 Well, I'm not going to be able to live up to that. But I very much appreciate the introduction, Scott. And who would have known all those years ago in those huge classrooms like this that we would cross paths only a few years later in this way? So I began by saying good afternoon. And it's a real privilege to be here with you today. I always enjoy speaking at SOAS. And I'm very much grateful to Scott for this particular invitation, and as well as many others that he has sent along the way. And thanks so much to Wilson Solicitors for your part in it as well. To Dr. Samia Bono, who I understand is responsible for publicizing the event and getting you all here and who I look forward to being in conversation with. And also, I just want to thank Dr. Vanya Homsich for the hospitality and camaraderie and welcoming me here. And there are many others, so it's really great to see old friends here and look forward to meeting new ones. I am especially honored to be here tonight to speak in memory of Kay Everett, someone I really wish I'd had the opportunity to know. The collaboration that makes possible this lecture and the student prize and congratulations is a really beautiful way to keep her memory and commitment to social justice alive. And I'm proud to be a part of it. The title of my talk this evening is Abolitionist Human Rights. And it's a topic that I wish I could have engaged Kay Everett on. As you know, we've already heard a bit about her. But also, she was an important critic of immigration detention in the UK. So I did a little bit of research and saw her testimony about it to parliament. She co-convened the Detention Committee of the Immigration Law Practitioners Association. She addressed the European Law Academy Conference in Strasbourg, although I can't find that, but I would love to, on human rights in the detention of asylum seekers. I don't know whether she might have considered herself an abolitionist or might today. But at least in the United States, many of those who oppose immigration detention have begun to work with prison and police abolitionists, seeing the similarities in their causes and in the structures they're fighting, including those that criminalize and racialize the immigrants on whose behalf Kay advocated. So although I'll not speak explicitly about immigration detention tonight, I hope we'll all keep it in the back of our minds and I welcome your thoughts on it. So the broad question I'd like to pose for you this afternoon is about the commensurability of movements for prison and police abolition with human rights law movements and discourse. And it starts with a paradox. While some of the most vocal abolitionists have long considered human rights to be central to their aims, most human rights advocates have not prioritized or even supported prisoner police abolition. The two groups, of course, agree on many matters. They all oppose the death penalty, mass incarceration, and police abuse. Yet they view the causes and responses to these issues quite differently. While abolitionists refuse the ideologies and practices of the carceral state, human rights advocates often depend upon them to back up their anti-impunity rallying cry. Indeed, human rights advocates have had tremendous success in defining anti-impunity in criminal punishment terms. Not only by helping to establish new international criminal institutions, but by embedding a carceral response to human rights violations in human rights institutions, international, and regional. I really appreciate the opportunity to get your feedback today. And I'm looking forward to the Q&A. As I'm at the beginning of a new book project that will consider the significant chasm between abolition on one hand and human rights law and practice on the other. I'm starting with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, or the ECTHR, in part because many countries in Europe and the Council of Europe as a whole, and you can help me decide whether the UK falls into that, or in what ways, have achieved penal reforms that would be inconceivable in my own country, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world. The ECTHR has played a role in and even instigated some of these reforms. At the same time, the Court itself has been swept up in the carceral wave of human rights, which I date to the 1990s, and it's done so often following the recommendations of UN bodies. Even as the Court insists both that it has a limited mandate and that it's not a criminal court, it consistently finds that states have a positive obligation to respond criminally to human rights violations. These rulings in these rulings, which Judge Francois Tolkens calls the Court's deployment of human rights as a shield, as a sword, have increased over time and threatened to undo some of its own achievements regarding penal reform. At the same time, they often facilitate the Court's claims to address and take seriously certain human rights violations, thereby providing it with an alibi for not calling for structural change. Now, I'm exploring the case law and advocacy that both led to and has resulted from some of this case law through a lens that some of you in the room might share, which is prison and police abolition. I suspect that many of you are at least thinking about the latter and perhaps the backlash to it in relation to the new police crime sentencing and Courts Act in the UK. Now, I could spend time trying to convince you to be abolitionists, but that's actually much less my aim today than urging human rights advocates to acknowledge the ways in which human rights often impede abolition and getting abolitionists to recognize that human rights law and even movements and discourse