The Convention Blog

Xenophobia – report

Natasa Mavronicola (The UCL Student Human Rights Programme): Tufyal Choudhury focused on the debates around integration and social cohesion. For Choudhury, the danger is that the debate on integration, which has taken the spotlight in the counter-terrorism discussions of the day, has pathologised perceptions of communities, especially the Muslim community. Much of the focus has [...]

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Transcript: The Conservatives and civil liberties

Below is a transcript of the Conservatives and civil liberties session
Iain Dale: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. In the style of Alcoholics Anonymous let me start off by saying that my name is Iain Dale and I am a conservative. At least I thought I was, but being a conservative can mean different things to different people. [...]

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New videos from the Cardiff Convention

You can see video recordings of each of the speakers in Cardiff (listed below) here.
Christopher Rees, Jenny Willott MP, Simon Hoare, Dr Peter Sutch, Jill Evans MEP, Nick Ramsay AM, Evan Price, Kirsty Williams AM, Dr Peri Roberts, Robert Buckland, Dr Urfan Khaliq, Chris Myant, John Osmond (IWA) and Professor Bertrand G Ramcharan.

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Democracy and liberty – Report

Amalia Kontesi (The UCL Student Human Rights Programme): Many would expect a display of pessimism by the members of the panel discussing the crisis of democracy at the dawn of the 21st century and its impact on modern liberty. The matter was indeed approached with scepticism but the proposals on how we could act to [...]

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The Left and liberty – Report

Amalia Kontesi (UCL Student Human Rights Programme): Although many would expect hesitancy from the members of the panel, considering the ability of the left to safeguard liberty, the outcome of this discussion was the exact opposite. It is true that in its pursuit of equality, the Left has often sacrificed liberty in the past and despite [...]

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Human Rights and Global Responses – Report

Evelyn Wong (UCL Student Human Rights Programme): Wars, climate change, the credit crunch and their fallout present a historic window of opportunity to raise the bar in human rights development. Equally, however, they present the danger of human rights being swamped by exaggerated and paranoid political rhetoric. It was thus with a mixture of hope [...]

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Brief report sent to Convention participants

The following brief report on the Convention was sent out to partipants today. Please email us your responses or leave a comment at the end of this post.
Dear participant,
This is a brief report on the Convention on Modern Liberty and a request to hear back from you.
Volunteers are publishing videos and transcripts of the 22 [...]

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Transcript – Police Q&A

Below is a transcript of the Police session Q&A, however the names of individual speakers are unspecified.
Q: Andrew Smith The question is what happens to those points if the police pick someone up and they go to court and are acquitted.
Hilary Wainwright: So the question from Andrew Smith is What happens to the Sanction Detection [...]

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Transcript – Human Rights and Global Responses Q&A

Below is a transcript of the Human Rights and Global Responses Q & A
I was asked by the organisers to generate as much of a debate as possible, so I’m going to take questions from the floor and if you could identify yourselves briefly in whatever way you want. The gentleman here in the grey [...]

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Transcript – Press Freedom Q&A

Below is a transcript of the Press Freedom Q&A session

Joanne Cash: And now I’d like to open up to the floor – ok so I’m going to take questions from the gentleman there and followed by the gentleman here in the red shirt and then followed by the gentleman in the white t-shirt – I’ll [...]

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