The European Parliament and Comitology: On the Road to Nowhere?

The European Parliament has generally been deeply distrustful of the comitology system, primarily on the grounds that it allows the national administrations to undermine its supervisory role in the area of implementing legislation. Parliament has therefore sought to use the political, budgetary and jurisdictional means at its disposal to counteract the spread of comitology, or at least to promote the less intrusive forms of committee procedure. These initiatives have not, for the most part, been wholly successful; neither the interinstitutional agreements nor Parliament's arguments before the Court of Justice have produced the results it had hoped for. Parliament has been able, however, to use its Maastricht powers to influence the choice of committee procedure included in legislation adopted under codecision, and its budgetary tactics have forced the Commission to rationalise somewhat the annual expenditure on committees of all kinds and to bring a modicum of transparency into their operation. The imminence of the intergovernmental conference led to a suspension of hostilities towards the end of 1996.     

Writing,Space and Authority: Producing and Critiquing Settler Jurisdiction in Western Australia

On the edge of Stirling Gardens in central Perth, Western Australia, five large, old-fashioned pen nibs stand in a curved line, their tips in the ground. Anne Neil’s sculpture, Memory Markers, commemorates the history of this site, which includes the Supreme Court. Taking this sculpture as an emblem of writing, which in the context of its setting highlights the relationship between literature and law, this article explores the image of the pen in the ground. As a symbol of literacy, it evokes the powerful network of discourses—particularly law, science and religion—that underwrote the imperial project. It signals, in Michele Grossman’s terms, “the event of literacy [that] radically interrupts and disrupts—but never eliminates—pre-existing Aboriginal epistemologies”. The article goes on to explore the sculpture as a symbol of the assertion of jurisdiction, the speaking of law in and over colonised space. It analyses a group of written texts associated with this site, from colonial legal assertions of jurisdiction over Aboriginal people in Edward Landor’s The Bushman (1847), through a proclamation under the Aborigines Act 1905 (WA), to Stephen Kinnane’s Indigenous family memoir of life under that act, Shadow Lines (2004).     

Engaging disengagement: The political reintegration of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front

The conflict between the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the Sierra Leonean government represents a highly instructive study for reintegration projects. Far from being a conventional political insurgency readily lending itself to peaceful political transformation, the RUF possessed within the ranks of its young and brutalised recruits a fundamental rejection of Sierra Leone's political structures. As such, Sierra Leone presented a unique challenge for reintegration efforts, requiring not only the immediate reconciliation of ex-combatants with victims and civil society, but also the long-term political incorporation of a group of youths defined by their very disengagement from and distrust of the political system. This article argues that the Sierra Leone experience demonstrates that successful political reintegration does not simply amount to political participation per se, but rather requires specific forms of political participation, which reinforce the primacy of peaceful political interaction over and above other means for affecting change. In this regard, this article concludes that despite progress in many key areas, former fighters of the RUF have yet to be fully politically reintegrated.     

Sex offender (re)integration into the community: realities and challenges

Abstract

This paper explores the benefits of engaging with self-defined communities in Northern Ireland on the issue of sexual offending and argues the case for building on existing community structures, by identifying people with leadership skills and by empowering them with the knowledge, and with connections to statutory services, that will support public protection. We address the historical context in terms of the impact of the conflict on these communities and describe the role and experience of NIACRO working in Northern Ireland, in particular its Base2 project supporting people under threat. We reference the development of current statutory arrangements for Public Protection Arrangements for Northern Ireland (PPANI) and argue the case for preparing people in the community to receive and understand the messages promoted through PPANI on the basis of our belief that public education is most effective when the people receiving it are receptive.     

Terror in the Texts: Technology – Law – Future

This paper is concerned withlaw's failure and need to manifest theessentiality of technology for the West. Thiswill be shown through a critical reading of therelated fictional and juridical projects ofAmerican golden age science fiction and spacelaw. This analysis involves sensitivity to theterrors that bind together technology, law andthe future. It is argued that cornucopia, thevictory of modernism through technology, ispresented in science fiction and space law asterrorised by its other – dystopia. Thisterrorising means that cornucopia activelyresists dystopia. However, this resistiveenterprise is flawed – cornucopia never escapesdystopia. Alternative images of humanity andtechnology are needed to escape these flawedimaginings of the West. The paper concludesthat the cyborg offers the potential for aregenerative thinking about technology and law.     

Therapeutic engagement in medium-secure care: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of service users’ experiences

Service users (SUs) detained in forensic hospitals are usually required to engage in psychological therapies aimed at reducing mental distress and/or for preventing further offending. Poor therapeutic engagement (TE) can lead to adverse clinical outcomes and reoffending, at a cost to the individual, staff, the service provider, and the public. To understand what factors influence TE from a SUs’ perspective, the experiences of 10 male residents of a medium-secure hospital were explored. Using a service-user informed design, interpretative phenomenological analysis of interview data was completed. Four superordinate themes emerged: different worlds; what the individual brings; what the therapy entails; and control. Consideration of how these factors may be of use to professionals working in secure care settings is discussed in relation to existing theory and research.     

Seeing Law: The Comic,Icon and the Image in Law and Justice

This special issue examines how the comic and the icon prefigure forms of legality that are different to modern law. There is a primal seeing of law unmediated by reading, writing or possibly thinking. This introduction identifies the primacy of the eye, the emergence of visual jurisprudence and the transformations of law as a paper-based material practice to a digitally enabled activity.     

Police officer attitudes to the practicalities of the sex offenders’ register,ViSOR and Child Sexual Abuse Disclosure Scheme in England and Wales

This paper examines police officer understandings of and attitudes to the sex offenders’ register, Violent and Sex Offenders’ Register (ViSOR) and Child Sexual Offender Disclosure Scheme (CSODS) in England and Wales – an under-researched area in the management of sexual offenders in the UK. This research is an adaptation of an American study utilising a mixed-methods approach, combining an online questionnaire survey (N?=?227) with a series of semi-structured interviews (N?=?27). The study found that police officers, irrespective of role, were generally supportive of the register, ViSOR and CSODS in principle, but they thought that logistics, practicalities, infrastructure, multi-agency collaboration and public understandings had problematic impacts on the scheme in practice. The participants believed that greater investment was needed in terms of time and resource to make the register, ViSOR and CSODS easier to use and access and thus fit for purpose.     

Student/trainee-professional implicit theories of paedophilia

Abstract

This research investigates student/trainee-professional implicit theories of paedophilia and their explanations for the current crisis of paedophilia. The research methodology is based on a previous research design (Sternberg, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 607–627, 1985), and consists of two interrelated studies. Study 1 (n=60) develops scales for student/trainee-professional implicit theories of paedophilia and Study 2 (n=188) uses these scales in conjunction with other scales to define the student/trainee-professional implicit theories of paedophilia and to measure the potential explanations for the current crisis of paedophilia. The findings indicate that student/trainee-professional implicit theories of paedophilic personalities (pathology, abusive and mentally disordered old offender) and behaviours (devious, child focused, cognitive distortions, secretive, child lovers, sexual abusers, socially inept and grooming) seem to reflect both previous research and expert opinion. These tentative findings suggest that student/trainee-professionals' implicit theories of paedophilia, and as such the current crisis of paedophilia in modern society, seem to have developed in part from the transfer of expert knowledge (explicit theories), the impact of the media, and social constructionalism; and not from the student/trainee-professionals' individual personality and coping traits.