Brought from my cousin’s Shropshire home early September 2023, the spalted limewood log from which  Eyeless in Gaza  is carved had been left barely protected from the elements after the tree was felled by a storm. It was over four years since that disaster. Axe and saw joined the host of creatures that had invaded the wood before I started to cut with the gouges and chisels of the woodcarver. There was no idea to start with—only to incise and discover. Following routes burrowed by small insects, such as woodworm, and moulds into bark and sapwood seemed a way to learn its story and find what I, as co-sculptor with these small beasts, could expand. Fig 1. Eyeless in Gaza, Eternal Flame (Willow Winston 2023, limewood, 34 x 69 x 30 cm). © Willow Winston The wood was rough with uneven texture that often did not hold together. I removed much of this outer material, hoping to find firmer ground for a more durable image. As I was cutting an archway through soft tissue aiming to have a strong primary image through which to enter, news came of the fearful events of 7 October at the Gaza border. Without doubt, the response to the initial attack would be savage in the extreme. Nothing could be done to stop this humanitarian disaster, in the first days at least. Fig 2. Eyeless in Gaza, Despair (Willow Winston 2023, limewood, 34 x 69 x 30 cm). © Willow Winston

On 15 August 2021, the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan. The ‘Apagan’ operation initiated an airlift that successfully evacuated approximately 2600 Afghans to France. However, two weeks later, the airlift operations concluded, leaving a considerable number of the remaining 40 million Afghans trapped within the confines of Afghanistan. Since then, numerous Afghans, compelled by threats related to their profession, gender, or opinions, have been forced to either hide or flee. Those who manage to escape often find themselves stranded in neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, Iran, or Turkey, struggling to survive in precarious conditions. Among them are families yearning to reunite with a spouse or child in France, single women grappling with uncertainty, children, judges, journalists, and activists—all seeking refuge from a country they no longer recognize or one that no longer recognizes them. Limited Legal Routes to France In light of the challenging circumstances faced by Afghans, there are very limited safe and legal routes available for them to reach Europe. Regardless of the process, visa applications must now be submitted in a neighbouring country since nearly all European consular authorities are closed in Afghanistan. For foreign nationals to enter France legally, a short- or long-stay visa is required. However, Afghans fleeing their country for an indefinite period must secure a visa allowing them to stay for at least three months. It is only with these long-stay visas that they can apply for asylum or a residence permit upon arrival in France. Long-stay visas for France can be sought on various grounds such as family, education, profession, or humanitarian reasons, but they are only granted if specific conditions are met. These conditions are often impractical to fulfil, especially when the applicant’s country of origin is in the midst of a humanitarian or political crisis. Consequently, the opportunities for Afghans to obtain French visas are significantly constrained. The objective of this contribution is not to provide an exhaustive list of theoretically available legal paths for all foreign nationals but to examine those actively utilised by Afghans to reach France. Practical barriers such as linguistic, financial, or administrative reasons largely exclude visa applications related to professional activities or studies due to the stringent conditions they impose. For example, it is practically impossible for a non-French-speaking Afghan engineer to secure a work permit for a French company remotely, a prerequisite for obtaining an ‘employee’ visa.