might not be as liberatory as they imagine. So I'll make this intervention in the following way. First, I'll consider broadly the relationship between human rights and abolition movements and what I think might be some of the synergies and dissonances between them. I'll then turn to two areas where I think the ECTHR has been the most anti-abolitionist and yet the least critiqued and that is, in those cases involving gender, sexual and racial based violence and relatedly in those calling for active policing responses. Along the way, I'll present some abolitionist critiques by many of those whose interests the courts claims to protect. And although you know much more than I about the new UK policing law and debates about its compatibility with human rights, human rights law, domestic, regional and international, I hope you'll find the discussion relevant to those debates as well. So let me begin then with the first part, the relationship between human rights and abolitionist movements. As I mentioned at the start, abolitionists often stake their claims in or at least see themselves as aligned with human rights. Ironically, this is true even in the United States where human rights carry little legal weight. Angela Davis, for instance, has long framed abolition as a human rights issue, including by relying in her 2003 book, Our Prison's Obsolete on Human Rights Watch Reports from the 1990s on prison conditions in the US. The more recent movement for black lives has in many ways followed in those footsteps, including by bringing complaints to the UN about racist police violence as one means of supporting their calls for police abolition. Now, the reasons for some of this reliance on human rights in the US is I think specifically related to the fact that abolition is a part of the black radical tradition in the US that has long turned to human rights, even or especially over civil rights, to bring the world's attention to deep structural legacies of slavery. Thus, it's not surprising that historian Ben Weber has recently called for a new human rights paradigm to support his call for prison abolition, one grounded in quote, the anti-carceral internationalism of the imprisoned black radical tradition. He does not, however, note that the other human rights paradigms are not only not abolitionist, but arguably undermine it. Others have picked up on the call each for slightly different reasons. So Jonathan Simon in the US, for Jonathan Simon in the US, abolition will be more likely to succeed if grounded in human dignity than if it's based in economic efficiency. For David Scott here in the UK, abolitionists should quote, promote human rights as part of their counter-hegemonic strategy. Again, neither thinker sees the real impediments to abolition that I contend are posed by human rights institutions. But let's think about the synergies. Why might abolitionism, why might abolitionists find human rights to be of assistance in their aims? Well, for several decades, human rights law and movements focus largely on due process rights of the accused, prison conditions, and even on getting people out of prison. So as early as 1968, for instance, Amnesty International, which had begun in 1961 to write for letter-writing campaigns to free political prisoners, Amnesty officially expanded in 1968 its mandate to cover the treatment of all prisoners, political, and what it called ordinary. In doing so, it used the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as prohibition on torture, cruel and inhumane punishment, and arbitrary arrest and detention. And while Amnesty might have found the criminal punishment systems of some states more suspect than others, it actually saw all countries as capable of abusing their penal power. At a doctrinal level, abolitionists and council of Europe countries might also see human rights law as aligned with their aims. The European Convention on Human Rights enshrines the rights of the accused, particularly in Article III's prohibition on torture, Article V's right to liberty and security, Article VI's right to a fair trial, and Article VII's prescription of punishment without law. Indeed, many scholars and practitioners have referenced these provisions and the court's jurisprudence interpreting them as evidencing the shield as opposed to the sword function of human rights. More than that, especially when compared to the United States, the Council of Europe and the ECTHR have engaged in or precipitated a number of penal reforms. So the Council of Europe considers itself to have been a pioneer for the abolition of capital punishment, and the ECTHR has abolished de jure, irreducible life sentences, though not life sentences in general, and relatedly has emphasized that everyone is entitled to the opportunity for rehabilitation or the right to hope. In addition, the court has protected a broad range of civil, political, and even economic and social protections of prisoners during confinement. One might even argue that certain of these reforms are what well-known U.S. abolitionist scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmour calls non-reformist reforms. And by that, she means those reforms that rather than supporting the carceral state, aim to, as she puts it, quote, at the end of the day unravel rather than widen the net of social control through criminalization. Indeed, and one of the only pieces to address had on the question whether abolition and human rights are compatible, Isabel Renzuli finds some glimpse of abolitionism in ECTHR rulings on prison overcrowding. Specifically, she gives the example of judgments that require a decrease in reliance on the prison system, she says, through the adoption of, quote, alternative measures to incarceration and reducing the use of pretrial detention. And additionally, while a far cry from promoting police abolition, the court has attempted to curtail police brutality through cases that proliferate the case law. It's found many states responsible for excessive use of force by police in violation of articles two and three. It has also found violations of articles fives prohibition on arbitrary deprivation of liberty when police have unlawfully detained or arrested individuals, subjected detainees to unwarranted or disproportional levels of compulsion and duress, and failed to properly inform detainees of the reason for their detention. The court has found some of these actions to violate article 14's prohibition on discrimination as well, given the enormous amount of policing that affects the rights of racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. Through these cases, the court implicitly, at least, suggests a variety of reforms that need to be taken by police, which the Council of Europe has detailed now in a handbook for police officers and other law enforcement officials. But what about the dissonances? In promoting the use of human rights or applauding these reforms, many abolitionists have missed that the very same court they lawed also calls for increased prosecution, sentences, and policing. As such, these reforms, as I've already suggested, seem to function as an alibi for an increasingly criminalized approach to human rights. Human rights advocates who have noted and generally critiqued what I've elsewhere called the turn to criminal law in human rights, or anti-impunity, have seen the tension between the shield functions and the sword function, found in these cases. Lawrence Laverson and Natasha Mavranakola refer to the deployment of this function as, quote, coercive human rights. In the relevant jurisprudence, the court has used some of the same provisions of the European Convention that support the rights of the suspected, accused, and convicted, as well as those that are used to hold states accountable if often criminally for police violence. They've done so to require states to enact or interpret criminal legislation to cover certain conduct, to find states accountable for not investigating, prosecuting, or punishing human rights violations, including by limiting, they've limited prosecutorial discretion in that way, and to find sentences to be too lenient, or, quote, manifestly disproportionate to the harm. Now, for the most part, the scholars who have usefully mapped the application of coercive human rights have not brought an explicit abolitionist lens to their work. And I hope to fill that lacuna with this project as well as to bring that abolitionist lens to two aspects of the jurisprudence of which they've been less critical. One is the ways that the groups seen as vulnerable or historically subordinated are often used to justify criminal sanctions. And relatedly, the court's calls for increased policing, especially for some of those same critiques. So I'll now go into more detail in each of these as I look at the anti-abolitionist jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. And both of what I just mentioned end up being major assumptions that the court makes or drivers of the jurisprudence. So the first is that certain groups are especially deserving of or in need of criminal law. So part of the court's jurisdiction, in fact, or jurisprudence, in fact, that part which is often seen as its most progressive, suggests that those who are vulnerable or are part of historically subordinated groups are particularly deserving or in need of criminal law. Indeed, the court has made over 500 references to vulnerability in the merits of Article III cases alone to describe children, victims of sexual and domestic violence, and members of the LGBTQIA plus community. While acknowledging that being deemed vulnerable, quote, does not always prove to be empowering, Karina Harry, though a critic, of course, of human rights in general, ultimately supports the vulnerability designation because it quote acts as a magnifying glass, making ill treatment look bigger and enabling the court more easily to apply more or more stringent criminal law. And she supports that because of the gravity of the crime. And like the court and most who support the jurisprudence, Harry does not claim a retributive rationale here, but rather assumes a deterrence rationale. Who could oppose an approach that will protect victims? One area in which the court has used vulnerability to increase the positive obligations of states to investigate, prosecute, and punish is domestic violence. In OPAS versus Turkey in 2009, the court handed down its landmark case finding that domestic violence resulting in death constituted not only violations of Article II and III, but also of Article 14. In doing so, it applied and affirmed multiple regional and international findings and policies, including of the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women or CEDA. The court considered that the victims were particularly vulnerable in that case, which was key to its finding that the state failed in protecting them, both at the policing and the charging stages. It also used the discourse of vulnerability to find the state accountable, notwithstanding that the victims had earlier dropped their complaints against the perpetrator. Later cases, consider the victims of domestic violence are per se vulnerable and requiring of state protection. Now, while in OPAS, the court considered that the law and the books have properly applied would have protected the victim. In other cases, the court has found the legal