Rethinking Human Rights in York as a Human Rights City

Human rights is in crisis in the UK. It lacks significant political backing and public support. This ‘insider account’ of York becoming a human rights city suggests that there is a need to rethink approaches to human rights. The article looks at the strategies adopted in the city; the annual city‐based indicator report which provides the key reference point for all local activities; and the declaration of York as a ‘human rights city’ in 2017 alongside its subsequent impact. The discussion is linked to two debates within human rights: how to define and build a culture of human rights, and what it means for human rights to be truly relevant at a local level. The new approach advocated can be summarised as participatory, locally informed, and related to everyday concerns.     

Public Services, Quangos And Women: A Concern For Local Government

The past eighteen years have witnessed a shift in the locus of much public sector service provision from elected and heavily regulated local government to the more opaque, appointed sector of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (QUANGOs). This shift has been the basis of much debate about the nature of democratic accountability and whether the users of public services are empowered by such decentralization. What has yet to be considered is how the displacement of local authority representation and service delivery may affect different groups of service users. This article is concerned with such issues in relation to women as consumers of public services who, from genuine political as well as expedient motivations, have been relatively well represented by local authorities. The concern here is that as decision making moves away from public view, the need to be seen to accommodate difference is lost, and representative diversity will suffer.     

Sexuality and citizenship: the state and girls' leisure provision in England, 1939-45

ABSTRACT

The main feminist conceptualisation of women's close relationships from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century characterises these as ‘romantic friendships’ and argues that a stereotype of ‘the lesbian’ was invented by sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and applied to these relationships in order to condemn them. A number of pieces of primary research are presented which suggest that this approach is highly problematic. In the case of Emily Wilding Davison's close relationship with Mary Leigh there is simply too little historical evidence to be able to draw any conclusions as to its character or its meaning for the women concerned. In addition, Edith Lees Ellis has been seen as a woman whose romantic friendships were ‘morbidified’ as lesbianism by her husband Havelock Ellis, although in this case archival evidence clearly shows that she certainly saw herself as a ‘invert’. And relatedly, the same archival source also shows that some women experienced their sexuality in ‘mannish’ terms in the absence of any evidence of an influence on them of the pejorative writings of sexologists. Rather than premature theoretical generalisation, what is needed is more primary research on particular women's close relationships and the social context in which these were located.

     

Looking back to see forward: the legal niceties of land theft in land rushes

This paper aims to make a modest contribution to an overdue need to locate the current land rush in its historical context, less as a new phenomenon than as a surge in the continuing capture of ordinary people's rights and assets by capital-led and class-creating social transformation. It aims to do so by looking back to earlier land rushes, and particularly to those which have bearing upon sub-Saharan Africa, the site of most large-scale involuntary land loss today. In particular, the paper focuses upon a central tool of land rushes, property law. The core argument made is that land rushes past and present have relied upon legal manipulations which deny that local indigenous (‘customary’) tenures deliver property rights, thereby legalizing the theft of the lands of the poor or subject peoples. Even prior to capitalist transformation this feudal-derived machination was an instrument of aligned class privilege and power, later elaborated to justify mass land and resource capture through colonialism. Now it is routinely embedded in the legal canons of elite-aligned agrarian governance as the means of retaining control over the land resources which rural communities presume are their own.     

Police accountability and the Irish law of evidence

Common law courts have differed on whether and to what extent an exclusionary rule should be used as a tool to impose standards on the police. The Irish courts have pursued an uncompromising approach in this area. Basing themselves on the imperative of upholding the constitutional rights of the accused, they have been willing to exclude relevant and cogent evidence on the basis that it was obtained by the police in breach of those rights. This article locates the Irish constitutional exclusionary rule in the broader context of the role of the law of evidence in police governance. Citing specific examples from the Irish legislation and case law, it shows how recent legislative interventions and some judicial hesitancy have fuelled inconsistent and contradictory trends. It concludes that there is now a pressing need for reflection on the respective roles of the legislature and the courts in this area.     

Policy,Practicalities, and PACE s. 24: The Subsuming of the Necessity Criteria in Arrest Decision Making by Frontline Police Officers

PACE, as amended by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, establishes a complex framework of factors that police officers must consider during arrest decision making. Officers must possess a reason to arrest, it must be necessary to arrest for that reason, and they must give at least a ‘cursory consideration’ to alternatives. Based on a four‐year ethnographic study of frontline officers from two forces in Northern England, we argue that the 2005 reforms have not achieved their aims. The new regime tasks officers with undertaking a complex legal assessment prior to arrest, but officers are often confused about the necessity criteria which, moreover, is typically a minor consideration in contrast to demanding practical and policy pressures. This means that unlawful and non‐human‐rights‐compliant arrests continue to be regularly made and, equally significantly, many suspects are escaping the criminal justice system because officers are not considering arrest alternatives.