Human Rights

Abstract

In addition to the specific academic voices on miscarriages of justice that articulate opposition at intermittent intervals in response to exceptional successful appeal cases, a further discernable voice exists that straddles the academic and campaigning spheres, coalescing around a central concept of compliance with enacted human rights. To be sure, from the perspective constructed here, human rights can be viewed as inherent to governmentality, to the shift from sovereignty to governmental modes of society, and a defining rationality in the relations and exercise of bio-power in modern rule of law societies. As the concept of human rights specifically relates to miscarriages of justice, it is claimed that as many as 3,000 people are currently imprisoned in England and Wales who are innocent. This estimate is said to have been reported in a Home Office bulletin, appeared in Prison News, was confirmed by a prison governor and broadcast as accurate on several occasions by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) (The Portia Campaign, 2006; Watkins, 2001). More recently, it was confirmed by a senior representative from the Parole Board in a ‘Chatham House Rules’⁴⁴ meeting with the organisation Progressing Prisoners Maintaining Innocence (PPMI)⁴⁵ that there are currently many thousands of prisoners maintaining innocence in England and Wales.