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Discourses of risk and human rights circulate on a daily basis in the UK prison sector. Little attention, however, has been devoted to the overlap between the demands of organizational risk management and Human Rights Act compliance. This article highlights how the shift towards 'business risk' management in prison governance has occurred alongside increased recognition of the ability of human rights to manifest as significant organizational risks (for example, legal or reputational). Three 'rights as risk' prisoner case studies from across the UK are used to show how human rights violations can produce both legal risk and, what I term, 'legal risk+'. Contrary to pessimistic accounts of risk, the article concludes by calling for further scrutiny of the potential of organizational risk management to result in, or enhance, rights compliance — whereby human rights are viewed through a risk lens, and not just a rights one.

Digital media technologies provide new opportunities for the recording and publicising of human rights violations. In recent years, soldier photography during military conflicts has become one of the most controversial sources of images of abuse, especially in relation to the visual representation of detainees. The backdrop to this article is the death of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi civilian who died while in detention on a British Army military base in Basra in southern Iraq in 2003. A soldier's video footage of Mr Mousa's treatment in the detention facility has helped to generate a range of cultural, political and legal effects, not least an ongoing official Inquiry into the causes of his death. But while new media technologies, such as mobile camera-phones, can provide an expanded visual record of human suffering and death in war zones, this article argues that this brings dangers as well as possibilities. More generally, it raises questions about how human rights practitioners should respond to the increasing visualisation of witnessing.

Risk and human rights discourses have become dominant features of the UK criminal justice arena. However, there has been little critical scrutiny of the ways in which these discourses relate to each other. In this article, I focus on different accounts of the case of Anthony Rice, a 48-year old ex-offender who committed a murder in August 2005 whilst under the joint supervision of English probation and police services. Drawing upon official reviews by the Inspectorate of Probation and the UK Parliament Joint Committee on Human Rights, as well as media coverage, I use the Rice case to problematise some common assumptions about the relationship between risk and human rights.

In recent years, debate about the relationship between law and politics appears to have become a good deal more intense in the United Kingdom. As others have observed, one major catalyst for this has been the ascent of human rights in the popular imagination and in national, and international, legal and political orders. The problem, however, is that this development also has the capacity to skew the debate: it threatens not just the already-weakened claim that `law is politics' but also, if left unchecked, it could deepen the neglect of two questions that ought to be at the heart of debate about law and politics: namely, the question of law, and the question of the political. In this article, we offer a perspective on this problem. We propose that one way of minimising it would be to have a broader definition of what counts as scholarship relevant to the question of the law/politics relationship. The redefinition we propose focuses specifically on two respected traditions in contemporary legal scholarship: the first of these is socio-legal scholarship, the second is feminist legal scholarship. The particular strength of these traditions, we suggest, is that they would encourage a broader perspective on the complexity of law and of the political.

'New public law' has a keen interest in the deployment of power and the shifting nature of the public and private. In this article, we argue that the historical legacy of the Crown has hindered the ability of public lawyers to respond to changes in modes of governance in the UK. The constitutional law textbook tradition has played a key role in limiting critiques of the Crown because of the obfuscation that surrounds the legal and political status of the Monarch. However, instead of discounting the significance of the monarchy, we use it as a resource for exploring governing power, the blurring of boundaries and constitutional renewal. Our starting point is the life, death and, most importantly, the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. The latter event exposed the political relevance of the 'personal' in a most dramatic way, generating claims about the 'feminisation of the government' and 'emotions augmenting democracy'. We follow through on these claims in order to focus on the effects of adopting private, intimate-sphere norms in the public sphere, in particular public-sphere decision making. While aware of the risks associated with this 'transformation' of democracy, we conclude that the increasing centrality of the intimate merits consideration in new public law's search for progressive tools of modern governance.

'New public law' has a keen interest in the deployment of power and the shifting nature of the public and private. In this article, we argue that the historical legacy of the Crown has hindered the ability of public lawyers to respond to changes in modes of governance in the UK. The constitutional law textbook tradition has played a key role in limiting critiques of the Crown because of the obfuscation that surrounds the legal and political status of the Monarch. However, instead of discounting the significance of the monarchy, we use it as a resource for exploring governing power, the blurring of boundaries and constitutional renewal. Our starting point is the life, death and, most importantly, the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. The latter event exposed the political relevance of the 'personal' in a most dramatic way, generating claims about the 'feminisation of the government' and 'emotions augmenting democracy'. We follow through on these claims in order to focus on the effects of adopting private, intimate-sphere norms in the public sphere, in particular public-sphere decision making. While aware of the risks associated with this 'transformation' of democracy, we conclude that the increasing centrality of the intimate merits onsideration in new public law's search for progressive tools of modern governance.

Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) are now one of the central features of government policy in the UK for managing the risk presented by violent and sexual offenders. Although there has been research and debate concerning the use of MAPPA with adult offenders, their application to young people has received relatively little attention until now. Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements & Youth Justice extends the existing literature on public protection. It provides a detailed exploration of MAPPA policy and practice in order to prompt further debate about the implications of the risk paradigm for young people and youth justice practitioners. In the book, key academics, practitioners and policy makers consider a range of theoretical and practical issues raised by the introduction of MAPPA including risk and children's rights, the use of professional discretion by practitioners, alternative approaches to risk management and suggestions for future policy development. It will be of interest to both professionals and academics working with young offenders and in youth justice