News

Don't miss Ana Aliverti's latest post on the Border Criminologies Blog: 'The New Immigration Act 2014 and the Banality of Immigration Controls'.

This post builds on the earlier one this week by Celia Rooney about the Immigration Act 2014. In this post Ana concentrates primarily on the nature and effect of the controversial new citizenship stripping powers brought in by this piece of legislation.

Last week the British Parliament passed the first major piece of primary legislation on immigration under the current Coalition government. Amid a heated electoral season in the run up to the elections for the European Parliament, which had as one of its focus Eastern European migration to the UK, the immigration bill made its way through Parliament without much fanfare. As Celia Rooney outlined, the Immigration Act 2014 has greatly reduced rights of appeal while limiting the right of those in detention to apply for immigration bail. It has also more strictly regulated appeals against removal and deportation orders based on Article 8 (ECHR) and incorporated a range of other measures to reinforce the view of the country as ‘hostile to migrants.’

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Alan Norrie will give a paper at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR) Colloquium on Guilt on 21 June 2014. His paper is entitled ‘Legal and moral guilt and “The Act of Killing”’. The Colloquium will discuss the following themes: Guilt and the Unconscious, Guilt and the State, Law, Guilt and Responsibility. Antonio Ribeiro will screen his film, Justice Seekers, about the struggle of Dafroza and Alain Gauthier to have alleged perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide put on trial in France. Afterwards he’ll be in conversation with Philip Spencer (Kingston).

The full programme of the event is available by clicking the link.

Jackie Hodgson has been conferred the award of Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences in recognition of her distinctive and distinguished contributions to Social Science.

The Academy of Social Sciences is the National Academy of Academics, Learned Societies and Practitioners in the Social Sciences. Its mission is to promote social sciences in the United Kingdom for the public benefit. Being an Academician means that a peer group has reviewed the standing and impact of one’s work and found it worthy of the conferment of the award of Academician.

Jackie has conducted ethnographic research in the field of criminal justice both in England and Wales and in Europe across more than two decades. Through a series of path-breaking studies of the work and practices of criminal defence lawyers, including a study commissioned by the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice (1993), her research and scholarship has had a significant impact on policy and practice. It led to the transformation of professional standards, guidelines and training for criminal defence provision in England and Wales. Her work is empirical and often comparative, and adopts a socio-legal approach to the study of criminal justice, as evidenced by her large-scale ethnographic studies of legal actors and legal processes. These studies have contributed to our understanding of legal processes by using qualitative empirical findings to challenge the effectiveness of legal norms and procedures as they operate in practice. Her work impacts on policy and practice, as well as academic scholarship, by demonstrating the limitations of legal procedural protections when legal and occupational cultures are not also addressed.

Jackie actively promotes a broader social science approach to the study of law, training the next generation of researchers through externally funded research and doctoral students. She has been elected to the Council of JUSTICE and has provided expert evidence to government bodies and the courts. She is the Director of Warwick Law School’s Centre for Criminal Justice, which promotes a socio-legal and interdisciplinary approach to the study of law. She is currently establishing a cross-faculty Centre for Operational Policing Research with colleagues from Psychology and the Warwick Business School.

Victor Tadros has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for three years, to begin in October 2014. Major Research Fellowships in the Humanities and the Social Sciences provide replacement teaching costs over two or three years, to allow academics in the humanities and social sciences to focus on a specific piece of original research.

Victor's project is entitled: To Do, To Die, To Reason Why: The Individual Ethics of War. This project will provide an ethical investigation of the conduct of individual combatants before, during and after war. It is concerned with decisions whether to join the military, whether and how to participate in wars, when to follow orders, and what to do after the war is over. It looks at those decisions both from the perspective of soldiers deciding how to act, but also from the perspective of those who might respond to their actions either through preventive harm, or by holding them accountable for their actions.

Blackstock, J., Lloyd-Cape, E., Hodgson, J., Ogorodova, A. and Spronken, T. Inside Police Custody: An Empirical Account of Suspects' Rights in Four Jurisdictions, published by Intersentia.

This empirical study of the procedural rights of suspects in four EU jurisdictions – France, Scotland, the Netherlands and England and Wales – focuses on three of the procedural rights set out in the EU Roadmap for strengthening the procedural rights of suspected or accused persons in criminal proceedings – the right to interpretation and translation; the right to information and the letter of rights; and the right to legal assistance before and during police interrogation.

In order to examine how these procedural rights operate in practice, the authors spent between two and five months in eight field sites across the four jurisdictions. During this time they observed lawyers and police officers during the period of police custody; examined case records; observed lawyer-client consultations; and attended suspect interrogations. Furthermore, they conducted 75 interviews with police officers, lawyers and accredited legal representatives.

In addition to producing and analysing empirical data, the authors have developed training guidelines for lawyers and police officers involved in the police detention process for use across the EU. The project team also produced a series of recommendations for legislative and policy changes designed to ensure better enforcement of the EU procedural rights’ instruments that are envisaged in the Stockholm Programme.

The study was carried out by the Universities of Maastricht, Warwick and the West of England, together with JUSTICE. Avon and Somerset Police and the Open Society Justice Initiative were also collaborators on the project.

"Inside Police Custody has been eagerly awaited by those working on legislation and policy in the field of procedural protections for suspects at EU level. This ground-breaking study is the first piece of comparative research to look at what actually happens in the process of police detention and interrogation in different jurisdictions, and to assess the differences in practice. Its findings will make essential reading and inform legislation at both EU and national level."
Caroline Morgan, Principal Administrator and former Procedural Rights Team Leader at the European Commission.