framework wanting. In a 2019 case against Russia, the court found the state liable for violations of Articles 3 and 14 pointing specifically to the Russian law's failure to include domestic violence as quote, either a separate offense or an aggravating element of other offenses. And as such, it definitely fell short of the state's positive obligation and then the court sort of summarizing a fair amount of case law to quote, establish and apply effectively a system punishing all forms of domestic violence. Now these cases have been lauded by many feminists and human rights advocates more broadly. As what many have labeled carceral feminism has taken hold, it has become nearly common sense, including in human rights, not only that violence against women should be addressed as a human rights issue, which is obviously a good thing, but that the harms should be attended to criminally and they just go hand in hand for many. And that position, I contend, is problematic for a variety of reasons, including that it neglects the thought and activism of many feminists around the world who have played important roles in abolition activism and scholarship often rooted in anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles. Those feminists have long confronted the need to create abolitionist responses to domestic violence as well as to rape and sexual violence. Noting the amnesia about anti-carceral feminism, which maybe is putting the label, setting the label and making the label in hindsight, French feminist Francoise Verge discusses debates among the women's liberation movement or the MLF in France in the 1970s about how to respond to violence against women. And she reminds us that nearly all refused the appeal to criminal law. They disagreed about a number of things, but they agreed that criminal law was not the right place to turn. In fact, they said doing so would, quote, admit the collective failure of the MLF as repressive laws only reinforced and upheld rape and violence. Relatedly, some feminists opposed a law against violence against women during the same period for pretending, for quote, pretending that respect for women will be measured in the number of years behind bars handed down in trials. Verge laments both the failure of an organized abolitionist feminist movement to emerge in France in those years and the move toward carceralism beginning in the 1980s. Yet abolitionist, anti-racist and anti-colonial feminists continue to make important arguments against incarceration as the answer to violence, including gender-based violence. With regard to domestic violence survivors, British writer and activist Lola Olufemi explains, quote, the most pressing issues for survivors is not that their abusers go to prison, but that there is a safety net for them to fall on, back on, that enables them to leave abusive situations. They need refuges, roots to economic stability and adequate welfare support, she says. And regarding perpetrators, she adds, quote, putting an offender in jail does nothing to reshape the logic of sexual and gendered violence, nor does it signal that the act itself was an injustice. Now this critique has actually began to gain some traction among a broader group of feminists in opposition to the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Act and to the bill that preceded it. And so some of you might be aware of this, but in an open letter opposing the bill, because it would lead to more and longer incarceration of women, particularly immigrant women and women of color, a number of feminist organizations also signed an open letter criticizing the parts of the bill that increased punishment for violence against women. And it was pretty clear that that was put in there to try to gain support and it didn't work. So they called on the bill's authors to, quote, address the underlying causes of violence against women and girls, and specifically contended, quote, we urgently need a shift from the punitive approach championed by the bill towards restorative and transformative justice that will actually make women safer. In fact, abolitionists have long considered a variety of alternatives from addressing economic and political causes of violence to alternative mechanisms such as transformative justice. Now, largely at the behest of advocates, the ECTHR has also required increased criminalization or punishment for racially motivated violence. The landmark case here is Nachova versus Bulgaria from 2005, which required that Bulgarian law distinguish with regard to police violence cases of excessive use of force from those cases of racist killing. In a later 2014 case, Obdu versus Bulgaria, the court used recommendations of the committee on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination to find that states must make racially motivated violence a separate legal offense. So I'm building in some of the other institutions that have many of the same understandings. The court has followed the ICERD and the Civil and Political Covenant by requiring states to criminalize hate speech, nowwithstanding the convention's Article 10 on the right to freedom of expression. And it's done so in a series of decisions finding hate speech against the Roma or Muslims or both, all in Eastern or Central Europe to violate Article 8's right to private life or Article 9's right to religious freedom sometimes in conjunction with Article 14. And in addition, the court has required states to criminalize homophobic hate speech when it accompanies violence, ensuring that the violence not be treated, quote, on an equal footing with cases involving no such overtones, because otherwise the resultant indifference would, quote, be tantamount