¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ

A paper authored by Dr. Alan Cusack (¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ) and Dr. Roxanna Dehaghani (Cardiff University) has recently been published in the Human Rights Law Review (OUP).

The paper is entitled ‘Navigating the Right to a Fair Trial for Vulnerable Suspects Pre-Trial: A Legal and Psychological Critique of the Strasbourg Jurisprudence’. Drawing upon a corpus of psychology and law literature, as well as the dissenting judgment in Hasáliková v Slovakia App no 39654/15 (ECHR, 24 June 2021), the paper critiques the narrow formulation of vulnerability that has taken hold in Strasbourg, and interrogates the Court’s ostensible faith in the safeguarding capacity of lawyers. By using Ireland’s weak pre-trial procedural framework as heuristic lens through which the shortcomings of this approach can be understood, it calls for a more generous conceptualisation of vulnerability that is sensitive to the ontological and structural dimensions at play.