Main menu
Staff & students

Goldsmiths Law Blog

Primary page content

Connecting theory and practice in critical human rights studies (spotlight on Dr Lena Holzer)

We are delighted to announce that Dr Lena Holzer has joined Goldsmiths as a Lecturer in Law.

Lena will be convening the Public Law and the Human Rights Act module (in Year 1 of the LLB), contributing to the Human Rights Law and Clinic module (in Year 3) and injecting specialist human rights law expertise into our programme, particularly through our LLM in International Human Rights (launching in September 2023!).

Lena is bringing to Goldsmiths excellent research capacity in the field of international law, gender justice and sports law.

The Q & A below offers is a first glimpse of Lena’s research, approach to teaching and contributions she is aiming to make to our programme.

Where did you work/study before joining Goldsmiths?

I received my PhD from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. My doctoral studies also included spending one year at King’s College London, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic I passed most of this time remotely. Before arriving at Goldsmiths, I taught in different university programmes in Geneva, Utrecht and Krems and worked for various human rights institutions, such as in Switzerland, Austria and Belgium.

What are your specialist areas in Law?

I focus in my research broadly on international human rights law and specifically on how international law impacts gender relations in society. My PhD thesis examined how international law shapes the existence of the gender binary in law. Another area of my research is sports law and its influences on different structures of inequality, such as sexism, racism and transphobia.

What is your role in Goldsmiths’ Law programme?

I will convene the Public Law and the Human Rights Act module and further contribute to the Human Rights Law and Clinic module. I will also be involved in coordinating the final year dissertation and develop my own research projects, focusing particularly on sports, human rights and gender equality.

What is your approach to teaching? What are your plans for the Public Law and the Human Rights Act module for the next academic year?

I enjoy teaching in an interactive manner that requires students to apply theoretical knowledge to real world issues. Since law often reflects past and current power relations, I usually encourage my students to question why certain laws exist, what they do in practice and how they could be changed to foster equality. Hence, I believe that an important task of a law lecturer is to provide students with the tools to critically assess law, and to show how they can use this knowledge in their future professions or current jobs.

Yet, a critical engagement with laws always entails knowing the technicalities and doctrines of laws and legal systems. This is why I will aim in my course on Public Law and the Human Rights Act to teach students the legalistic aspects of UK public law and human rights system, whilst enhancing their sensibilities to critically interrogate the sources of law discussed. In line with the general approach of Goldsmiths’ Law Department, I will analyse public law in its current socio-political context by examining the impact of recent legal developments, such as Brexit. At times, I will also draw the comparison to foreign legal systems to show the specificities of and controversies around the UK public law and human rights system.

You have experience in teaching in interdisciplinary programmes. How will you draw on this experience for your work at Goldsmiths Law?

I will certainly draw on my experience of studying and teaching in interdisciplinary programmes in my work at Goldsmiths since I believe that this can help to prepare the students for their careers as lawyers. I think that my interdisciplinary academic profile has allowed me to develop the capacity to teach law to a broad audience with different interests and background knowledges. This is crucial for a law programme that aims at making legal education accessible and practice-oriented. I am further convinced that lawyers can more effectively regulate an issue if they understand the subject matter from different angles, which is why I will encourage my students to read broadly and also familiarise themselves with literature from other disciplines. Moreover, as lawyers end up working in all types of professions these days, it becomes even more important to have transversal skills and a grasp of interdisciplinary debates.

What are you looking forward to the most being at Goldsmiths?

I am excited to join a department that strives towards teaching a new generation of lawyers the legal tools for promoting equality, justice and a sustainable future. The educational approach of Goldsmiths will allow me to connect my passion for theoretical engagements with laws with a practice-oriented approach that can help to generate critical human rights lawyers. I am specifically looking forward to working in an environment that fosters creative and critical thinking and to being surrounded by highly motivated colleagues. Not only will I be able to draw inspiration from my colleagues’ teaching methods and research, but I will also learn from my students who will push me to question my own approaches and perspectives.

Our students write: The urgent need to regulate Drone Strikes

In this piece, second year law student Samuel Cardwell draws on the knowledge he gained from participating in Goldsmiths Law’s Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights Law and Policy Clinic to examine the human rights implications of using drone strikes as part of the War on Terror.

