Reproducing crises: Understanding the role of law in the COVID-19 global pandemic

Governmental responses to the COVID-19 global pandemic have generated numerous constitutionals, policy, legal, and political-economic debates. Scholarly engagements with the sociolegal and policy consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been dominated by discussion on the role of emergency powers, the suspension of individual civil liberties, the suspension of economic rules in order to guarantee economic survival, and social regulation of public spaces and of workplaces. This paper aims to explore how a critical sociolegal scholarship can contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of the role of law in creating the unequal conditions that propitiated the COVID-19 pandemic and that might enable further crises. This introduction offers a roadmap for theorizing the limits of law, the operationalization of emergency powers and the different policies implemented by global south and north countries in response to the pandemic. This introduction is structured as follow: (1) provides a general overview of the law and society tradition and its engagement with the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) engages with three key consequences of the pandemic, labor, and the lockdown; colonial implications; and the limits of law; (3) introduces the papers in this special issue; (4) sketches a proposal for the critical sociolegal scholarship of law and crises.     

The existing tensions in the defining of human trafficking at a UK and international level: a critical overview

Human trafficking is an ancient trade that took several forms over the centuries, from full blown state-perpetrated slavery through to illegal exploitative employment of migrants in the sex and other labor industries. At the start of the twenty-first century, a new definition of human trafficking was produced by the United Nations, within which are contained terms such as “coercion,” “deception,” “abuse of power” and “consent.” While the definition itself has largely been agreed upon, deep divisions – about the interpretation of those terms within the definition – continue to polarize the views of antagonizing political and feminist lobbying groups. The agreement on the definition seems to have served little in ironing the differences and the debates continue to be fuelled. In this article, the author elaborates on the tensions that surround the interpretation of the definition and argues that the main group to have fallen victim to the relevant yet inept international and individual state regulations is the trafficked people, while the traffickers tend to largely escape punishment. Rectifying the situation can be extremely challenging and requires sustained and large scale multinational collaborative work. So far, only little is being done to address the problem and the expectation is that it will become significantly worse before it eventually gets better.     

The role of human rights in extradition: the imperatives of reforming the Indian extradition law

The mobility of criminals and the consequent internationalization of crime have made domestic criminal law enforcement dependent upon international cooperation. As there is no general obligation of extradition at the international level, every country outlines the conditions and procedure, subject to which requests for extradition are granted. In fact, from the origin of the extradition system, objections stemming from human rights have been the major considerations in the grant or decline of extradition. It is in this background that the article examines and critically reviews the current level of the human rights protections afforded to persons facing extradition under the Indian Extradition Act, 1962. This article notes that in the field of extradition and human rights, several landmark legal developments have occurred in the last 50 years, and accordingly calls for a complete overhaul of the Indian extradition framework, so that India truly and effectively cooperates with other countries in criminal matters.