Risk, human rights and the management of a serious sex offender

Risk and human rights discourses have become dominant features of the UK criminal justice arena. However, there has been little critical scrutiny of the ways in which these discourses relate to each other. In this article, I focus on different accounts of the case of Anthony Rice, a 48-year old ex-offender who committed a murder in August 2005 whilst under the joint supervision of English probation and police services. Drawing upon official reviews by the Inspectorate of Probation and the UK Parliament Joint Committee on Human Rights, as well as media coverage, I use the Rice case to problematise some common assumptions about the relationship between risk and human rights

A question of definition: feminist legal scholarship, socio-legal studies and debate about law and politics

In recent years, debate about the relationship between law and politics appears to have become a good deal more intense in the United Kingdom. As others have observed, one major catalyst for this has been the ascent of human rights in the popular imagination and in national, and international, legal and political orders. The problem, however, is that this development also has the capacity to skew the debate: it threatens not just the already-weakened claim that `law is politics' but also, if left unchecked, it could deepen the neglect of two questions that ought to be at the heart of debate about law and politics: namely, the question of law, and the question of the political. In this article, we offer a perspective on this problem. We propose that one way of minimising it would be to have a broader definition of what counts as scholarship relevant to the question of the law/politics relationship. The redefinition we propose focuses specifically on two respected traditions in contemporary legal scholarship: the first of these is socio-legal scholarship, the second is feminist legal scholarship. The particular strength of these traditions, we suggest, is that they would encourage a broader perspective on the complexity of law and of the political

Soldier photography of detainee abuse in Iraq: digital technology, human rights and the death of Baha Mousa

Digital media technologies provide new opportunities for the recording and publicising of human rights violations. In recent years, soldier photography during military conflicts has become one of the most controversial sources of images of abuse, especially in relation to the visual representation of detainees. The backdrop to this article is the death of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi civilian who died while in detention on a British Army military base in Basra in southern Iraq in 2003. A soldier’s video footage of Mr Mousa’s treatment in the detention facility has helped to generate a range of cultural, political and legal effects, not least an ongoing official Inquiry into the causes of his death. But while new media technologies, such as mobile camera-phones, can provide an expanded visual record of human suffering and death in war zones, this article argues that this brings dangers as well as possibilities. More generally, it raises questions about how human rights practitioners should respond to the increasing visualisation of witnessing

Rights as risk: managing human rights and risk in the UK prison sector

Discourses of both risk and human rights circulate on a daily basis in the UK prison sector. Little attention, however, has been devoted to one overlap: the co-existing demands of organisational risk management and Human Rights Act compliance. This paper begins by highlighting some of the shifts towards 'business risk' management in prison governance, alongside the increasing recognition that human rights have the ability to manifest as significant organisational risks (for example, legal or reputational). It then draws upon three 'rights as risk' prisoner case studies from across the United Kingdom which vividly demonstrate how human rights violations can produce legal risk, and what I term 'legal risk+', for a particular prison organisation. By focusing on how actors outside the organisation have transformed human rights non-compliance into different types of risk, some of the effects of failure to manage human rights risk in the prison sector are illuminated. The paper ends with a call for closer scrutiny of the potential of organisational risk management to result in rights compliance - whereby human rights are viewed through a risk lens, and not just a rights one

A question of definition: feminist legal scholarship, socio-legal studies and debate about law and politics

In recent years, debate about the relationship between law and politics appears to have become a good deal more intense in the United Kingdom. As others have observed, one major catalyst for this has been the ascent of human rights in the popular imagination and in national, and international, legal and political orders. The problem, however, is that this development also has the capacity to skew the debate: it threatens not just the already-weakened claim that `law is politics' but also, if left unchecked, it could deepen the neglect of two questions that ought to be at the heart of debate about law and politics: namely, the question of law, and the question of the political. In this article, we offer a perspective on this problem. We propose that one way of minimising it would be to have a broader definition of what counts as scholarship relevant to the question of the law/politics relationship. The redefinition we propose focuses specifically on two respected traditions in contemporary legal scholarship: the first of these is socio-legal scholarship, the second is feminist legal scholarship. The particular strength of these traditions, we suggest, is that they would encourage a broader perspective on the complexity of law and of the political

Risk and human rights in UK prison governance

Risk and human rights discourses dominate the landscape of prison governance in the United Kingdom. For the most part, however, criminologists have focused only on concepts of risk and lawyers on human rights; there has been little overlap in the scholarship of these disciplines. In this article, we problematize this separation. We argue for a new stream of academic enquiry which recognizes the co-existence of different types of risk and rights discourses, and which draws upon more interdisciplinary understandings of risk, human rights and regulation