Surveying a wide array of sources, Cardwell uses hard-facts and legal analysis to highlight the damage that drone strikes have on not just the victims but the perpetrators too.

‘Drone strikes lower the threshold for violent action and trivialise killing’, writes Cardwell. ‘The operator is distanced from the scene of the violence and only views it through pixels on a screen’, which ‘distance the emotion from them’. ‘International law must apply to drone strikes to prevent global misuse of this technology’, he concludes.

Read the blog here: The urgent need to regulate Drone Strikes.

 

Climate justice, BLM, human rights: Goldsmiths Law workshops in schools continue apace

Our Department of Law is passionate about connecting with young students in schools across London and the UK, and across a range of educational settings, with a view to engaging them with, and giving them a platform to participate in, contemporary debates through a socio-legal lens.

Our Knowing Our Rights project, which seeks to raise awareness about the impact of the European Convention on Human Rights in the UK, through the Human Rights Act, has provided a great platform for this work, enabling us to connect with approximately 3,000 students, both in person and virtually, since launching the project.

At the end of March, we were delighted to virtually visit St Margaret’s School, an independent co-ed school in Bushey. Our Dr Fatima Ahdash delivered an exciting and highly relevant workshop on human rights, social justice and the Black Lives Matter movement.

The workshop was a great hit: dynamic and highly interactive from the start. St Margaret’s impressively brilliant students were highly engaged. They actively participated in a debate on whether the Human Rights Act 1998 should be repealed and replaced with a British Bill of Rights — a highly controversial political project — and they offered some truly insightful reflections on how, and the extent to which, human rights law can tackle institutional racism in the UK.

Earlier this academic year, on December 10, international human rights day, three students from the Human Rights Law & Clinic module joined our Head of Department, Prof Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos, in an in-person visit to Brighton, Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College (BHASVIC), one of the biggest sixth forms in the country, where they delivered the Knowing Our Rights workshop to students in the human rights law A level class there.

Our Knowing Our Rights workshops continue throughout May and June with planned visits to a number of secondary schools, where we will be delivering two different workshops, on climate justice and human rights, and on BLM and human rights.

We are thrilled that there has been such a positive response to this initiative, and are always looking forward to extending the reach of our work to all schools who would be interested in injecting human rights law elements into their curriculum in this way (please email us at Law@gold.ac.uk if you would like your school to take part in this programme).

Forthcoming lectures open to students/staff across the College and wider audiences

With a strong interdisciplinary ethos and appetite for engaging with challenging socio-legal issues, we strive to make our lectures and professional activities accessible across the College and to wider audiences when possible.

Please see below about opportunities to attend forthcoming lectures and public debates:

An examination of the criminal trial, February 8th, 13:00-15:00 (open to all Goldsmiths students and staff – RSVP by emailing d.giannoulopoulos@gold.ac.uk). With:

Silkie Carlo, Director, Big Brother Watch: Technology, human rights and the criminal justice system

Fallon Alexis, junior barrister, QEB Hollis Whiteman: Defending in criminal trials 

Prof Fiona Gabbert, Prof of Applied Psychology, Goldsmiths: How to ensure reliable information/evidence informs decision making in criminal trials

Dr Caoimhe McAnena, Clinical Lecturer in Psychology, Goldsmiths: The role of the expert witness in criminal trials 

Dr Emma Davies, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Goldsmiths:  Children in criminal trials (and the criminal justice system)

David Malone, Deputy Head of the Specialist Fraud Division, CPS; barrister, Red Lion Chambers: Prosecuting in criminal trials

Adam Wagner, The impact of Covid-19 on human rights, February 9th, 13:00-15:00 (open to all Goldsmiths students and staff – RSVP by emailing v.barral@gold.ac.uk).

Adam is a Visiting Professor in our department, and barrister at Doughty Street Chambers.

You may read Adam’s recent analysis on Covid-19 and human rights in the New Statesman, Prospect and engage with discussion on this twitter thread.

Street Art and Copyright Law – February 11th, 10:00 – 11:30 (open to all students/staff at Goldsmiths the wider pubic – click here to register your interest and for more information).

Prof Leslie Thomas QC,  From the Mangrove to Brixton, from Lawrence to Lammy. The policing of Black People in 40 years. Do Black Lives really matter in the eyes of the policing establishment? – 16 February 2021, 18:00 – 19:30 (open to all students/staff at Goldsmiths and the wider pubic. Click here to register your interest and for more information).