If you tolerate this, your children will be next! Manic Street Preachers, 1998   Introduction   The issue of immigration and human rights law, or more precisely, the human rights of people on the move, has become one of the most urgent challenges for many Western societies. Syrian refugees walking across Europe in 2015 almost faded away in the collective memory. They were replaced by the images of people clinging on the planes leaving Kabul, a mass exodus from Ukraine, people desperately trying to escape Sudan, and now the catastrophe in Gaza. In 2023, the UN Refugee Agency ( UNHCR) estimated 110 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. Many of them, like 750,000 Rohingyas[1] or 120,000 ethnic Armenians expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh in October 2023,[2] have not been properly registered on the Western news cycle.   Wherever, however, and whenever they arrive, people seeking protection or migrating are often perceived as a threat despite being vulnerable, insignificant in numbers, or needed for the local economy (only 3.6% of the world’s people lived outside their country of birth in 2020).[3]   The UNHCR has warned that the UK immigration legislation passed in 2023 is ‘inconsistent with the country’s obligation under the international human rights and refugee law’.[4]   This is, albeit limited, an attempt to chart some of the trajectories and connections of how hostile environment immigration policy, enforcement, and populist approach to immigration, undermine fundamental human rights and bring into question UK compliance with and membership of international human rights treaties and bodies and the rule of law.   It is also a reflection on the impact on people’s lives from the perspective of a frontline campaigner for migrant and refugee rights and a survivor of the siege of Sarajevo and the UK asylum system.[5]   Despite the alarming state of affairs and the horrifying extent to which governments are willing to sink in their implementation of the hostile environment immigration policy, this is a story of hope—how people build resilience, resist hostility and human rights violations, imagine better future, organise in solidarity, and speak out for dignity and justice for all.   Context   There is widespread populist belief, deeply rooted in the right-wing, nationalistic, and scarcity narrative, that rights cannot be shared or afforded to everyone. To take this logic further, as inalienable as human rights might be, there aren’t enough rights for everyone. Therefore, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, ‘the right to have rights’ is reserved only for citizens.[6] The not-so-subtle proposition that non-citizens, immigrants, refugees, or foreigners—currently the chief category of the ‘other’, are not to be afforded the same human rights as citizens is nothing new or surprising. At the risk of sounding cynical, it is all too often that we see citizens’ human rights violated, especially if rights are in the way of power interests, political or commercial or both.

This article explores an uncomfortable reality that locates international humanitarian and development organisations as sometimes unwitting, sometimes witting facilitators of the state crime of genocide and in doing so reveals the stark and sometimes lethal contradictions inherent in the overarching organisational goals and principles to which these organisations adhere. Our focus is on the Burmese/Myanmar Rohingya genocide, and the immediate pressures, moral dilemmas, and institutional strictures faced by humanitarian actors in the critical years following the 2012 Sittwe massacres, before the annihilation phase of the genocide in 2016/17.[1]   While the Genocide Convention defines genocide as ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’,[2] we favour a definition which captures both this outcome but also more significantly the processes which lead to destruction. Genocide is a process which begins with dehumanisation and ends with erasure. In between and often concurrent are occasions of litmus-testing violence, structural discrimination, state denial of persecution, forced isolation and ghettoisation, and systematic weakening.[3] The Convention definition was dogged by criticism from the outset, including from Lemkin[4] who was disappointed with the final iteration (including the exclusion of ‘cultural genocide’), the convention definition being the lowest common agreeable denominator.   We write elsewhere about the complicit role of elements of the United Nations (UN) in the Rohingya genocide.[5] Contextually, however, and given its widely proclaimed ‘moral leadership’ in the field of human rights, it is important to understand that the UN systematically failed to challenge the Myanmar government on the genocidal human rights abuses which were to lead to the effective annihilation of Myanmar’s Rohingya in 2017. Rather than demand the closure of the Rohingya detention camps the UN, through its Resident Coordinator and agencies, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the World Food Programme (WFP), actively contributed to their sustainability through the provision of food and limited medical aid. In doing so it worked with the Myanmar regime to support a system of brutal apartheid in which the incarcerated Rohingya were reduced to ‘bare life’.[6] It suppressed its critics and silenced those who advocated against the regime on behalf of the Rohingya. By elevating development at the expense of human rights and by ensuring relations with the regime were conducive to UN access, the UN effectively colluded with the regime’s genocidal project. This is not to suggest that the UN (or indeed the humanitarian organisations we will now consider) in any way shared the genocidal intention of the Myanmar regime but that its actions and organisational goals served quite explicitly to facilitate rather than challenge the genocide.   The humanitarian dilemma   Angela Sherwood writes that:   bureaucratic practices of humanitarian organisations may result in harm to local communities, especially when such practices are embedded in state agendas for security and pro-capitalist development.[7]   Sherwood raises fundamental questions for the practice of humanitarianism generally but even more acutely for humanitarianism operating in the context of unfolding war or genocide. The opportunity to enact the saviour/victim binary, embodied in the practice of western international humanitarianism, crucially relies on the ‘welcome’ extended by offending states. Without access, the practice of direct humanitarianism cannot take place and as we shall see when we examine the practices of international aid organisations, and the UN, in particular, inside Myanmar, securing and maintaining access relies on political arrangements, relationships, and agreements which are disaggregated from, and frequently anathema, to field practice. Access becomes the holy grail — an end in itself — at the expense of those the access is designed to assist. Our observations of the humanitarian response to the unfolding Rohingya genocide suggested that while it was characterised by neo-colonialism it was a form of neo-colonialism utterly dependent on regime paternalism.

Introduction[1]   Why have Palestinian Bedouin youth in the Jerusalem periphery disappeared? This has been a consistent question in the minds of researchers working with Al-Quds University Human Rights Clinic (AQHRC). The AQHRC has been working with Palestinian Bedouin communities in the southeast Jerusalem periphery since 2014. These communities are among the most vulnerable communities to Israeli settler colonialism in all of its components; land expropriation, displacement, and imposition of an apartheid system, as will be demonstrated shortly. Over the past ten years, despite making concerted and consistent engagement with these communities, AQHRC has failed in engaging young men in the vast majority of activities, including research, advocacy, and awareness-raising workshops, to name a few.   This observation was corroborated while interviewing a 37-year-old Bedouin man in a Bedouin community near Jerusalem. The field research team of AQHRC asked him about the whereabouts of young Bedouin men, and his response was: ‘we rarely see them as well…if it is a wedding, or a social event you will see 300 young men but otherwise you will barely see one of them, it is like they have just ‘disappeared’ as if they rode a donkey or a car and went deep into the desert’.[2] This statement on its own gave rise to several other questions. Why would the Bedouin young men appear in weddings or social events and not in political activities? Why are they absent from the public sphere and the political arena of their communities despite the imminent threat of eviction and demolition of their homes by the Israeli authorities? How can this alternating surfacing of young men be explained?   Suppression of resistance, activism, and mobilisation are intrinsic components of settler colonialism. Within this framework, Israeli occupation has constructed a sophisticated system of suppression through the adoption of a series of vital laws and policies. These include Military Order 101 and the British Defence (Emergency) Regulations in Mandatory Palestine, which restricted freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and political participation. All of these will be explored thoroughly later. Apart from these laws, the risk of revocation of civil status as a concrete part of settler colonialism, coupled with the risk of deprivation of opportunities and access to livelihood, has given rise to self-censorship and refrain from any form of participation in activism and resistance. This is particularly relevant among the most vulnerable Palestinians, whose livelihoods completely depend on the Israeli economy.   Israeli measures intended to instil domination of one racial group over another has over time given rise to the absenteeism of key social groups from political arena and wider Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. This system of hegemony and domination has been the subject of several recent analyses by Israeli and international human rights organisations, who have all concluded that Israel practices a system of apartheid against Palestinians that seeks to perpetuate the domination of one racial group over another.[3]   A key pillar of this system of apartheid is the fragmentation of Palestinians, which classifies Palestinians by civil status and confers a hierarchy of privileges and rights accordingly. This system of classification is designated by area of residency. To demonstrate by way of example, Palestinians inside Israel enjoy the status of citizenship, which differs from nationality, as the former confers individual rights, while the latter confers collective national rights.[4] In contrast, Palestinians in Jerusalem enjoy the status of ‘permanent’ residents, which confers residency, employment, and other social rights. However, this status is fragile, and unlike its connotation can be easily revoked, on grounds including but not limited to the ‘centre of life’ criterion and as a punitive measure.[5] Further down the ladder of privileges are Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who are stateless and reside under a system of military occupation, and last are refugees whose right of return is unrecognised by Israel.[6]

