World

When Anne Sacoolas – the wife of a diplomat who allegedly crashed into and killed teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn – fled the UK, she not only caused untold anguish to the Dunn family, but she also helped to undermine the system which protects diplomats and their families throughout the world. The right that is now being invoked by Sacoolas has a history that goes back as far as Ancient Greece, where heralds were granted safe passage between warring city-states. There should be no quibbling with the principle that diplomats and their families are given protection from vexatious legal proceedings in the countries they are sent to. Without this safeguard, it

It beggars belief that Mickaël Harpon was employed as a computer expert in the intelligence department at police HQ in Paris. It is also barely credible that when Christophe Castaner, France’s minister of the interior, addressed reporters hours after Harpon had murdered four of his colleagues on Thursday he didn’t know of his background. Castaner said that the perpetrator ‘has never given the slightest cause for concern’, yet on Saturday afternoon France’s anti-terror prosecutor described Harpon’s ‘radical vision of Islam’. The 45-year-old had made no secret of where his allegiance lay. A convert to Islam more than a decade ago, Harpon first came to the attention of the authorities in 2015 when

When I landed in Delhi at the height of the monsoon, the excitement in the city was palpable. The Indian Space Research Organisation was planning the launch of Vikram, the country’s first rocket mission to the Moon. Media coverage was ubiquitous and each report was imbued with a gushing sense of national pride. This great nation was about to take another giant leap into the future. But in modern India, there is also a great paradox. My trip was not about rockets but the much older human activity of dispensing justice to wrongdoers. Having travelled around Britain earlier this year for a BBC series on our criminal justice system, I wanted to

The news yesterday from protests in Hong Kong is extremely worrying and demands a response from UK parliamentarians. This concerns not just the welfare of an 18-year-old, shot in the chest at close range by the police, but also the future of democracy in a country whose history is closely linked with the UK’s. The immediate events leading up to the shooting, and whether the police officer acted in self-defence, will need to be examined in detail. Nonetheless my thoughts, as a parent of two sons, are with the family holding vigil at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Yau Ma Tei. There has been a tragic escalation of tensions, and Hong Kong has become a tinder

I am sure that Tooba Gondal, the latest Isis bride to beg for a return to Britain, would, as she says, rather face justice in a British court than in the detention camp where she is being held in a Kurdish-controlled part of Syria. Maybe she really is the “changed person” she claims to be and she really would, if given the chance, do her best to “help prevent vulnerable Muslims from being targeted and radicalised” – as she wrote in her letter to the Sunday Times yesterday.     But whether you believe her or not – and I have to say I read her pleas with a huge dollop of

If President Donald Trump hoped the release of a memo detailing his July 25 telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was going to exculpate him from questions about misconduct in office, his hopes were dashed the moment the public read the transcript.    Suspicions of Trump trading £323m ($400m) in military aid to Ukraine in return for Zelensky launching a corruption investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden have coloured this entire affair. If a quid pro-quo was offered, it would be a severe violation of the American people’s trust and a gross misuse of the president’s powers. That no such quid pro-quo was made explicit in the transcript gave Trump’s defenders

Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be a liberal from San Francisco, California and a diehard political opponent of President Donald Trump, but she is also an institutionalist at heart. Having gone through the saga of former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the late 1990s, she has never been a fan of using the procedure to push a president out the door. For Pelosi, Trump’s impeachment has always been a political risk for the Democratic Party, particularly for Democratic politicians in Trump districts who face a tough re-election campaign next year. The dam, however, has broken. The latest scandal enveloping the White House, in which Trump purportedly pressured newly-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr

Forty years of membership of the EU has taught us a lot. Many of us have learned a new language; most of us have learned new recipes for our supper; and our Judges have learned how to seize power from democratic institutions. For there has always been a fundamental cultural clash between us and most EU states – that of law. The UK (though Scotland is slightly different) is a common law country – like Australia, India, Canada, New Zealand and the USA. Most EU states are civil law countries. There are many differences, but the most striking one to ordinary people is the difference in how lawyers are treated.

The biggest victim of the failure of Thomas Cook is the worldly reputation of its eponymous creator – a sober cabinet-maker from Leicestershire whose pioneering and fantastically successful package tours used a network of temperance hotels.  His name is now synonymous with a company whose senior executives paid themselves millions while it crashed and burned. That there is something rotten with aspects of company law is obvious from the fact that taxpayers are going to be stung for up to £600 million to fly 150,000 stranded British holidaymakers home. Why is there no mechanism to claw back those millions paid in bonuses over the past decade while the business was

Drones have come of age in the war on terror. When the United States and Britain invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the technology was barely out of the lab. Today, these flying machines represent a huge security threat. If reports are to be believed, a Houthi rebel-launched drone attack in Saudi Arabia last weekend shut down 5 per cent of the world’s global oil supply and caused the largest spike in the price of oil since the first Gulf War in 1990. This is what the future of warfare looks like. So far, drones have been mostly on our side: used, very effectively, to disrupt and damage terrorist networks. The campaign

Proceedings in the Supreme Court are typically being reported as if judges are making an impartial assessment of the constitution. It would be more true to say that they are asking whether or not to give themselves more power. Perhaps they will uphold the established constitution, or perhaps they will concoct sophisticated legal-soundings reasons for appropriating the powers that lawfully belong to parliament and the people themselves. Only recently, the most senior judges understood clearly what was at stake. Lord Bingham, who retired as a judge in 2008 having been Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law Lord, said in his book The Rule of Law, that:

Saudis woke up last Saturday to find the crown jewel of their oil industry in smoke. The attack on the al-Abqaiq oil processing facility, allegedly conducted by cruise missiles and launched from a staging area inside Iran, resulted in the sharpest single-day increase in crude prices since the 1991 Gulf War. Saudi Arabia’s largest oil installation, however, wasn’t the only thing that went up in smoke last weekend. The volley of missiles screeching into Saudi airspace may have also ruined French president Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to deescalate tensions in the Persian Gulf and save the 2015 Iran nuclear deal from a slow and agonising death. The French president has been hard