Aoife O'Donoghue

@aoifemod.bsky.social

Law Prof QUB| Tyranny & Global Legal Order | Utopia | International Law | Feminism | Feminist Constitutionalism | Brexit & Northern Ireland | History | Law & Humanities | Cork & Belfast & Ireland | She/Her Sí/í

Aislinn Fanning of @research-nulawuk.bsky.social laying down some vital home truths following months of upheaval in NI. Law and the authorities' focus on an Orange/Green lens gets in the way of racism and misogyny being addressed and civil society has to pick up the pieces: dflw.ie/the-law-wont...

The law won’t save us now: pushing back against extreme misogyny in Northern Ireland - Doing Feminist Legal Work

Gisèle Pelicot, in September 2024, waived her right to anonymity during the trial of her husband (Dominique Pelicot), who was found guilty of all charges

dflw.ie

The NI Executive have been sitting on the Historical Clerical Child Abuse research for a full year. They've just released the reports in the middle of the summer when they will get as little attention as possible - survivors deserve better than this: www.executiveoffice-ni.gov.uk/publications...

Historical Clerical Child Abuse Research Reports

The reports from the three research studies that were commissioned into Historical Clerical Child Abuse.

executiveoffice-ni.gov.uk

The UNCLOS drafters were quite aware of climate change, the harms of pollution, & the interconnectedness of the oceans & atmosphere. They'd lived through nuclear testing; they knew pollution to the atmosphere like strontium-90 affected the marine environment, because they had it in their *bones*.

A Policy Exchange report claims the ICJ is "transforming UNCLOS into something which it was never intended to be", as GHG emissions "seem very different from the kinds of pollution States Parties had in mind in 1982". This is an unsourced, ahistorical claim refuted by even US records. Embarrassing.

A quote from a recent report by Policy Exchange, a Conservative thinktank purporting to analyse international law. https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Litigating-Climate-Change.pdf

"Renegotiate UNCLOS
This is perhaps the most ambitious of our proposals. UNCLOS resulted
from a decades-long effort by the international community to codify
the law of the sea. On the whole it has been a success for participating
States. However, the ICJ through the Climate Change Advisory Opinion
has implicitly invited claimant States to invoke UNCLOS in suits for
alleged injuries arising from climate change, a development that risks
transforming UNCLOS into something which it was never intended to be
and delegitimizing the Convention in the eyes of many States party.
Therefore, we recommend that, in concert with peer States, the United
Kingdom launch an effort to clarify the ambit of UNCLOS in climate
matters and to prevent the compulsory dispute settlement mechanisms
in UNCLOS from being used to adjudicate matters which exceed the
Convention’s scope. Otherwise, the ICJ’s implicit invitation to litigants
to avail themselves of UNCLOS and the litigation opportunities afforded
by Part XV, section 2, of the Convention will be taken up with great
enthusiasm, with unfortunate results."Excerpt from p. 34 of the Policy Exchange Report: 

"Article 194(2) is one of the several UNCLOS provisions that the Advisory Opinion says entails a stringent due diligence standard.62 Moreover, in concluding that ‘the term “activities” in Article 194, paragraph 2, encompasses activities which produce [greenhouse gas] emissions’,63 the Advisory Opinion greatly enlarges the scope of activities that a litigant might attack by invoking that UNCLOS provision. States, in adopting Article 194(2), intended to impose legal responsibility, e.g. when an oil spill originating in State A spreads beyond ‘the areas where [State A] exercise[s] sovereign rights’. No doubt adjacent areas—e.g. neighbouring State B’s territorial sea, or the high seas immediately past the outer limits of State A’s Exclusive Economic Zone—are concerned in Article 194(2); environmental effects of pollution, or at least their geographic scope, are broadly forecastable on that understanding of the provision, and causal linkage between such effects and injuries is conceivably determinable, even if parties likely will contest it. By contrast, the injuries and the scope of responsibility that Article 194(2) embraces according to the Advisory Opinion now would seem very considerably larger, harder to forecast, and almost inevitably to be bedevilled with uncertainties about causation. Greenhouse gas emissions, considering their global spread, long-term effects, and differentiated impact on different States, seem very different from the kinds of pollution States Parties had in mind in 1982 when they concluded UNCLOS. Now, however, if judges and arbitrators treat the Advisory Opinion as governing law for the interpretation of UNCLOS that difference does not matter."An excerpt from 'US Priority Interests in the Environmental Activities of International Organizations' (Dec 1970) FRUS 1969-76 vol E-1, doc 303 (https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve01/d303): 

