LawPod

​Sara Fegan & Rosalie Rothwell from Allen & Overy join Tamara Duncan to discuss gender diversity in law, as well as give their top tips for females starting their own legal journey. www.allenandovery.com Participants​ Sara Fegan - Senior Associate Solicitor at Allen & Overy Rosalie Rothwell - Legal Professional at Allen & Overy Tamara Duncan - Masters in Law Student at Queen's University Belfast TeamInterviewer and Editor - Tamara Duncan Researcher and Editor - Ruby Sturgeon

Dr Peter Doran and Dr Rachel Killean are joined by French Jurist Valérie Cabanes in a wide-ranging discussion about the rights of nature, biocultural rights, ecocide and more. Valérie is an international lawyer with expertise in international humanitarian law and human rights law. Since 2006, she has been involved in defending the rights of indigenous people. She started a thesis in Legal Anthropology in northern Quebec with the Innu people and then became involved in the defence of their ancestral territory in the face of large hydroelectric dam projects. In 2011, she also opposed such industrial projects in the Brazilian Amazon, in particular, the Belo Monte dam, by preparing reports debated in the United Nations Human Rights Council or the European Parliament. In 2013, she participated in the launch of a European citizens' initiative proposing a European directive on the crime of ecocide. https://www.rightsofnaturetribunal.org/judges/valerie-cabanes/ https://valeriecabanes.eu Dr Peter Doran https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/peter-doran Dr Rachel Killean https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/rachel-killean Articles From ecocide to eco-sensitivity: ‘greening’ reparations at the International Criminal Court https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2020.1783531 Criminalising ‘Ecocide’ at the International Criminal Court   https://ejni.net/resources/student-working-papers/

​In this episode, Dr Rachel Killean, Prof. Chris McCrudden and Ms Boravin Tann discuss some of the challenges associated with defining human dignity and what they have learned so far about the concept’s diverse meanings in Cambodia. Since its inclusion in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1949, ‘human dignity’ has become a foundational human rights concept. It can be found in international human rights documents, in judicial reasoning in multiple jurisdictions and increasingly in the context of sustainable development programmes around the world. Yet, what human dignity means in practice is by no means so obvious. In fact, understandings of what human dignity requires are often widely varied and contested. In this episode, Dr Rachel Killean, Prof. Chris McCrudden and Ms Boravin Tann dig into some of these complexities. Reflecting on their recent research project ‘Locating Human Dignity in Cambodia’, they discuss some of the challenges associated with defining human dignity and what they have learned so far about the concept’s diverse meanings in Cambodia. Dr Rachel Killean is a Senior Lecturer in the Queen’s School of Law and the Principal Investigator on the ‘Locating Human Dignity in Cambodia’ project. You can read more about her work here: https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/rachel-killean and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1949834. Prof. Chris McCrudden is Professor of Human Rights and Equality at Queen’s School of Law, the William W Cook Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan, and a practising Barrister at Blackstone Chambers in London. He is the author of several publications exploring the human dignity’s diverse meanings and uses and is the editor of the multidisciplinary collection ‘Understanding Human Dignity,’ published by Oxford University Press in 2013. You can read more about his work here: https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/christopher-mccrudden andhttps://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/fellows/christopher-mccrudden-FBA/ Ms Boravin Tann is a Researcher and Lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Humanitarian Law in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Her interests centre around human rights and transitional justice, and she has published on a range of topics including the right to freedom of expression, victims’ perceptions of justice in Cambodia’s transitional justice processes, and memorialisation in post-conflict contexts. Links You can read more about the project and access the research brief here: https://law.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofLaw/research/publications/human-dignity-cambodia/See also: ‘Dignity and Mana in the 'Third Law' of Aotearoa New Zealand’ https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3932625

In this episode, School of Law Social Media Ambassador Róise Pelan interviews recently graduated student, Yi Kang Choo, about his time studying Law at QUB. In addition to studying for his LLB, Choo was President of the University's Malaysian Students' Society NI during 2020-2021 and he volunteered as a mentor in the School of Law. In 2021, Choo received a Diana Award for his work to support fellow Malaysian students during the pandemic and he was named 2021 Allstate NI Queen's Student of the Year. In this episode, Choo discusses his experience of studying Law at QUB, what it is like to be an international student at QUB, and he offers guidance on how to make the most out of the university experience.

A conversation with the two founders of the campaign to stop street harassment in Northern Ireland. In this episode PhD researcher Meghan Hoyt speaks with fellow QUB law students Kirsten Wallace and Hannah Campbell about their campaign to criminalise street harassment. Further Information: Vera-Grey, F. (2016) ‘Men’s Stranger Intrusions: Rethinking Street Harassment’. Women's Studies International Forum. Vol: 58 pp. 9–1. Page, T., Bull, A. and Chapman, E. (2019) ‘Making Power Visible: “Slow Activism” to Address Staff Sexual Misconduct in Higher Education’. Violence Against Women. Vol: 25 (11) pp. 1309 – 1330. Vera-Grey, F. and Kelly, L. (2020) ‘Contested gendered space: public sexual harassment and women’s safety work’. International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice. Vol: 44(4) pp. 265-275.

In this episode two of our Law & Activism team – Charlotte Gourley and Debora Mosso - speak to John Finnigan from QUB’s Report & Support, the University’s support service for students affected by sexual misconduct, bullying, harassment, or hate crime. They talk about the work of Report & Support, what happens when you engage with the service, and what to do if you have been impacted by – or witnessed – sexual misconduct, hate crime, bullying or harassment. You can learn more about Report & Support here https://reportandsupport.qub.ac.uk/ Please note that the service remains open over the summer holidays.

