Here is an excellent and readable analysis of a failed attempt by a Congolese national based in Brussels to persuade a Belgian court to ban the 1930s book Tintin in the Congo on (basically) the grounds that it promoted and still promotes racist hatred. The legal move failed: This is all […]
What, you ask, are Honorary Consuls? The FCO gives the answer (ignore if you can the clueless gramar): Honorary Consuls are volunteers who help our Posts overseas provide a more accessible and responsive service to British nationals and other nationals for whom we have consular responsibility for (sic), particularly in difficult […]
I have written at length here and else where about the moral and policy challenges arising from engagement with wicked regimes elsewhere in the world. See this piece in January about the lawsuit against former MI6 officer Sir Mark Allen over his alleged role in ‘rendition’ to Libya: In the real world […]
Update I now also have a piece over at Commentator which elaborates on the material below. * * * * * The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has pronounced on a case brought against Russia by a number of Polish relatives of victims of the Katyn Massacres. Even […]
What happens if you elect prosecutors and judges? Perhaps they start to look at legal issues not according to what is right, but rather according to what outcomes might or might not be ‘popular’. Here is Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz coming down hard on the prosecution case against George Zimmerman […]
Remember the ‘outing’ by the Times of thitherto anonymous blogger Nightjack? It turns out the Times journalist concerned sneaked into Nightjack’s email account by a simple ruse to discover his real identity, and subsequently the Times lied to the courts about the way it found its information. The whole dismal business […]
Israeli superspy Jay Pollard – serving out the final years of his life prison sentence in the USA – is unwell. My own modest link to the Pollard story is here. Not to ignore here. Wikipedia blithely glosses over Pollard’s academic links to me, but the general explanation of what the […]
A gush of media reporting on the start of the conflict in Bosnia back in 1992. This one by Tim Judah (who knows his Balkans) is smart but maybe too optimistic. Yes, the likelihood of horrible inter-ethnic fighting has subsided. But is what we have now really good enough and, […]
One Ann Kittenplan sees some sort of equivalence between ‘tax avoidance’ and benefit fraud: see her comments on my post about the moral vacuum that is Graham Norton, including: I do have a problem with unfairness… a) what are the relative costs to the economy of benefit fraud, tax avoidance, […]
Here is a gloomy wail by Dahlia Lithwick against the conservative case brought to attack the sprawling ‘Obamacare’ Affordable Care Act, which now has reached the US Supreme Court: But after the aggressive battery of questions from the court’s conservatives this morning, it’s clear that we can only be truly free when the young are […]
