KlimaSeniorinnen and Gender
This blog post discusses the relevance of the KlimaSeniorinnen case to the discussion of vulnerability and intersectional gender in climate litigation. To date, very few climate cases have addressed the gendered dimensions of climate change and there was some hope that this case would. However, as this post argues, despite the fact that KlimaSeniorinnen is a case about the impacts of climate change on elderly women, the Court fails to meaningfully engage with gender as a determinant of the harms suffered by individuals. Gender remains an overlooked issue in climate litigation.
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Humanitarian Externalisation
Why are the reasons given in support of the declared aim of the current asylum policies in the UK, EU and USA of breaking the business model of smugglers expressed in humanitarian terms? It is, no doubt, tempting to simply dismiss this humanitarian rhetoric as hypocrisy, as the compliment that vice pays to virtue. Yet however justified that dismissal may be in particular cases, to turn away too quickly from this phenomenon would be to miss something of political significance in its form and to fail to register the historical entanglement of humanitarianism and border externalisation.
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Magical Thinking and Obsessive Desires
Two days before the UK Supreme Court declared the government’s Rwanda policy unlawful, PM Rishi Sunak rid himself of his Home Secretary, Suella Braverman. The sacking, the ruling, and the aftermath demonstrate both a key division in the Conservative Party and illustrate the choice it faces on the kind of politics it will promote after the next election: socially liberal technocratic nationalism (the Sunak option) or illiberal ‘culture war’ nationalism (the Braverman faction). The Supreme Court’s judgment raises the stakes in this conflict because its grounds for ruling the Rwanda Plan unlawful appear to provide ammunition for the radical illiberal wing of the Conservative Party.
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What is the Point of the UK’s Illegal Migration Bill?
The introduction of the Illegal Migration Bill to the UK Parliament appears to be the latest outburst of the Conservative government’s increasing hysteria with respect to the small boat crossings of the Channel in which Brexit-released fantasies of post-imperial sovereign power are acted out in the form of half-baked legislative proposals. The politically inconvenient fact that most of the 15% of asylum seekers who reach UK territory in this way are found to have legitimate asylum or protection claims seems to be a particular source of rage with a leaked Conservative Party email to party members under Suella Braverman’s name blaming “an activist blob of leftwing lawyers, civil servants and the Labour Party” for boat crossings, which at least suggests she knows her audience. This is “Build the Wall” for an island nation and, like Trump’s project, its primary value is as a fantasy object than a practical project.
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The UK’s anti-legal populism
Calls for UK withdrawal from the ECHR are raised at fairly regular intervals in certain quarters of the Conservative party, but this week various members of the Government, including the Prime Minister. Reason for this was an interim measure by the European Court of Human Rights that stopped a deportation flight to Rwanda. It was entirely predictable that calls for UK withdrawal from the ECHR would resurface. Less predictable for many, are the implications this would hold for the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
Continue reading >>Democracy on Thin Ice
The notorious Elections Act 2022 culminated in an appropriately dramatic fashion this past week. Following two successful motions in the House of Lords that sought to tame the most controversial provisions of the Act – the voter ID measure and subjecting the Electoral Commission to greater executive oversight – the House of Commons was forced to directly confront the disputed and unpopular nature of these measures. Despite ongoing concerns and the Lords’ efforts to intervene, the Act will go into effect largely as originally drafted.
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Electoral Oversight under Government Control
The Elections Bill 2021 has generated significant controversy among members of parliament, scholars, and observers. The provision that has generated the most alarm has been a voter ID provision, whose effect has been described as prospectively oppressive and whose justification is widely seen as thin, given the low levels of identified voter fraud in the UK. However, another provision of the Bill has also generated alarm: granting the Secretary of State the power to influence the currently independent Electoral Commission.
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The Narrowing of Electoral Access
The broad reforms in the UK Elections Bill 2021 present as self-serving entrenchment by Conservatives. Two measures in particular support this assessment. A voter ID requirement would raise hurdles that could reduce turnout among vulnerable or marginalized groups; and the Electoral Commission would be placed under greater oversight of the partisan Speaker’s Committee, hamstringing the Commission as a neutral monitor of elections. Other provisions lack such a clearly oppressive or self-serving character, but could raise similar concerns if abused in implementation.
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