Government, the police and intelligence services are too easily given sweeping powers that they too often abuse.
Jenny works with campaigners to defend our civil liberties. She has worked on legislation like the Investigatory Powers Bill, raised the cases of victims of state power such as detained pregnant women, and defended the right to protest.
When a survivor of domestic abuse reaches out for help, they should be treated as a human being and given the help that they need unconditionally. What is the Government’s priority? Do they care more about helping survivors of domestic abuse end that abuse and making them safe, or about catching and deporting migrants?
Continue reading “A hostile environment for migrants sanctions domestic abuse”
This week the Guardian reported that non-fatal strangulation is to carry a five year prison sentence as an amendment to the Domestic Abuse Bill. This news comes after Jenny and Natalie have both worked hard to propose and support improvements to the Bill.
The Domestic Abuse Bill was the one positive Bill in this awful Parliamentary session, but it still needed a few friendly amendments to make it a perfect Bill. Over 190 amendments were tabled at Committee Stage in the House of Lords, covering areas like police training, revenge porn, the links with drug abuse and the inclusion of statutory duties. Perhaps the key set of amendments was the creation of a specific crime of non-lethal strangulation in recognition of how this is employed in numerous relationships as a means of control.
Continue reading “Domestic Abuse Bill Win”
This is about ethics, morality, having a clear conscience and making sure that we behave as a democracy should, by abhorring genocide and people being murdered, tortured and imprisoned. This is about operating as an enlightened nation and when we talk about genocide, we ought to talk as well about ecocide—large-scale environmental destruction and ecological damage. Although it is not as obvious, it is a slow genocide. It drives people away from their land, makes them poor and gives them fewer opportunities and terrible lives. We should accept that we do that sort of damage, and that we do it in virtually every act of our lives. In some way, we impact on our environment and the rest of the world and, by doing that, we can damage the health and well-being of other nations and people who live in the places where we get our food or the minerals for our phones. So we ought to think very carefully about how we operate as individuals and as a nation.
Continue reading “Trade Bill ‘Ping Pong’ – Lords oppose Government over Genocide amendment”
We have the time and the expertise to scrutinise things, and that is what we should be allowed to get on with. Jenny spoke in the chamber as the government suffered a further three defeats Continue reading “Trade Bill ‘Ping Pong’ – Lords pass a further three amendments after Commons strips out all previous amendments”
The Green Party recognises that, in the majority of cases, the limited use of drugs for recreational purposes is not harmful; it actually has the potential to improve well-being and even enhance human relationships and creativity. However, most harmful drug use is underpinned by poverty, isolation, mental or physical illness and psychological trauma—in these cases, harmful drug use can cause a vicious circle. This Bill will have a gaping hole if it does not properly address the complex relationships between domestic abuse and harmful drug use... Continue reading “Domestic Abuse Bill”
Dear MP
Please retain the Lords amendments to the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (CHIS) Bill when it returns to the Commons.
Continue reading “A letter to your MP re the Spy Cops (CHIS) Bill”
I do not call these people covert human intelligence sources; they are police spies, and we have to be clear about that
Continue reading “Police Spies Bill at Report Stage in the House of Lords”
I congratulate everybody who has brought this bill to this point.
Dear Commissioner
During the Policing and Security APPG on 14th Dec 2020 I asked you what investigations were happening within the Met on the issue of the historic unlawful sexual relations between undercover police officers and their targets.
You told me that there were no ongoing investigations, yet the HoL Minister has made it clear in the debate on the CHIS Bill that such interactions are now and always have been unlawful. It seems remiss not to examine previous instructions to establish wrongdoing by senior officers.
Can you please therefore outline, in full, the Met’s position on whether these sexual relations were lawful. Could you also please explain when and why the Met decided to take no further action on the issue?
If you wanted to convince the public that international trade agreements are a way to let multinational companies get rich at the expense of ordinary people, this is what you would do: give foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever a government passes a law to, say, discourage smoking, protect the environment or prevent a nuclear catastrophe… a process known as ‘investor-state dispute settlement‘, or ISDS.
(The Economist, October 2014)
This Trade Bill the government has written includes ISDS…
Continue reading “The Trade Bill: Report Stage – ISDS”
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb 