Barefoot Lawyer is a remarkable memoir by Chen Guangcheng, a blind civil rights activist from Dongshigu in Northeast China. Having lost his eyesight even before the age of one, Guangcheng battled discrimination against the handicapped, finding himself opportunities for education after being refused from the local village school.

Twenty-four years after the ICTY was established by the UN Security Council, the Tribunal concluded its final trial, upholding the sentence of former Bosnian Croat commander Slobodan Praljak to 20 years imprisonment for war crimes. The events which followed will unfortunately be unavoidably engrained into the Tribunal’s history, with the war criminal swallowing a vial of cyanide and killing himself.

After the International Human Rights Day, it seems an appropriate time to pen a response to a piece titled “Human Rights Do Not Exist!” by the Conservative English journalist Peter Hitchens, published in The YLJ.

On the 7th December the Council of Europe accepted the UK government’s proposal to end the blanket ban on UK prisoners’ right to vote. This proposal is a response to the European Court of Human Rights’ ruling in Hirst v UK (No 2) [2005]. In this case the Court held that the UK’s blanket ban on prisoner votes is against Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 of the ECHR (the “Right to free elections”). This article outlines a couple of key questions that the “prisoner votes saga” raises.

When the ECHR was being formulated, shortly after the second world war, the UK was one of the key drafters of the convention. The White Paper that instigated the (partial) incorporation of the ECHR into UK law, almost 50 years later, was entitled: Bringing Rights Home. The introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) was much needed and has led to legislation being more human rights focused, by virtue of provisions such as section 19 (statement of compatibility)

When will the international community’s response to the persecution of the Uighurs in Xinjiang become proportional to the severity of the crimes that China has been accused of committing?

Over 40 members of the Oxford Climate Justice Campaign and Cambridge Zero Carbon Society and Oxford Climate Justice planned to drop a 20m-long banner over Hammersmith Bridge, with the words “Oxbridge Come Clean”, as the men’s boats passed underneath the bridge. This was a repeat of similar action that had been staged at last year’s Boat Race, in which students dropped a smaller banner reading “Oxbridge Divest”. According to a statementreleased by Cambridge Zero Carbon Society

With the exponential growth of media interest in Xinjiang’s ‘re-education camps’ in recent months, the so-called ‘story China wants the world to forget,’[1] it is safe to say that Xi’s China has steadfastly abandoned Deng Xiaoping’s policy of ‘keeping a low profile.’ (taoguangyanghui)

To me, the main way that society has changed in terms of the past thousand years of human development is transportation. We have gone from living in small communes, unlikely to ever leave, to being able to reach the other side of the world in under 24 hours. People now can choose to live their lives miles away from their place of birth and indeed frequently do. What is the position however if the individual gets into trouble with the ‘host state’ and tries to send them back t

Where are you going for your next holiday? Hopefully not Syria or Iraq. Not only is it rather dangerous, it now seems likely that it will be illegal to go there without a reasonable excuse. Clause 4 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill will make it a criminal offence for a UK national or resident to enter or remain in a ‘designated area’. The Secretary of State decides what this constitutes; the designation must be considered necessary to prevent people from visi

On 12th of February, we had the pleasure of hosting an excellent panel of speakers who engaged in a lively discussion on the agenda to repeal anti-abortion laws in Northern Ireland. In conversation were Dr David Russell (Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission), Dr Shona Wilson Stark (Cambridge academic with substantial research on abortion rights in Northern Ireland), Mr Darragh Mackin (solicitor on the Sarah Ewart case) & Helen Jennings (Cambridge fi