My Story   Ten years old and wishing I was dead. Sitting on my bed, staring at my hand—wondering whether I was invisible or not. I never want another child to feel invisible, worthless, and so terrorised that they can’t swallow. So filled with fear that their very breath feels choked and smothered. Let me take you on a journey back 50 years, to my childhood.   My mum had run away from her Mafia boyfriend, a Greek man who was already married. Upon hearing my mum was pregnant, he took out a gun and put it to her stomach, saying: ‘Get rid of the baby or I will kill you both’. There was no fairy-tale ending, as my mum had hoped, of him leaving his wife, marriage, and having a baby together. There was only the stark reality of running in fear—homeless, with no money and no work. My mum ended up living in a homeless shelter in the UK, traumatised and addicted to alcohol. I was born two months early. As my mum couldn’t look after me, I went to live with an aunt. In the meantime, my mum met a smooth-talking man in a pub who groomed her, said he loved her and asked her to marry him. She did marry him, and when I was two she took me back and I lived with them.   My stepdad was evil; he was an alcoholic and a psychopath. He had severe mental illness and hated me with every fibre of his being. He was obsessively jealous and saw me as a part of the man who my mum first loved. Life as a child was hell on earth. My stepdad was drunk and aggressive daily and beat my mum most weeks. I saw her kicked, punched, stabbed, screamed at, and constantly verbally and emotionally abused. My stepdad would chase her down our street with a knife and punch her in front of the neighbours; yet not one person stepped in to help. The attitude was to turn a blind eye and not interfere with the business of others.   One night I witnessed my mum being kicked in the stomach and strangled and I watched in fear as an ambulance took her unconscious, battered body to hospital. The neighbours had phoned the police when they heard the screams—the first time the neighbours had actually helped. My stepdad was arrested, but the next morning he got let off and came home. My stepdad told me my mum was dead, and when I started to cry, he took out a knife and said he would cut me in pieces and put me in the freezer. Three days later my mum walked in the door, bruised and with a hoarse voice. I ran to her immediately—all I wanted was to be hugged and comforted. I had just endured three days of hell thinking she was dead. Instead she pushed me away and said, ‘We don’t talk about it’.   My stepdad was in a gang of men, a gang that included both a doctor and a policeman. They would come to the house and buy me with money or sometimes give my stepdad a bottle of whiskey. I cannot look at a bottle of whiskey without being triggered by the trauma of what happened to me. I often had the thought: ‘I am only worth the value of a bottle of whiskey’. The gang would abuse and rape me. Sometimes I would be taken in a car to places where other men and children were located and be abused there, but it is all a blur for me now—they gave me meds to keep me quiet.

On Monday 15 April, a fire broke out in the Notre-Dame de Paris. Believers and tourists were invited to leave the cathedral immediately. A race against time was launched which would last more than fifteen hours, defying all human bravery to save the Notre-Dame. Thousands of people gathered around the cathedral this evening to reflect, pray, and witness this catastrophe which none had thought possible to an eight-century old lady that had accompanied people in their joys and sorrows and had survived wars, plagues, revolutions, and occupations. The emotion was felt worldwide and donations for the reconstruction arrived quickly. The fire destroyed the spire, the timber roof structure, and part of the vault, at the level of the transept crossing. Three years later, the investigation to find the cause of this fire is still ongoing. This article does not claim to be an exhaustive account of the issues associated with the reconstruction of Notre-Dame, nor does it claim definitive answers to an ongoing investigation. It rather seeks to put forward a scientific hypothesis on the causes of this fire, not only for the pure satisfaction of knowledge, but also in the hope to raise awareness about the widespread but relatively unknown phenomenon of pyrolysis during works on monuments.[1] It is crucial that architects and companies working on listed buildings are aware of the phenomenon of pyrolysis so that they can adapt their working protocols, be more vigilant, and request more efficient fire detection instruments to avoid future similar disasters. In recent years, other major French monuments undergoing restoration works had been destroyed without the causes being identified: the seventeenth-century Hôtel Lambert in the centre of Paris in 2013 and the flamboyant gothic townhall of La Rochelle in 2013 are just two examples. In the 1990s, a fire outbreak was discovered just in time at the Beauvais Cathedral the day following some hot-spot work using a blowtorch. It is worth reminding the reader that the vast majority of fires happening during work are caused by hot-spot works.