Martin Meenagh blog

Fighting Pirates; is Obama being set up for a test stranger than fiction? The painting is Breughel's Fall of Icarus. Sometimes, history is much better than science fiction. All of the following facts and most of the arguments are true. Two hundred years ago, international shipping was menaced by the growth of a piratical federation centred upon Tripoli. Previously, the pirates had been kept in check for the better part of a millennium by an old order of Knights . The charismatic general, Napoleon, on his way to becoming Emperor, betrayed and broke the Knights in their island stronghold, Malta, in 1798. France and England then turned to their own world-struggle. The American Vice President, bitterly opposed to his President and who had negotiated a way of living with the pirates, became concerned at their freedom of manoeuvre. One of history's great secularists, he saw the menace of criminals who stole, killed and enslaved Christians on sight for what they were. On becoming pres...

The International Sea Bed Authority We're very used by now, in the west at least, to breathless media reports detailing how 'the arctic is shrinking'. This is despite many surveys over the past few years showing that it is not. The ice at the top of the world is falling back in comparison to previous seasons in some areas, but it seems actually to be growing in others, as do some glaciers . A simple explanation for all of this seems beyond the wits of clever men and women. Some have suggested a change in the salinity of the ocean ; some have suggested the influence of undersea volcanoes . Interestingly, given that solar sunspots are slow in appearing these days-- solar cycle 24 is overdue, and overdue or inactive solar cycles historically correlate with cold periods --some have suggested that we might be in for a spot of global cooling anyway. None of this has stopped stories about the 'North-West passage' opening up . This has had policy effects. The idea that t...

The Straits of Hormuz; Globalization, The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the USS Stark Affair The issues involved in the latest dispute in the Straits of Hormuz immediately seem as though they relate to a straightforward competition which is well underway between Persia and its claims to the leadership of the anti-Western bent within the lands of Islam, and the USA. Actually, the issue seems much more complicated than that. It is not exaggerating, of course, to say that blogland, like Oxford, is full of slightly strange people shouting 'and ninthly....' at those captives who did not speed by quickly enough. However, there are clearly at least four issues involved in the latest affair that really should be brought to people's attention. The reason it has come to prominence, of course, is that yesterday, several Iranian ships were alleged to have threatened American ships. It could all blow up into war either this year or next and a Persian war would be a disaster f...

The Desperate Necessity of Law My friend Martin Kelly has written a withering review of Vincent Cable's latest book, The Storm . It chimes with some thoughts I had yesterday whilst travelling back to London on the train from Oxford, having met with some old friends and their family. My thoughts were provoked by the latest edition of Foreign Affairs Magazine . Foreign Affairs works at a higher level than the Economist , which I have always thought is there to give people opinions and information--any opinions and information--which they can drop at cocktail parties and business meetings. FA, on the other hand, has some influence. It is where the sorts of people who host the higher end-parties get their opinions, whence they trickle into consensus and law with each olive in the vodka. This month's particularly appealed to me since I have for some time been trying to familiarise myself with the international convention on the law of the sea . I think that this code, to which the...

  The short answer to the question is that Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon allowed a state to leave. Such an answer raises the question of why the United Kingdom has, so far, been the only state to invoke and execute the right to leave under the article. The reasons why some of the poorest and most deprived areas of the United Kingdom led it out of the EU on June 23, 2016, are complicated and do not fit into an easy chronological or legal order. From the very broadest point of view, membership of the Union, and the Community before it, was a limitation on the freedom of the House of Commons to legislate and represented a second sovereignty in the UK. It is very tempting to take a ‘grand sweep of history’ approach and to note that the Westminster regime has never dealt well with alternative sovereignties. The claims of the Catholic church were expunged in 1533, for instance, as were those of Wales to separate treatment; the Irish parliament was subordinated to Poyning’s law, ...

Should Doctors Kill.... The way in which legal logic works itself out of the boxes in which it has been set is intriguing to me. These past days, occasioned by a horrible story of a child murdered at the hands of her mother for being disabled, I found myself asking about the way in which the power to kill had devolved upon doctors. Doctors tend to be default arbiters in this country. That is to say, when the abortion legislation was put through the commons and lords in 1967, it didn't convey a right to abortion. Instead, it formalised a longstanding defence to a charge of illegal abortion, which was that such a thing was available at the discretion of a doctor on the terms normal to the medical community. That's still the case, and only one doctor has ever been prosecuted for performing an abortion on demand (R v Smith [John] in 1973). In 1992, the law of England and Wales went a little further. The result of Airedale v Bland was that doctors were allowed the option of switchin...

Margate Dispatches I spent most of yesterday and this morning in Margate. I wanted to get away from London on a cheap awayday, and jumped on a train at Victoria to a town which I dimly remembered from the 'Only Fools and Horses' show my father and I loved in the 1980s, and which was immortalised by the cockney singers Chas n Dave. It's good to get out of London, and also to familiarise yourself with what England is actually like. I thought that there was sea, the prospect of fine weather, some cockles and mussels, and drink to be had, and anyway, the break would do me good. It did, but in going I found a place in the sunshine which really can't fall that much further. Peely-wally charm is all very well, but the place is a virtual ruin. It's famous 'Dreamland' amusement arcade burned down three years ago, and four out of every five stores seem to be shut along the seafront. The fifth store is usually a pub, or a Victorian-style gambling den full of old cheap ...

  The Irish Parliament 1297-1800 There was a semi-autonomous Irish parliament between 1297 and 1800. From 1537, this body was divided into an Irish House of Lords and House of Commons on an highly restricted franchise, and whereas it purported to a national authority, it should not be misinterpreted as a national assembly. From 1495, its laws had to be cleared by the Irish and British Privy Councils, for instance, as ‘Ponying’s Law’ subordinated the Irish parliament to the English one. [1] From 1607, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, until 1778, Catholics in Ireland were excluded at various times from public office, voting, the army, many forms of ownership, and effectively from public worship and burial. This process was from time to time interrupted, and was not systematic at first, leaving some Irish catholic lords and MPs until the late seventeenth century, for instance. From the early seventeenth century, however, constituencies were changed to give the Irish House of...