Category: Ideas

Public Lecture in Hong Kong: A Rule of Law Crisis in Europe?

EDIT (1.9.16): It seems there is quite a bit of interest in this topic, so the location of the lecture has been changed to Room 724 & 725, 7/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong. Registration is still open!

*   *   *   *   *

I will spend next week as a visitor at the Centre for Comparative and Public Law at the University of Hong Kong. While there, I will be participating in a workshop and collaborating with colleagues in the CCPL, meeting with doctoral researchers and discussing their work with them, and also giving a public lecture on Friday, September 3rd.

The lecture, “Is there a Rule of Law Crisis in Europe?”, will take place at 5:30pm on the Centennial Campus of HKU (Small Moot Court, Room 723 Room 724 & 725, 7/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower). Registration is free but encouraged, as there is a registration limit of 50. If you are in Hong Kong at the time you can register here. Continue reading “Public Lecture in Hong Kong: A Rule of Law Crisis in Europe?”

Defending academic freedom in Turkey

In the wake of last week’s failed coup, President Erdoğan of Turkey has been taking ‘decisive’ steps against those he claims or suspects were involved in the organisation of the coup or otherwise supported it. This has included people involved in the education sector: 21,000 teachers have had their licences revoked, over 1.5 thousand university deans have been instructed to resign, and a ban on international travel for professional purposes has been placed on all university academics.

There is, of course, concern that these activities are not only oriented towards removing ‘plotters’ from public life, but also quietening all opposition to the Erdoğan regime and, thus, greatly undermining critical democratic spaces represented by universities and other educational settings. I spoke about this yesterday on the Russia Today news channel and the interview and associated news story is available here.

I have also started a petition, which so far has over 600 signatures, directed specifically towards expressing solidarity to our academic colleagues in Turkey and asking President Erdoğan to rethink and revoke the travel ban. Please do consider signing it and share it widely.

There is also an open letter here, condemning the purge in Turkish universities, which I would also encourage people to sign.

The more support our colleagues in Turkey get from their international colleagues, the better.

New Essay: Evaluation and Effectiveness of Counter-Terrorism

Last autumn I went to Antwerp to give a lecture at a symposium there about responsible innovation in security technology. I am pleased that many of the papers from that symposium are being brought together in a book, including mine. I have now posted the accepted version of the essay on SSRN where it can be downloaded for free. Here is the abstract:

In spite of their proliferation at national and supra-national levels, evaluation of whether counter-terrorist measures are actually effective is worryingly inadequate or, sometimes, simply non-existent. In this short essay I argue that the expansion of counter-terrorism in the past fourteen years has had, and continues to have, serious implications for human rights (not only of suspected terrorists, but of all of us), for democracy, and for the Rule of Law. As a result, part of assessing the justifiability of maintaining (and expanding) these measures must be to establish that there are not only prospectively necessary and designed with rights concerns in mind (the arguments made in justifying introducing them), but also actually effective and proportionate. In order for us to truly assess the effectiveness of a counter-terrorist measure and the robustness of the underlying necessity claim, we must assess the extent to which they meet both meta-objectives of security measures per se and the specific objectives of these measures in as comprehensive, rigorous, and open a way possible. Current practice is, however, not to do this in a systematic manner, meaning that counter-terrorism continues to expand on the basis of prospective arguments as to its necessity and appropriateness, claims for trust on the part of governments and, ultimately, shaky evidentiary bases.

Hybrid (Counter-) Terrorism: New Chapter

In March 2014 I spoke at a workshop at the University of Birmingham on the idea of hybridity. At the time, as this post shows, I was somewhat skeptical of what the concept of hybridity (as lens, or frame, or otherwise) might have to bring to law and, especially, to counter-terrorism and the law. However, the workshop got me thinking and next year (2016) an edited book from the workshop will be released for which I wrote a chapter building on my intervention at the workshop.

The chapter was written in the fall of 2014, and may be revised before finalisation of the manuscript to take account of post-Paris developments, but it brings together in a short form some of my key thoughts about hybrid (counter-) terrorism. I have uploaded the pre-print here, and the introduction gives a flavour:

Legal scholars have written much about different ‘models’ of counter-terrorism, with the ‘criminal justice’ and ‘military’ models dominating the discourse. However, these models of counter-terrorism law and its place within a broader ecosystem of counter-terrorism measures, policies and practices, fail to appreciate the breadth, complexity and drivers of counter-terrorism when viewed in the round. Indeed, this is indicative of legal scholarship on counter-terrorism, which tends (in contrast to some sociological scholarship in the field) to focus almost exclusively on doctrinal legal research, infrequently placing counter-terrorist law and policy within its broader context. In this, hybridity may be a helpful lens through which to view counter-terrorism law and practice; it may facilitate our understanding of counter-terrorism as a field of practice with multiple limbs and elements, indicating more fully the terrain on which critical engagement with terrorism and counter-terrorism ought to focus. This chapter aims to illustrate the hybrid nature of terrorism and counter-terrorism as mechanisms of resistance within asymmetrical power relationships and, through considering its combination of measures and engaged actors, to illustrate the critical usefulness of conceptualizing counter-terrorism as a hybrid phenomenon.