Law - new material (71)
01 April 2010
Experiments in Torture: evidence of human subject research and experimentation in the “Enhanced” Interrogation Program. Physicians for Human Rights White Paper (June) 2010, pp 30. This report examines Bush’s “human intelligence collection programs” which redefined practices such as waterboarding, forced nudity, sleep deprivation, temperature extremes, stress positions and prolonged isolation, as “safe, legal and effective” enhanced interrogation techniques. This report concludes: “The use of human beings as research subjects has a long and disturbing history filled with misguided and often wilfully unethical experimentation. Ethical codes and federal regulations have been established to protect human subjects from harm and include clear standards for informed consent of participants in research, an absence of coercion, and a requirement for rigorous scientific procedures. The essence of the ethical and legal protections for human subjects is that the subjects, especially vulnerable populations such as prisoners, must be treated with the dignity befitting human beings and not simply as experimental guinea pigs.” See: http://www.soros.org/initiatives/usprograms/focus/security/articles_pu blications/publications/phr-torture-report-20100607/phr-torturereport-20100607.pdf
Without Suspicion: Stop and Search under the Terrorism Act 2000. Human Rights Watch, 2010, pp. 64. This report examines the use of the stop-and-search power under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The power is intended to prevent terrorism, but despite almost 450,000 section 44 stops and searches throughout the UK between April 2007 and April 2009, no one was successfully prosecuted for a terrorism offence as a result. Available as a free download: http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2010/07/05/without-suspicion-0
Cutting crime: the case for justice reinvestment. House of Commons Justice Committee, 14.1.10 ( HC 94-I), pp. 226. This report is in two parts: Chapters 1-5 set out the financial, policy and political context in which the criminal justice system operates and the problems involved in controlling its expansion. The remainder of the report sets out how these problems might be overcome to transform the criminal justice landscape and create a sustainable and evidence-based response to crime for the future. Available as a free download:
http://www.parliament.the-stationeryoffice.com/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmjust/94/94i.pdf
Recent developments in housing law, Jan Luba QC and Nic Madge, Legal Action, August 2010, pp. 31-36. Of interest in this month’s section concerning housing law, is the news on page 32 that £30 m will be cut from the Gypsy and Traveller site grant, which “effectively ends the programme which was designed to refurbish existing official sites".