[2] The phenomenon of pyrolysis and, more generally, of slow combustion are still little known to those working on historic monuments, whether they are architects or craftsmen. The case of Notre-Dame de Paris deserves to be studied in greater depth because this hypothesis remains the most likely, given the conditions that existed during the restoration of the spire in the days preceding the fire. The current investigation has only shown that the fire started at the foot of the spire (fig. 1). Samples of charred wood have made it possible to locate the fire’s starting point in the area of ‘the wall plate of the choir at the south-east corner of the transept crossing’ (fig. 2).[3] Fig 1. Flèche centrale de N-D de Paris ©Ville de Paris / Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP) The spire, built by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc at the transept crossing, was embellished with sixteen statues, that of the twelve Apostles in the higher parts and the symbols of the four Evangelists at the bottom. Fig 2. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (1854-1868) The statues rested on wooden posts directly connected to the roof timber structure. At the South-East of the crossing, the lowest post supported the Eagle of St John the Evangelist. It was at its base that the fire broke out on 15 April 2019.

In law schools as well as political science and history classes, students are generally taught that when the Supreme Court decides a constitutional issue it delivers the final word unless the Court changes its position. That is the prominent theory. In 1953, Justice Robert Jackson promoted the doctrine of judicial finality by making a statement that is often cited: ‘We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final’.[1] Perhaps a clever and witty turn of phrase but it advances a claim unsupported by facts. What has occurred from 1789 to the present time is not judicial finality but an ongoing dialogue among all three branches of the national government, the states, scholars, and the general public. On occasion, members of the Supreme Court will acknowledge that errors and misconceptions can occur in the judicial process. Chief Justice William Rehnquist spoke bluntly in 1993: ‘It is an unalterable fact that our judicial system, like the human beings who administer it, is fallible’.[2] The person who should have understood that point is Robert Jackson. In 1940 the Court upheld a compulsory flag-salute with a strong majority of 8 to 1.[3] The final word? No. The decision was subject to such criticism from the public and scholars that three Justices in the majority (Hugo Black, William Douglas. and Frank Murphy) announced two years later that the decision was wrongly decided.[4] That reduced the majority to 5-4. Two of the Justices in the 8-1 majority retired and their replacements joined the four Justices to produce a 6-3 decision in 1943 reversing the 1940 decision.[5] Who wrote the majority opinion in 1943? It was Robert Jackson. Early Precedents The claim of judicial finality appears in a unanimous decision by Chief Justice John Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), which held that Congress possessed an implied power to create a national bank. He said if the case had to be decided ‘by this tribunal alone can the decision be made’. On the Supreme Court ‘has the constitution of our country devolved this important duty’.[6] He concluded that the statute to create the Bank of the United States ‘is a law made in pursuance of the constitution, and is a part of the supreme law of the land’.[7] The fact that Congress created the Bank and the Supreme Court upheld it did not prevent the elected branches from reaching a different conclusion a few decades later. On 10 July 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill to restore the U.S. Bank. While admitting that the bill had some positive features and had gained support from the Supreme Court, he noted the mixed history of the Bank: Congress favoring it in 1791, voting against it in 1811 and 1815, but supporting it in 1816.[8] As to the decision in McCulloch , he denied that the Court’s ruling, even if it ‘covered the whole ground of this act’, ought ‘to control the coordinate authorities of this government’. Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court ‘must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution’. A public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution ‘swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others’. The opinion of judges ‘has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both’.[9]