Prof Leslie Thomas QC is a Visiting Professor in our department, the Gresham Professor of Law and a barrister (and former joint head) at Garden Court Chambers.

 

Dr Abenaa Owusu-Bempah in our 2019 annual criminal justice symposium at the British Academy

Dr Abenaa Owusu-Bempah (LSE), Part of art or part of life? Rap lyrics in criminal trials – 18 February 2021, 14:00 – 15:00 (open to all students/staff at Goldsmiths and the wider pubic. Click here to register your interest and for more information).

New video: Law and Politics in the US after Trump (lessons for the UK and the EU)

You can now watch the video of our rapid response-seminar (January 21st), analysing what the storming of Capitol means for US democracy, and the lessons we can learn in Europe.

This online event brought together very eminent experts from the US and UK, including academics from Stanford Law and Princeton as well as our Head of Department, Prof Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos and Visiting Professor Leslie Thomas QC.

From Nuremberg to the International Criminal Court

ICTY Through Children’s Eyes – Sarajevo Kids Festival 2014
Edin, 14 years old, Sarajevo.

Our LLB Law class had the privilege of being taught by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC this week. Sir Geoffrey, who is a Visiting Professor in Law at Goldsmiths, has led on the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where the former President of Serbia was charged with crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and violations of the laws or customs of war, including for planning, instigating, ordering or otherwise aiding the widespread killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, during and after the take-over of territories within Bosnia and Herzegovina and the killing of thousands in detention facilities there or for the forcible removal of the majority of the Croat and other non-Serb population from the approximately one-third of the territory of the Republic of Croatia that he planned to become part of a new Serb-dominated state.

Against the backdrop of such seminal experience, that defined the development of international criminal law at the beginning of this century, Sir Geoffrey undertook a historic review of international criminal law, focussing on several milestones: from the post WWII Nuremberg trials to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the setting up of the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and, more recently, the International Criminal Court.

Sir Geoffrey’s presentation also focussed on his work as chair of the Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting  from Prisoners of Conscience in China (murdering prisoners to extract hearts, livers, kidneys etc for commercial transplantation surgery).

The lecture was delivered in the context of ‘English Legal System in a Global Context’ module, which has the key aim of introducing our students to UK legal institutions, but goes further than what is normally covered in introductory modules of this nature, in comparing and contrasting UK legal institutions to foreign legal systems and in international law, with a view to enhancing the students’ knowledge of, and ability to critically analyse, how our domestic institutions operate and creating, more generally, a cosmopolitan legal spirit, that ensures we understand there is more to ‘Law’ than our domestic legal institutions and processes.

Sir Geoffrey presented his lecture in conversation with the Head of the Law programme at Goldsmiths, Professor Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos. The lecture was delivered online, in an interactive format, as a response to the emerging Coronavirus crisis. Students had the opportunity to ask several questions and expressed their excitement for Sir Geoffrey’s invaluable contribution.

 

Liberty’s Martha Spurrier to LLB class: “We must keep the Human Rights Act intact”

Martha Spurrier to Goldsmiths’ LLB Law students: “Rules affecting our human rights can sometimes be unfair and the law inadequate. You must be prepared to challenge unfair rules and campaign for their change”

In line with our approach of teaching Law in its socio-political context and exposing students to key players in the legal and political process, we had the great pleasure of hosting Martha Spurrier in the Year 1 ‘Public Law and the Human Rights Act’ module, coordinated by Goldsmiths’ Dr Virginie Barral.

Martha was appointed earlier this year Visiting Professor in Law at Goldsmiths. She is the Director of the UK’s leading human rights NGO Liberty and a human rights lawyer specialising in questions of access to justice, freedom of expression, children and women’s rights, and the rights of prisoners and immigration detainees.

In her lecture, Martha discussed how the Human Rights Act had changed the way civil servants and judges make decisions on a day to day basis, noting that a remarkable undocumented impact of the Act has been on the way public servants have integrated the concepts of rights in the way they interact with people.

Confronting students with current debates about updating the Human Rights Act (in line with the Conservative government’s 2019 election manifesto), Martha brought to light the inadequacy of the common law to protect fundamental rights effectively and insisted on the importance of keeping the Human Rights Act intact.