Dr Peter Doran talks to Malik Ayub Sumbal, author of 'Tovuz to Karabakh: a comprehensive analysis of war in the South-Caucasus', about geopolitics, 'frozen conflicts' and energy in relation to the recent conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Malik Ayub Sumbal is author of: Tovuz to Karabakh: a comprehensive analysis of war in the South-Caucasus, 2021. “The appropriation of land thus opens up a legal space as such, turns the earth into a location.” Byung-Chul Han, What is Power?, p.80) For decades, during a civil conflict that engulfed Northern Ireland, we regularly featured in articles and book collections on so called “intractable conflicts.” The world is littered with these “frozen conflicts” that seem to “flare up” and flash intermittently across our screens, seizing our attention momentarily when conflicting parties calculate that an escalation in violence can shift the balance of power and public opinion in their favour. In every case that I can call to mind, these conflicts are the unfinished business and geopolitical fractures created in the wake of a collapse or reconfiguration in wider regional imperial or other strategic interests. Consider Kashmir and Palestine to name but two other examples. In the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, the fate of local populations and politics per se will turn, ultimately, on their continued utility in a regional balance of power shaped by Turkey and Russia, driven largely by a timeless and toxic deployment of energy politics and ethnic conflict. Malik Ayub Sumbal, has taken on the complex task of combining his keen skills as a geopolitical analyst and commentator to bring us a fresh account of the “frozen conflict” involving Armenia and Azerbaijan.  While Armenia won control over the Nagorno-Karabakh territory in the 1988-1994 war, its population has remained largely hostage to Azerbaijan’s refusal to accept the new status quo. This account is an invaluable and heartfelt series of insights based on Malik’s first-hand knowledge of the region, not least the border areas where previous hostilities have left their tragic mark on civilian populations. His sense of history and geopolitics is weaved together with granular accounts of the characters and detail that is also a hallmark of Malik’s journalism. When conflicts become “frozen” and beset with intermittent low-level – even routinized skirmishes – we rely on writers such as Malik Ayub Sumbal to provide a reliable up-to-date account when all-out war flares up and our attention is drawn once again to the region. Not only has he provided a fresh account of the background to and fall-out from the 2020 war, the writer and analyst has demonstrated an unerring ability to foresee the significance of vital developments that led to war in 2020, for example the Tovuz incident in July. This is just one of the events documented in some detail, events that led to a new “hot war”, with Armenia delivering on its promise to embark on a high-stakes attempt to leverage new influence by targeting vital Azeri oil and gas infrastructure, compelling regional powers with interests in the new trans-Eurasian east-west corridor, to engage in a new round of Russian-sponsored diplomacy designed to trade territorial concessions in return for the restoration of corridors linking Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. War is always an exchange. In exchanges over energy and geopolitical advantage, the regional powers learn all too often that the relatively powerless lives and futures of civilians can be taken hostage time and time again. Malik Ayub Sumbal provides an invaluable, timely and incisive account from a conflict that will not be allowed to die, just yet. Reference Byung-Chul, Han, 2019, What is Power?, Polity Press, Cambridge.

In this episode, Lauren Dempster is joined by Ulrike Lühe, Dr Julia Viebach and Dr Benjamin Thorne to explore the role of archives in transitional justice. Our guests discuss how archives have been understood in Transitional Justice in the past, the various forms and functions that archives have, and the intersection of archives and power in transitional justice processes. You can learn more about the work of our guests here: Atrocity’s Archives: The Role of Archives in Transitional Justice’  Thorne, B. (2020) Remembering Atrocities: Legal Archives and the Discursive Conditions of Witnessing. The International Journal of Human Rights. Viebach, J., Hovestädt, D. and Lühe, U. 'Beyond evidence: the use of archives in transitional justice,' International Journal of Human Rights Viebach, J. (2020) Transitional Archives – Towards a Conceptualisation of Archives in Transitional Justice, International Journal of Human Rights Works referenced in the episode include: Browder and Herrera: An Archive; Public Participation and a Performance Ariana Phillips-Hutton: 'Performing the South African Archive in REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony' Henry Redwood: Archiving (In)justice: Building Archives and Imagining Community Andy Aydin Aitchison: Transitional Justice Between the Individual and the State: Criminal Trials, Historical Record, Societal Responsibility Piotr Cieplak documentary, 'The Faces We Lost' - https://www.faceswelostfilm.com/ Interview with Luisa Franco: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/role-archives-transitional-justice/luisa-franco Jelena Subotic: Ethics of archival research on political violence

A unique and illuminating conversation about the work and legal legacy of Lord Kerr. This episode provides a unique opportunity to hear a wide ranging and animated conversation about the work and legal legacy of Lord Kerr. Host Anurag Deb chairs the exchange with reflections from Lady Brenda Hale, Professor Brice Dickson, Professor Claire Archibold and Ms Monye Anyadike-Danes QC.  The episode touches on his time as Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, his changing judicial philosophy within the Supreme Court and his personal warmth and generosity while also taking in specific analysis of certain key judgements. This gathering of eminent colleagues provides an illuminating portrait of Lord Kerr which is not to be missed. Please download our Additional Show Notes PDF for a full list of resources mentioned in the episode in the sequence in which they are mentioned along with participant biographies. Team Details: Interview: Anurag Deb Participants: Lady Hale, Professor Brice Dickson, Professor Claire Archibold, Ms Monye Anyadike-Danes QC Additional Support: Richard Summerville, Meghan Hoyt and Rachel Thompson

In this episode, Lawpodder and Mooter, Lucy Bill talks to Dr David Capper, Sarah Hair and Joseph Le Seelleur about their collective mooting successes this year. A must listen episode for any prospective mooter as they share their experiences, tips for success and explore the role mooting has played in enhancing their skills as well as their legal studies.