I. Introduction Issues of priority are at the centre of English land law. Where a plot of land in which a third party has an interest is transferred from one party to another, a conflict arises between this third party and the transferee: whose interest has priority? If push comes to shove, can the transferee prevent the third-party interest holder from exercising her right, or is the third-party interest-holder entitled to enjoy her interest in the face of the transferee’s objections? The Land Registration Act (‘LRA’) 2002 does much to answer this question. Under section 29, pre-existing unregistered interests are postponed to the interests of a registered disponee taking for valuable consideration. As a result, any such unenforceable interests are rendered prima facie unenforceable against a purchaser. However, section 29 only has this effect where the priority of the interest in question is not ‘protected’. Interests falling under any of the paragraphs of schedule 3 LRA 2002 are within this special category of ‘protected’ interests.[1] This article is concerned with paragraph 2 of schedule 3, which serves the important function of safeguarding interests ‘belonging at the time of the disposition to a person in actual occupation’[2] and ‘whose occupation would not have been obvious on a reasonably careful inspection of the land at the time of the disposition’.[3] Paragraph 1 is limited to leaseholds and paragraph 3 is limited to easements and profits à prendre . By contrast, paragraph 2 is not constrained in its application to any particular interests. This makes paragraph 2 potentially far-reaching in its effects and a powerful defence against the postponement mechanism in section 29. However, the interpretation of schedule 3 paragraph 2 has proved a significant headache for the courts. First, disagreement has emerged regarding precisely when the disposed land must be occupied.[4] Second, there has been debate as to which factors might be relevant when deciding whether a person is in actual occupation. The relevance courts should accord to a person’s ‘intentions and wishes’ has remained particularly ambiguous in this regard.[5] Third, in the context of the rectification and alteration provisions in the LRA 2002, the question has arisen whether a ‘right to rectify’ the register might amount to an overriding interest under schedule 3 paragraph 2.[6] Behind these controversies, however, the question whether the protection afforded by paragraph 2 is coextensive with actual occupation seems to have been largely forgotten. This question did receive some notable attention under the LRA 1925. Applying section 70(1)(g) LRA 1925—the precursor to schedule 3 paragraph 2 in the LRA 2002—the decisions in Ashburn Anstalt v Arnold [7] and Ferrishurst v Wallcite [8] came to opposite conclusions regarding whether occupation of part of the land could protect an interest in the whole. The LRA 2002 seems to preclude this possibility by providing that an interest is only overriding ‘so far as relating to land … in actual occupation’.[9] However, schedule 3 paragraph 2 is not free from ambiguity in this respect. In particular, the change in the wording from section 70(1)(g) LRA 1925 raises the question whether the words ‘relating to’ enable the protection afforded by paragraph 2(1) to extend beyond the land actually occupied. I will attempt to answer this forgotten question. First, I will outline in brief the pre-LRA 2002 disagreement regarding the scope of the protection afforded by actual occupation. Second, I will analyse the changes implemented by the LRA 2002. I will demonstrate that the vexed question is whether ‘relating to land … in actual occupation’ should be interpreted narrowly or broadly. Under the narrow interpretation, only an interest in land which is actually occupied by the interest-holder would be protected against postponement; under the broad interpretation, schedule 3 paragraph 2 also protects an interest in land which, although not itself occupied, still ‘relates to’ occupied land. Third, I will consider the merits of both the broad and narrow interpretations. I will examine the alternative drafting options available to Parliament, analogous language in the pre-LRA 2002 case law, the suggestions of the Law Commission, and the policy implications of each interpretation. From these I will argue that only the narrow interpretation is ultimately convincing. As I will demonstrate, this conclusion has far-reaching implications for the interaction between postponement and protection provisions in the LRA 2002.