She also pointed out that rules can sometimes be unfair and the law inadequate. She encouraged students to be prepared to challenge unfair rules and campaign for their change.

Martha also deplored the lack of attention and interest paid in the UK to economic, social and cultural rights such as the right to food, shelter, or health whilst the financial crisis and deepening socio-economic inequalities have brought these in sharp relief with more families unable to feed themselves decently. She called for more radical thinking about socio-economic rights and drew from the work of Andrew Fagan to show that poverty and destitution often mean lack of access to civil and political rights. A higher level of protection of socio-economic rights was thus necessary to ensure fuller civil and political rights protection.

Martha predicted that alongside the climate crisis, which raises obvious fundamental rights questions, the future direction of rights protection and campaigning in the UK will focus on socio-economic rights and that Liberty was certainly thinking very hard about this.

We are delighted with Martha’s appointment as a Visiting Professor in Law at Goldsmiths, and are very excited to be working with her and Liberty, in our attempt to confront our students with major socio-political and economic challenges that we’re facing in the UK today.

Learning Public Law at the UK Supreme Court

Goldsmiths LLB Law students at the UK Supreme Court (November 2019)

Goldsmiths LLB Law students and academics at the UK Supreme Court (November 2019)

Goldsmiths students doing Public Law and the Human Rights Act in Year 1 of the LLB Law programme witnessed law being made at the highest level (and having potentially pervasive effect) during their recent visit to the UK Supreme Court.

In a busy day for the supreme jurisdiction in the country, the court first found that five asylum seekers that were detained pending their removal from the UK had been detained unlawfully and were therefore entitled to compensation under domestic law for any loss that the wrongful detention had caused them. ‘Thousands of asylum seekers could bring claims for millions of pounds of compensation’ after the Supreme Court judgment, wrote The Times (the Brief) the following day.

In a second judgment, the Court pronounced that a Royal Mail whistleblower had been unfairly dismissed, for raising concerns over alleged regulatory breaches.

Lord Kitchin, Lord Wilson and Lady Hale (President) delivered the judgments in these two cases.

Were the appellants right to refuse to fulfil Mr Lee’s order? How would you have applied the law if you were on the bench for this case?

The students then took part in an interactive workshop delivered by a member of staff at the Supreme Court, introducing them to key public law and human rights cases, asking them how they would have voted on them. R v Gnango, the leading authority on joint enterprise and transferred malice, and Lee v Ashers Baking company (the ‘gay cake’ case) were a focal point of discussion.

The group then moved to Courtroom 3, to observe Privy Council proceedings, in a case that was on appeal from the Court of Appeal (Bahamas). The appellant had been convicted of rape and sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment in 1996, and his appeal raised the issue of whether the criminal proceedings had been vitiated by a procedural error at the committal stage and whether the defendant had been defined a fair trial because DNA samples had not been provided to the defence. Lord Carnwath, Lord Hodge, Lady Black, Lord Lloyd-Jones and Lady Arden were in the judicial bench.

Learning about the Privy Council’s role as the court of final appeal for UK overseas territories, Crown dependencies and (some) Commonwealth countries. 

The wonderful visit ended with the students spending some time at the permanent exhibition on the lower ground floor of the building and enjoying some cake, coffee and tea, at the Court’s café, in a well lit atrium that marries modern architectural elements with the neo-gothic building of the Court which started life as the Middlesex Guildhall in 1913.

The visit was part of the Public Law and the Human Rights Act curriculum, and is typical of the innovative approach taken at Goldsmiths to incorporate experiential learning activities and study visits as part of contact time in all modules in the LLB degree.

The visit was coordinated by the module convenor, Dr Virginie Barral.

Students and academic staff reflecting on the visit, and catching up with each other, over a cup of coffee.

 

Goldsmiths Law and The Better Human podcast

We are delighted to announce that, in line with the Law School’s commitment to innovate and create a distinctive offer on human rights and social justice, we are acting as the inaugural institutional sponsor for the Better Human Podcast, produced by our Visiting Professor in Law, Adam Wagner, a leading barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, and the founder and Chair of the pioneering and multi-award-winning RightsInfo charity.

