each of the conflicts varied. However, the constant in all three conflicts was the intended elimination of a specific group and the implementation of a policy of sexual violence in order to do so. In order for crimes to be considered genocide they must fulfill one of the following conditions, as stated in Article 2 of the Geneva Conventions, any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: A. Killing members of the group; B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; C. Deliberately inflicting on the group the conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Egregious acts of sexual violence and torture were utilized by all three respective commands in order to murder, incur grievous mental and physical harms, destroy the group’s ability to procreate in the future and impose measures upon the group intended to bring about its end. This work demonstrates that irrespective of the cause of a conflict, when systematic and widespread sexual violence is used as a weapon of war, it is genocide

Welfare Law in California

In California, over 1,500,000 people are dependent on public assistance for all or part of their means of subsistence. To provide aid to these individuals, a large and complex bureaucracy has developed over the years that expends more than a billion dollars a year, and is governed by an evergrowing set of federal, state, and local rules and regulations. Notwithstanding the size of the bureaucracy and the complexity of the laws governing the system, until recently there had been few instances of judicial review of welfare practices or laws. With a few exceptions,4 the court decisions relating to welfare prior to 1968 dealt with situations where conflicts between county and state welfare agencies were resolved, or where appeals were taken from convictions in welfare fraud prosecutions. It was unusual to have a recipient seek affirmative judicial redress on the grounds that welfare aid was illegally or unconstitutionally denied. Despite the substantial efforts of a few scholars - most notably Dr. Jacobus ten Broek - little serious discussion of the legal issues raised by the welfare system was undertaken. Much of the welfare litigation in California in 1969 has been directed to the enforcement of existing law as well as to the challenge, on constitutional grounds, of welfare laws, regulations, and practices. Some of these court actions have resulted in increasing the cost of public assistance programs. For the most part, however, these added costs have resulted from judicially ordered compliance with existing law; the implication is that for years welfare administrators have been, and still are, illegally depriving thousands of persons of welfare aid to which they are legally entitled

Planning at the interface of localism and mayoral priorities: London’s ungovernable boroughs

In this article we address scalar issues of power in planning. In the context of the reengineering of governance, including the promotion of localism in England, we focus on local actors’ beliefs in the extent of their power (de facto and de jure) over development decisions pertaining to their jurisdiction, on how misreadings arise and the consequences thereof. Our intervention highlights the extent and cost of ambiguity in England’s discretionary planning system and asks whether and how this should be moderated