Out of Many,One? Strasbourg's Ibrahim Decision on Article 6

This case comment considers the European Court of Human Rights decision of Ibrahim v United Kingdom on 13 September 2016. Relying on Salduz v Turkey, the applicants claimed, largely unsuccessfully, that denial of access to a lawyer during police questioning, and subsequent admission into evidence of statements made in the course of that questioning, violated fair trial rights protected by Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The comment suggests that the decision's unusually emphatic statements about Article 6's ‘internal structure’ have consequences for assessing violations in future applications. Further, the decision creates greater room for public interest balancing in Article 6 cases. The decision may thus undermine the Article 6 guarantees.     

JUDICIAL DISPUTE RESOLUTION

Judicial Dispute Resolution or JDR is a pre-trial settlement process involving judges as settlement facilitators. In October 2000 the Family and Youth Court in Edmonton, Alberta launched a yearlong JDR pilot project to determine whether JDR would help in resolving family and child welfare matters before the court. The project was very successful and has become a permanent program in Edmonton. This article explains how the Edmonton JDR polit project was set up and evaluated as well as its success as a permanent program. The article describes the JDR process in detail and discusses the current statistics from the program. The design and development of the new JDR Centre in the Edmonton courthouse is also addressed.     

Violence and the U.S. prohibitions of drugs and alcohol

This paper examines the relation between prohibitions and violence,using the historical behavior of the homicide rate in the UnitedStates. The results document that increases in enforcement ofdrug and alcohol prohibition have been associated with increasesin the homicide rate, and auxiliary evidence suggests this positivecorrelation reflects a causal effect of prohibition enforcementon homicide. Controlling for other potential determinants ofthe homicide rate does not alter the conclusion that drug andalcohol prohibition have substantially raised the homicide ratein the U.S. over much of the past 100 years.