Some time ago I was invited to act as a country expert in the IALS/CECL led project on the implementation of the EU Victims’ Rights Directive in Ireland. Together with Rumyana Grozdanova, a PhD student in Durham, I undertook both desk research and a series of interviews with key stakeholders in the Irish criminal justice system in the summer of 2013, which resulted in the preparation of a report on the challenges for implementation in Ireland. The report is available here.
I am delighted to see the publication of David Jenkins, Anders Henriksen & Amanda Jacobsen (eds), The Long Decade: How 9/11 Has Changed the Law by Oxford University Press this week. This collection emanates from what was an extremely stimulating workshop at the University of Copenhagen some years ago, where the implications for law (in the United States but also more generally) were explored by a large group of us assembled for the task. My chapter in the collection is entitled ‘Guantánamo Bay, the Rise of Courts and the Revenge of Politics’, and the abstract is below. An earlier version can be downloaded on SSRN.
Although a core part of Barak Obama’s election platform, the closure of Guantánamo Bay has proven more difficult to bring about than anticipated. This difficulty has primarily emanated from the persistent opposition to closure found within the United States Congress and given practical effect through legislative measures that make closure difficult, if not impossible. Understanding this divergence between Executive policy and Congressional preferred outcomes in the national security arena requires us to ask a simple question, which lies at the core of this paper: is Congress acting in a purely political or a politically constitutionalist manner? In other words, is this merely a question of politics or is Congress using Guantánamo Bay as the site upon which to sketch its vision of the appropriate relationship between different organs of government? That question takes on an added level of resonance in the context of Guantánamo Bay because of the series of US Supreme Court cases making it clear that the detention centre there is subject to law and, more specifically, to constitutional and constitutionalist limits. In this short essay, I address this question and argue that, rather than communicating a grand constitutional message, Congressional obstructionism in this context is politics as usual and should be understood as such.
An article that I co-authored with Suzanne Kingston and published in the American Journal of Comparative Law ((2010) 58(2) AJCL 359-413) has been extracted in a collected edited by Sudha Setty, entitled Constitutions, Security and the Rule of Law (2014, iDebate). The full version of the article, entitled “Rights, Security and Conflicting International Obligations: Exploring Inter-Jurisdictional Judicial Dialogues in Europe”, can be downloaded for free here or read on Durham’s online repository here. The book, which features a range of international perspectives, can be ordered here.
Last December I attended and spoke at the IACL Working Group on Constitutional Respones to Terrorism conference on surveillance at UNSW Law School. The edited book arising from that conference has now been published by Routledge and is edited by Fergal Davis, Nicola McGarrity and George Williams and is entitled Surveillance, Counter-Terrorism and Comparative Constitutionalism. In it I publish a chapter entitled “Privatized Counter-Terrorist Surveillance: Constitutionalism Undermined”. I describe the chapter thus in the introduction:
This chapter is concerned with the constitutionalist challenges posed by privatized counter-terrorist surveillance (PCTS). PCTS is defined here as surveillance done for the purposes or in the course of a broader counter-terrorist regime and in which private (by which is meant non-state) actors are involved. This chapter characterizes PCTS as one illustration of a broader trend of privatization in counter-terrorism and problematizes it as a phenomenon that severely undermines the core constitutionalist commitment to limited, transparent and accountable power.
The entire collection–which is very comparative in its approach–is an insightful and intersting one. It can be ordered here.
Professor Fiona de Londras 