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This week I wrote the Birmingham Perspective, focusing on the Executive Order through which President Trump has attempted to arrest immigration and asylum entry from a number of Muslim-majority states. The text is below. Birmingham Perspectives are timely commentaries from experts within the University of Birmingham relevant to contemporary debates and controversies and intended to bring expert insight and research to bear on these debates.

Borders are profoundly challenging places; places of violence, refuge, opportunity, and risk. For individuals, crossing a border can represent entry into a new political and legal space in which possibility is rich; an escape from persecution, the beginning of a new life, membership of a new polity. However, borders are also of fundamental importance for states. In delineating territory they provide a clear sphere of physical responsibility: for those within those borders, what happens there is the political responsibility of the state, which we rely on to ‘keep us safe’. And so, there is an inescapable tension between the opportunity that borders represent for people, and the risk that they represent for states. Continue reading “Trump’s Immigration Ban: A Legacy of Securitised Immigration Rhetoric?”

On Tuesday I published the following rapid reaction column in The Conversation

The UK Supreme Court has ruled that the government does not have the right to trigger Article 50, formally beginning the Brexit process, without an act of parliament.

The court voted eight to three against the government, following an appeal from the High Court late last year.

In essence, the government argued that even though triggering Article 50 would lead to a change in domestic law and fundamentally alter the constitutional arrangements that EU membership had wrought, it should be allowed to trigger it without parliamentary consent. This was, it said, part of the prerogative power of the executive – the matter is merely about membership of an international treaty and organisation (the EU), and that is a prerogative matter.  Continue reading “Government loses Brexit court case – so what happens now?”

The implementation of the ECHR is a perennial challenge, whether it is securing its proper and effective ‘domestication’ in domestic legal systems, or ensuring adverse judgments are executed, it is important that we continue to question how and why the Convention is not always as well implemented as it could be. Partly in an attempt to pursue this question, I have been involved–with others–in organising a conference to be held in the Constitutional Court of Lithuania in Vilnius (pictured; credit) the week after next on Regional Challenges in Implementing the ECHR. The key question that the conference seeks to address is whether there are any regional variations or factors that are relevant to the question of implementation. Continue reading “Regional Challenges in Implementing the ECHR”