to official acquiescence to or connivance with hate crimes. Recently, in Sabola versus Croatia, the court found a sentence against the perpetrator of violence against a lesbian to be manifestly disproportionate to the crime because it hadn't considered a hate crime element as an aggravating factor for the offense. And demonstrating how much this view has become common sense within European and UN human rights law and advocacy, the court cited for support a number of other human rights bodies. Notably, a number of local, European, and international LGBTQ organizations intervened in the case, supporting, I mean, they ultimately prevailed in their interventions. In its submission, while Zagreb Pride pointed to the quote institutionalized and social violence against LGBT persons in Croatia, trying to bring the structural in, it merely assumed that harsher sentences would constitute that effective and effective response to that structural violence. In fact, LGBTQ plus advocacy organizations have broadly lauded this and related decisions. And in doing so, they've done it with little regard for much of the work of abolitionists, especially queer abolitionists who have for years specifically opposed using hate crimes to expand punishment. As UK queer abolitionist scholar and activist Lambeau recently put it, quote, the problem with hate crime legislation is that it offers a false promise. It takes the symbolic aspect of recognizing harm and channels it into a punitive response, tougher sentencing, that does little to stop violence and instead shores up the powers of the carceral state. In fact, Lambeau calls attention to the many LGBT organizations, and she says specifically in the US, Canada, and Britain. Particularly, she says white dominated and class-privileged ones, who she says, quote, are increasingly complicit in the forces of prison expansion, not only because they call for increased penalties under hate crimes law, but she gives a variety of other ways in which they're complicit, including, quote, contributing to gentrification of poor working class and immigrant neighborhoods and supporting quality of life ordinances that drive queer and trans youth from public spaces. If many anti-discrimination advocates have fought hard to make the state accountable for so-called private acts of violence, which is what makes much of the court's jurisprudence path-breaking, those who fight anti-black racism, homophobia and transphobia often remind us that the state is part of the problem. So the next assumption and really move of the court is to say that many of these same groups deserve more active policing. So many of the court's decisions, including a number I've already discussed, fought the police for inaction or insufficient action, especially in the cases of groups that the court sees as marginal or vulnerable. This lack of police action sits, of course, in tension with the many cases the court hears in which the police have overreacted or overacted, including against many of those same groups. It should raise the question whether, especially given all that we know about police abuse nearly everywhere in the world, the court should be calling for more policing. A police abolitionist perspective, of course, would aim its sight on defunding the police with the goal of redistributing resources and abolishing policing as we know it. Now, at a general level, one could argue that human rights penalty necessarily calls for more policing. Indeed, I've argued in the context of the inter-American court's anti-impunity jurisprudence that arrest and detention of alleged perpetrators, even when wrongfully done, can provide an expedient way for some states to indicate that they're responding to criticisms of their perpetuation of impunity. And my Tia Pinto, who is here, and Laura Lazarus both offer examples of how the ECTHR's jurisprudence has played out in practice under the UK's Modern Slavery Act. As Lazarus explains, quote, the case law puts considerable pressure on law enforcement agencies to act preemptively in order to avoid being held liable, which feeds into a risk averse operational culture within policing. Now, other cases call more specifically for increased or more active police presence, faulting police for inaction. And again, the court's most likely to condemn what it often refers to as the passivity of the police in cases of groups it considers vulnerable or marginalized, and again, often from the very groups most likely to be targeted by police. In nearly all of the domestic violence cases that I've discussed, the court has condemned what it references as the passivity of the police, which generally means the failure of the police to arrest or even criminally investigate claims of domestic violence. Sometimes that lack of action has occurred at the request of victims. In an illustrative case against Georgia, the court, again, suggesting deterrence, found that such passivity, quote, created a climate conducive to a further proliferation of violence committed against women. Even while recognizing in some cases how ill-equipped and improperly trained the police are to deal with domestic violence, the court has paid little attention to alternative actual or potential state responses. So as I've already talked about a bit, an increasing number of feminists, especially but not only abolitionists, have begun to question the dominant response to domestic violence of increased criminalization, but they've also focused on policing. So recognizing the many ways that it's failed to achieve desired results, they call for rethinking and attending to the structures that drive domestic violence. Many also note that victims or survivors of domestic