I have not read all the tributes that have been made to John Hume since his death in 2020, but I doubt if many—perhaps any—of them have got to the heart of his real achievement, which was twofold. On the one hand, he prevented a settlement of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status that seemed to be a real possibility in the late seventies and early eighties on what might have been called ‘Unionist’ principles (though it could have resulted in the end, or radical decline, of ‘Unionism’ as a force in Northern Ireland politics). On the other hand, along with Gerry Adams, Charles Haughey, and Father Alec Reid of the Clonard monastery in Belfast, he found a means by which the IRA could lay down its arms without the appearance of having been defeated—an appearance of defeat that would have had very damaging consequences for the cultural and political coherence of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland.   It needs to be said straightaway that the IRA were not defeated. Their achievement in maintaining the war and driving their enemies— the British army, with all the resources, both overt and covert, it possessed, together with the array of Ulster Protestant paramilitary forces—to a stalemate is very impressive. Pat Walsh, in Resurgence , his remarkable study of the resurgence of the Catholic community starting in the 1960s, suggests that, even as early as the late 1970s, elements in the IRA leadership had recognised that they could not ‘win’, if ‘winning’ meant ‘securing a united Ireland’.[1] But by that time so much energy, skill, and determination had been invested in the campaign that it had become the emblem of Catholic—especially Catholic working-class—resolve never to return to the near-50 years of humiliation they had suffered since the Westminster government imposed a separate, necessarily Protestant-dominated, government on them. An appearance of defeat would have had a severely demoralising effect on the community as a whole, the more so because so many young people were joining (with all the dangers—and excitement—that that implied), not because of any great longing for a united Ireland, but simply out of outrage at the presence of army soldiers in their streets and army helicopters in their skies.   A disruptive system of government   In the early 1980s, it was possible to believe (I certainly believed) that Northern Ireland was headed, on autopilot so to speak, towards what could have been a stable and permanent settlement. In principle, the political problem had been solved in 1972, with the ‘suspension’ of Stormont. Precisely because of the Catholic/Protestant division, Northern Ireland was the part of the United Kingdom least suitable for the establishment of a devolved government. In Northern Ireland, devolved government could only mean a permanent Unionist (Protestant) majority lording it over a permanent Nationalist (Catholic) minority. This was obviously not what the Catholic minority wanted. But the Catholic position wasn’t a simple matter of Republican sentiment. Catholic Ulster had been a redoubt of the old Home Rule movement against the new, determinedly separatist, Sinn Fein. The leading Ulster Catholic politician, Joseph Devlin, was well connected in Westminster and particularly well placed with regard to the emergence after the First World War of the Labour Party. He had been very much looking forward to continuing his Westminster career under the new circumstances that would have been created by Home Rule (a relatively minor devolution of power analogous to the present arrangements for Scotland and Wales). Even after partition, if Northern Ireland had continued to be governed directly by Westminster he would have made a formidable tribune for the Ulster Catholics. As it was, with effective power in the hands of his lifelong enemies, and all the political parties in Westminster washing their hands of responsibility for the place, it was as if he had the legs cut out from under him.   But nor did the Ulster Unionists want a devolved government for their part of Ireland. When, in May 1920, the Government of Ireland Act came to the House of Lords, the Unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, abstained and protested powerfully, saying:   It has been said over and over again, ‘you want to oppress the Catholic minority, you want to get a Protestant Ascendancy over there’. We have never asked to govern any Catholic. We are perfectly satisfied that all of them, Protestant and Catholic, should be governed from this Parliament and we have always said that it was the fact that this Parliament was aloof entirely from these racial distinctions and religious distinctions, which was the strongest foundation for the Government of Ulster.[2]

