Tag Archives: Sovereignty

What the ‘right to die’ debate tells us about sovereignty

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Many readers will be familiar with the ongoing debate in the UK around the ‘right to die’. The campaign group Dignity in Dying is calling for a change in the law with a new assisted dying bill to give terminally ill people choice in how and when they die.

However, things aren’t as simple as they may first seem. While many people may well argue that developed nations should not treat their citizens worse than animals, there have been many dissenting voices who suggest that an assisted dying bill may put pressure on people to take their own lives; it may even be a ‘slippery slope’ of legislation that discriminates against the most vulnerable people.

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The biopolitics of the bird-flu pandemic

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Bird flu pandemic: chickens in coop

There’s a pandemic on don’t you know.

Or maybe you don’t: that’s the problem. Across the globe now, millions of birds have died, and many more have been put to slaughter in order to try and curb the spread of the deadly strain of bird-flu that has ravaged its way through swathes of the global bird population.

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Law and war in outer space

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I recently had the pleasure of attending the Iredell Law Conference at Lancaster University to present a paper, ‘Beyond the horizon: law, exception and conflict in outer space’. In my paper, I spoke about law and warfare in outer space, and what I see as a fundamental problem in the operation of law, and the exercise of sovereignty in outer space.

After my presentation one of the delegates posed the question, well what about Antarctica and colonies at the bottom of the sea? According to current practice, international law does apply in both of these situations, so doesn’t that set a precedent for law on the Moon?

My response to this question was very definitely a ‘no’, however I didn’t have time to expand on my argument. In this blog, I hope to discuss some of the issues surrounding law and sovereignty in outer space, and the problem of just how you impose sovereign rule on a colony that could advance many decades in the time it takes for a message to reach it… Continue reading »