Notting Hill Carnival is the second largest in the world and celebrates Caribbean culture, and it is one of the safest festivals in the world. Yet, every year, the apparently numerous arrests made at Carnival is widely reported and used as justification to threaten the existence of Carnival itself and to employ police tactics that are unfair and discriminatory.

Following a call by Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights for a national oversight mechanism to ensure that lessons are learned from deaths in prisons, Clair Hilder reflects on the growing number of cases that demonstrate the failure of our current system to protect vulnerable prisoners.

Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights (the JCHR) is currently carrying out an inquiry into mental health and deaths in prison, looking at three broad themes…

Mr Conway, a 67 year old man, was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease, a degenerative and terminal illness, in 2014. His wish, while he retains capacity to make such choices, is to enlist the assistance of medical professionals, lawfully to bring about his peaceful and dignified death. Section 2(1) of the Suicide Act 1961 however, criminalises assisted dying.

At an International Women’s Day event at Garden Court Chambers last month, barrister Maya Sikand launched her research paper, ‘Lost Spaces: Is the current procedure for women prisoners to gain a place in a prison Mother & Baby Unit (MBU) fair and accessible?’

Donald Trump’s executive orders banning immigration from seven Muslim majority countries and imposing an indefinite stay on refugees fleeing the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria has caused untold misery and legal uncertainty for tens of thousands.

Mr August Flentje, lawyer for Trump’s justice department, stated that this exercise of executive power was ‘perfectly constitutional’, though the US courts halted the ban in its initial form.