Christopher A Marinello is an expert in recovering stolen, looted, and missing works of art. A lawyer for over 38 years, Marinello began his legal career as a litigator, negotiating complex title disputes between collectors, dealers, museums, and insurance companies. In 2013, he founded Art Recovery Group, a specialist practice providing due diligence, dispute resolution, and recovery services for the art market and the cultural heritage sector. Marinello has overseen the development of the ArtClaim Database, the most technologically advanced system in existence for identifying and recording issues and claims attached to works of art. Marinello has recovered over $400 million of stolen and looted artwork, and has worked on some of the most important recoveries of Nazi-looted art. CJLPA : I thought we could start with a bit about your career. How did you start off as an art lawyer? Christopher Marinello : I started off a while ago at art school, but I wasn’t particularly talented and was encouraged by others to try the law instead—with a law degree you can always go back to painting. So I went to law school and became a litigator, and worked in the courts of New York City for almost 20 years, and I developed my love for keeping my clients. I worked for artists, for galleries, collectors, museums, and whatnot. And then, in around 2013, I founded Arts Recovery International.   CJLPA : How did you come about doing that?   CM : I was working for the Art Loss Register as their General Counsel, and I started in New York and, at their request, moved to London. Then I left to start my own business. Of course, it’s very hard to tell a British businessman how to run their business when you’re an Italian American lawyer.   CJLPA : You’ve worked on the cases of some highly famous works of art. Would it be fair to say that fame and public intrigue around some of the cases you’ve worked on have been impediments to objective investigation?   CM : I don’t think so at all. In fact, some of the high-profile cases I have handled will never be disclosed publicly. The cases that we do disclose are for a reason: either because we are trying to publicly pressure a government or a certain party to resolve the matter in some fashion, or because we are trying to put pressure on the public to tell us the whereabouts of a stolen or looted painting. As lawyers, we do what our clients ask us to do. If they want the publicity we go forward. If not we remain confidential. If clients do decide to go forward publicly, it’s to apply pressure to somebody, or so the public knows that the painting is no longer subject to a title dispute, because they want to sell it or the painting has to be   sold, and they want the art market to feel comfortable that a title dispute has been resolved.

Philip Hoffman is Founder and CEO of the Fine Art Group, which focusses on art advisory, investment, and philanthropy. At 33 he became the youngest member of KPMG’s Management Board and later served as its Deputy CEO of Europe. He also worked for Christie’s for 12 years. He regularly comments on the art market in the international press. The Frick Collection is widely regarded as one of New York’s finest galleries. From the interiors of Vermeer to the forests of Fragonard, any enthusiast, collector or museumgoer would envy its collection. Around 300,000 people visit the collection each year, and in 2019 they saw shows on Giambattista Tiepolo’s Milanese frescoes and on French faience masterpieces.[1] It is easy to forget, though, that the Frick has depended on private collectors since its inception. There would be no Frick Museum without Mr and Mrs Frick, just as there would be no Courtauld Gallery without Samuel Courtauld, and no Kettle’s Yard without Jim and Helen Ede. Museums should remember that private collectors will facilitate their survival in times of trial and tribulation.   In conversation with Philip Hoffman, founder and CEO of the Fine Art Group, this article explores the ways in which the private collector supports the public institution.[2] Hoffman recalls how his clients work with public institutions: they send art around the globe, fund exhibitions, and make gifts to their beloved galleries. Although the idea is counterintuitive, public museums must continue to connect, engage, and communicate with private collectors. Loaning and philanthropy have never been more imperative for ensuring the permanency of our institutions. Collectors and museums are not ‘Romulus and Remus’, as the art world has come to believe. There are, it appears, two spaces on the Capitoline Hill. Our culture benefits from the presence of both collector and institution.   The Fine Art Group manages 140 different collections in 28 countries. From ‘Australia to Chile’ and from ‘New York to London’ its collectors invest in, assemble and donate art. Naturally, some motivations and ambitions are unique to the collector. Personal collections are a store of both monetary and social capital. Moreover, for many, buying art is an investment strategy, since art assets generally rise in value. It is tempting to believe that these objectives go against the public interest. The collector’s ambition to own  seems at odds with the institution’s ambition to exhibit, display, and educate . Private collections seem covert rather than overt, isolated  rather than accessible . Private is consistently considered ‘versus’ the public.   The social life of private collections, however, generally extends into the public realm, since their artworks are loaned and exhibited to the public. ‘We have lent major paintings from our own collections or art investments to museums’, Hoffman notes. Recently, they lent a Canaletto and a Cindy Sherman to shows about their respective artists. Collectors furnish exhibitions with artworks that museums could not afford, and the works they loan are integral to retrospective exhibitions. Collectors, then, participate with and enable public intentions—they facilitate in educating and exhibiting .