violence have ended up being incarcerated as a result of increased police response, particularly when mandatory arrest laws are in place, and that's more likely to happen to survivors from historically oppressed groups. US black abolitionist Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Miners, Beth Richie and Nina Evans have a new book entitled Abolition Feminism Now, and there they questioned the wisdom of calling upon police to respond to sexual violence more broadly, given that it's the second most commonly reported police misconduct in the US, and then they add with regard to domestic violence that police households are quote more likely to experience domestic violence than the general population. Suddenly they say our simple stories fall apart. The solution's become less clear. Who do you call when the police officer is the rapist? What do you do when calling the cops on your abuser brings violence, not relief to your door? These and similar concerns have led a number of feminist abolitionists of color to call for anti-police brutality organizers to quote be concerned with and invested in developing responses to violence that are not law enforcement based. So they're basically calling on abolitionists to say like, well, not just abolitionists but anti-police brutality advocates to say we need to realize that, again, trying criminally police is not the answer. And what might appear to be case law protecting protesters, something the UK might need right now, the court has condemned police in action and failing to protect them, yet in failing to protect the protesters, yet it's done so in a way that increases police power. So in a case against Georgia, for instance, 2000 police officers had been deployed to protect participants in an LGBT public rally. Counter protesters committed acts of violence against those in the rally which the court attributed to the officer's passivity. Specifically, the court faulted the government for deploying quote unarmed and unprotected police patrol officers instead of quote equipping them with appropriate riot gear and in order to be able to discharge their police functions. Now it's striking that the court reaches this conclusion because if you read the case, there's also a finding that at least some of the police were complicit in the violence by aiding the counter protesters. So armed and riot gear, arms and riot gear in those circumstances would likely make the situation worse and one can imagine the state then using the case actually to call for greater funding for police a definite anti-abolitionist move. So I'll conclude now by coming back to where I began. Whether you're a human rights advocate and abolitionist, both, maybe neither. I hope that I've at least convinced you that to take seriously the racialized and gendered inequalities that over criminalization produces and reproduces means that criminal law should not be the principal enforcer of human rights. I also hope that I've made you wary of the potential of the current state of human rights to pursue or even simply just not to impede abolitionist aims. Importantly, some of the same abolitionists who call for basing abolition in human rights also make clear that individual litigation is not the way to achieve abolition. That might mean that abolitionists should simply not engage with the court. But my call is broader here, which is that at a minimum, anti-racist, feminist and queer advocates should not use the court to call upon policing and carceralism to respond to the issues they address. To the extent that we might imagine the ECTHR as an abolitionist or at least not as an anti-abolitionist force, it would need to do more than merely fortify the traditional shield of human rights. It would need to promote non-reformist reforms that point toward abolition rather than those that function as an alibi for human rights penalty or coercive overreach or otherwise support the very structures that need to be dismantled. More specifically, it would need to respond to violence, including gender and race-based violence, public and private, in ways that do not rely upon increased police action or criminal sanction. The ECTHR is far from among human rights institutions in its turn to criminal law. As the used commune of human rights has developed, the court has borrowed, as I've demonstrated along the way, from other institutional bodies that made the turn arguably more consciously. Those bodies are responding to the language and tactics of human rights advocates who often see ending a culture of impunity through increased investigation, prosecution and punishment as central to their mission. Perhaps the European court could break away from these other bodies and much of the human rights come in since today. But in order to do so, it would need to rid itself of certain assumptions and refrain from a number of rhetorical and doctrinal moves that it currently deploys. The court might even embrace its status as a human rights court, not a criminal court, as its status, the status it often insists on. Unlike other regional human rights systems, the European court asserts that it cannot demand structural changes, and so that's one of the ways in which it often limits its remedies. But my argument is that that claim belies the radical ways in which it is called upon the state to do just that, demand structural change through coercive human rights. So what if the court were to assert the obligation of states to provide reparative rather than carceral remedies for political, economic and social inequality? Such remedies might still rely on states, but they seem to be a good place to begin the everyday work of abolition. So thank you very much.