The Better Human Podcast will explore the most important human rights issues of the day – Brexit, facial recognition, racism in sport, assisted dying, artificial intelligence – through engaging and accessible interviews with high-profile guests and plain English guides to key concepts and historical events. The tone of the podcast will be open and unpretentious, with all technical terms and concepts explained.

The podcast is inspired by the idea that in today’s polarised and dangerous political times, human rights – and the liberal values they arise from – can give us the lens we need to understand what’s happening and make our societies better.

The first episode explores free speech, and you can listen to it here.

In this episode, Adam Wagner speaks to Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Index on Censorship about the human right to freedom of speech. He asks: sometimes described as the life blood of democracy, why is this important right so controversial? Do we have a right to offend, or not to be offended? Is Julian Assange a journalist? What about Tommy Robinson? Where is the  dividing line between racial hatred and protected opinions? And much more…

Goldsmiths Law students will have various opportunities to interact with the podcast, including participate in a live recording at Goldsmiths and, in due course, potentially, contribute library research that will feed into specific episodes.

The LLB Law programme at Goldsmiths gives students unique opportunities to engage with leading legal professionals and partake in challenging current debates, developing indispensable professional skills in the process.

HOW TO LISTEN TO THE PODCAST:

🎤 Listen on Google Podcasts

🎤 Listen on Apple Podcasts 

🎤 Listen on Spotify

🎤 Listen on PodBean

🎤 Listen on Overcast

🎤Listen on Stitcher

🎤 Listen on Pocket Casts

🎤 RSS feed: https://anchor.fm/s/e527bec/podcast/rss

New book: excluding unlawfully obtained evidence to protect human rights

A new book by Goldsmiths’ Head of Law, Prof Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos, explores the perennial controversy over the use of improperly obtained evidence in criminal trials. This is the first book to do so from a cross-cultural – comparative and international human rights – perspective.

The book compares and contrasts various procedural mechanisms, within Anglo-American and continental legal systems (with a focus on the United States, Greece, France and England and Wales), that may stop the jury, or the judge as a fact-finder, from accessing or using unlawfully obtained evidence – sometimes crucial, reliable evidence – when reaching a verdict or making a finding of guilt.

Analysis focuses on confessional evidence and evidence obtained by search and seizure, telephone interceptions and other means of electronic surveillance.

The book attempts to reinvigorate the idea of excluding evidence to protect constitutional or human rights (the rights thesis), arguing that there is significant scope for Anglo-American and Continental legal systems to place a renewed emphasis on it, particularly in relation to confessional evidence obtained in violation of custodial interrogation rights. This is because we can locate an emerging rapprochement, and unique potential for European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence to build consensus, in this respect.

In marked contrast, remaining divergence with regard to evidence obtained by privacy violations means there is little momentum to adopt a reinvigorated rights thesis more widely.

English law, in particular, offers a key illustration of discordance between privacy violations and violations of custodial interrogation rights. The discretionary powers that courts possess in relation to the latter often lead to exclusion. In contrast, the exclusion of evidence obtained in violation of the right to privacy is a rare occurrence in the related jurisprudence.

The book is available by Hart Publishing and on Bloomsbury online collections, and you can read a more detailed description here.

Book presentation at Berkeley Law School (10 April 2019), hosted by Prof Charles Weisselberg (first from left) and Prof Jonathan Simon (second from right)

Since publication of the book, Prof Giannoulopoulos has presented his research in this area to academic audiences in England (most recently at the Law School at the University of Exeter), Greece (at a major symposium of the Hellenic Criminal Bar Association) and in the United States, where the ‘exclusionary rule’ has been the source of one of the most enduring and controversial debates in American constitutional criminal procedure.

“Policing Los Angeles Forum” presentation, Loyola Law School (8 April 2019). From left to right: Prof Eric Miller, Prof Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos, Prof Christopher Hawthorne

In the United States, Dimitrios spoke at Loyola Law School’s Policing Los Angeles Forum, Stanford Law School, where the talk was hosted by Prof David Sklansky and was attended by many students in his constitutional criminal procedure class, and Berkeley Law School, where the event was sponsored by the Sho Sato Program in Japanese and US Law and the Centre for the Study of Law and Society.

A podcast from Prof Giannoulopoulos’ presentation at Loyola Law School is available here.