Francis Hoar: Mladic, Gaddafi and the limitations of international justice

Francis Hoar is a Barrister who writes on constitutional affairs and law reform in legal journals and on politics on his own blog. He is also the author of a chapter on a British Bill of Rights in The State of Civil Liberties in Modern Britain.

The arrest and extradition of Ratko Mladic, during Nato’s intervention in a conflict justified by a doctrine Mladic’s crimes helped encourage, is an opportunity for reflection on the uneasy balance between international justice and humanitarian protection.

These two principles are the lasting legacy of the Yugoslav conflicts on which, in most other respects, the West can look back only with shame.  From 1991 it was apparent that the Serbian-led rump of the Yugoslav Federation would stop at nothing to prevail in its plans for a Greater Serbia.  In that year, Yugoslav troops entered Croatia, ostensibly to protect its Krajinan Serb minority, and embarked on a savage campaign against the civilians of Vukovar, leading to a massacre of 264 civilians in a hospital.  The support of militias by the Yugoslav Army was to be a feature of the Yugoslav Wars up until the Kosovan conflict in 1999, one that was widely reported from the start.

Yet the leaders of the West did nothing.  Inaction and hand wringing preceded the imposition of an arms embargo not on the Yugoslav rump but on all territories of the former Yugoslavia. This embargo continued as Mladic – a Yugoslav Army general – was shelling the civilians of Sarajevo, a crime described in a subsequent war crimes prosecution as “an episode of such notoriety in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia that one must go back to World War II to find a parallel in European history. Not since then had a professional army conducted a campaign of unrelenting violence against the inhabitants of a European city so as to reduce them to a state of medieval deprivation in which they were in constant fear of death.”

Francis Hoar: We must stop treating children like adults

Francis Hoar is a barrister and writes on constitutional affairs and law reform in legal journals and on politics on his own blog; he is the author of a chapter on a British Bill of Rights in The State of Civil Liberties in Modern Britain.

Katharine Birbalsingh and Jamie Oliver’s Dream School have put a welcome focus on the decline in discipline in schools.  This will come as little surprise to those who teach or know teachers in inner city schools.

But few have commented on the fact that children’s expectation of ‘respect’ from teachers whilst being unwilling to give them any themselves is part of a wider trend, with consequences beyond the grave damage it has done to children’s ability to learn.  While children must be called ‘students’ and are invited to expound their grievances after moaning that “You think you’re higher than everybody else because you’re a headmaster”, rather than being given a detention for cheek, they also suffer adult consequences for childish behaviour.

Under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, local authorities have been required to keep a record of each racist incident by children.  Adrian Hart has pointed out that this has led to 250,000 racist incidents being logged in six years, mostly childish playground insults made in some cases by children as young as three.  Each of these children is tarred as a racist in these records, leading to potentially serious consequences in their school career even if the records are eventually deleted (something we can have no confidence will be done, given the government’s inability to keep data secure).

Undoubtedly an indirect consequence of this Act is that CPS prosecutions for racist or religious offences for ages 10 –17 rose from 404 in 2005/06 to 2,916 in 2007/08.  It cannot be the case that such prosecutions reflect a seven-fold increase in racist behaviour by children.  The criminal justice system is one in which children suffer particularly badly for their treatment as adults.