"R.2 Deterioration of the Marine Environment. While the high seas, like the atmosphere, is a commons, international cooperation to control the. deterioration of the marine environment must take account of prevailing sovereign rights regarding territorial waters and the adjacent seabed. Most ocean pollution problems affect coastal waters; but the obvious inter-connections with the rest of the ocean, as well as the interactions of the oceans and the atmosphere, make any division of the marine environment somewhat arbitrary. The first six projects listed below are specifically concerned with pollution, whereas the other three reflect a continuing need for cooperative research on the indicated topics.
*M1 Preventing Pollution from Ship Operations and from Dumping
*M2. Studies of Oceanic Pollution Effects
*M3. Monitoring Pollutants Affecting Ocean Quality
*M4. Inventory of Ocean Pollution Sources
*M5. Analysis of Economic Impact of Ocean Pollution Standards
*M6. Development of Control Technology
M7. Sustaining Yields of Marine Living Resources
M8. Air-Sea Interactions Affecting Weather Forecasting
M9. Man-made Ecological Upset of the Sea"Excerpt from: Memo NSC-U/DM-109B from Kenneth Rush to Richard Nixon (14 May 1974) FRUS 1969-76 vol E-3, doc 12, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve03/d12

"Dispute settlement 
Our substantive position with respect to all our proposals regarding areas beyond the territorial sea includes compulsory dispute settlement. We are authorized to place major emphasis on compulsory dispute settlement as a general principle applicable to all disputes arising under the Law of the Sea Treaty (subject to the sovereign immunity of warships, other government vessels and state aircraft, and leaving our options open regarding compulsory dispute settlement in the territorial sea and straits). (NSDM 225)."

In these utterly depressing times the idea that the CTA can be magically secured with some new law is the nadir of "quick fix" political solutions, which would only make life more difficult for thousands with cross-border lives. Me in @theconversation.com - theconversation.com/what-is-the-...

What is the Common Travel Area? Why the Ireland-UK border arrangement isn’t a ‘loophole’ for migrants

Violence continued in Belfast after a man from Sudan was charged with attempted murder following a knife attack.

theconversation.com

On Nolan BBC radio show loyalist Jamie Bryson claimed rioting was mostly in loyalist areas due to disenfranchisement of young men, and that "there is not the same disenfranchisement on the nationalist side". There are 35% more unemployed young men (16-24) from a Catholic background than Protestant.

All eyes to the Court of Appeal in London at 11am for the hand down of a special five judge decision (in light of the importance of the issues at stake) on the lawfulness of the UK Govt's Palestine Action ban: www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

High Court to rule on Palestine Action terror group ban

Three judges ruled in February that the then-home secretary Yvette Cooper’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action was unlawful

independent.co.uk

“Bill” was found at a bus stop in Ballincollig in 1986 with apparent amnesia, unable to tell Gardai his name or where he came from, and taken into psychiatric care. He lived in hospital for 40 years - there was never a public appeal to find his family www.irishexaminer.com/news/spotlig...

The Deirdre O'Shaughnessy Podcast: The mystery of Bill Fitzgibbon

A man found confused in Ballincollig in 1986 spent decades in care without ever being identified

irishexaminer.com

This is a longer version of the piece I did for the Morrigan Blog on the Dillon Decision in the UK Supreme Court focusing on the continuities in the descriptions of the Irish as violent & producing silences amongsts those not identified as 'sectarian' criticallegalthinking.com/2026/05/27/w...

Women and Colonialism in the UK Supreme Court’s decision in Re Dillon (2026)

There are many extraordinary things about the UK Supreme Court’s (UKSC) decision in Dillon. It unpicks at least half of Article 2 of the Windsor Framework

criticallegalthinking.com

This is a comprehensive blog post the UKSC Dillon Judgment The judgment's first para is extraordinary - no UK or English involvement in the centuries (& it puts it in the context of centuries) in the conflicts on the island of Ireland - just the Irish fighting each other for no good reason

Colin Murray@colinmurray.bsky.social · 3mo ago

My take on the UKSC's Dillon judgment - it is a combination of regressive and dubious reasoning. It radically reduces the range of cases in which Art 2 is applicable, in reasoning which flies in the face of the UK Government's promises over the provision: ukconstitutionallaw.org/2026/05/14/c...

'The judgment in the case brought against the Office for Students by the University of Sussex after it was fined more than half a million pounds could not be clearer, or more devastating for the OfS. Whether it can survive only time will tell.' (Sir Peter Scott) 1/2

Free speech, bias and the case of the OfS vs Sussex - HEPI

Over the weekend HEPI published a blog on subject-linked maintenance grants and a book review of Danny Scott’s book ‘The Undisputed King of Selston’. This blog was kindly authored by Professor Sir Pet...

hepi.ac.uk