The Magna Carta is probably the most famous British document, composed in Latin in 1215 to record the agreement between king John and his barons regarding the king’s responsibilities and the rights of the people. Here several clauses are excerpted from the 1225 version published under king Henry III, with references given to the clauses in the 1215 version. These clauses relate to women’s incomes, the right to basic maintenance, standardisation of weights and measures, the problems caused by obstructions in rivers, each person’s right to a swift and fair trial, and freedom of movement for foreign traders.

This chapter analyzes the nationwide coordination and concealment of the government’s “anti-Haitian campaign.” What they called the anti-Haitian campaign was actually the beginning of a genocide that the perpetrators variously misrepresented in terms of deportation, imprisonment, forced labor, and flight. This chapter brings to light leading functionaries, including Emilio Zeller and Reynaldo Valdez who played key strategic roles as architects of the genocide. By exploring records of mass arrests, and the jailers’ own descriptions of conditions of imprisonment over the course of 1937, the chapter casts doubt on the exact fate of detainees. The anti-Haitian campaign also included racialized discourse around disease, vagrancy, and illegality. The chapter argues that not only was the 1937 Genocide planned, but that a critical appraisal of the actions that the officials were willing to write about offers one of the best windows into the killings that they deliberately concealed. It wrestles with the interpretive problem of official concealment and suggests that deportation was also a euphemistic cover for killing. This chapter interrogates the fact that military and migratory documents are completely absent for the northern border regions during the most violent months of 1937 and places the archival record into dialog with eyewitness accounts.

This chapter reconstructs Haitian and Dominican life along the border in the years before the 1937 Genocide. It addresses the history of the old border by studying new laws and new forms of enforcement that changed border life during the 1920s and 1930s. It draws from records of migratory and non-migratory arrests of ethnic Haitians. Offenses included contraband, illegal border-crossing, sanitary laws, theft, and failure to produce national identity documents. It argues that ethnic Haitians were disproportionately targeted for the enforcement of these laws and the pattern of enforcement reflected a rising tide of official persecution. Far from being a harmonious, open, bicultural border, the chapter shows that border and migratory enforcement grew over the course of the 1920s and 1930s and the new patterns of enforcement were changing everyday life in places where people had once crossed freely. Struggles over claims to land, livestock, and crops are recorded in the remarkable testimonies from ethnic Haitians who spoke boldly against their persecution in Dominican courts. Through an analysis of excuse-making, the chapter also details the strategies ethnic Haitians employed as they struggled to maintain old ways of life amidst news legal forms of ethnic and racial discrimination.

Thistlewood’s mental instabilities were exposed when he was imprisoned for a year in Horsham gaol for breach of the peace after challenging the home secretary Sidmouth to a duel. He emerged a broken man. Watson assumed the leadership of London’s ultra-radicals. He persuaded Henry 'Orator' Hunt to address a great reform meeting in Smithfield market in July 1819, in whose success Thistlewood participated. Deserted by moderate Spencians like Thomas Evans, however, he and Watson again began to plan insurrection, and to fund the manufacture of weapons for future use.

The chapter covers the arrests and detention of the conspirators, the coercion used to force some to testify against their colleagues, preparations for the trials and the selection of the juries, public reactions to the news, identities of the men freed without prosecution.

Chapter 8, “Spoiling for A Fight: Armed Opposition,” begins a two-part examination of violent resistance and how, when, and why Poles embraced or rejected it. This discussion is deliberately postponed in the story, as much of the existing literature focuses on military resistance as a shorthand for resistance as a whole, which it was not. Polish military resistance efforts, initially launched by officers and soldiers of the Polish Army in hiding under occupation, remained fractured and hamstrung by vicious Nazi reprisals until 1942. Despite its danger, myriad groups organized around plans for insurrection, spanning the political spectrum from orthodox communists to the fascist far right, and including Polish-Jewish participation. After the destruction of many such initiatives and the merging and reformation of others, one increasingly grew in size and strength: the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) eventually dominated a chaotic resistance landscape through the support of the Western Allies. This chapter argues that violent resistance was initially a disorganized catastrophe, and only late in the occupation did a few surviving underground militaries achieve the ability to influence the Polish population or threaten the German occupiers.

Chapter 9, “Home Army on the Offensive: Violence in 1943-1944,” dissects mature intelligentsia military resistance. As the tide of war turned and the Germans endured their first battlefield defeats against the Soviet Union, the consolidated Home Army grew aggressive. Its most effective move was a 1943 assassination campaign targeting Wehrmacht officers, Nazi police, and German administration personnel called Operation Heads. Heads intimidated the Germans and shifted occupation policy. The Home Army’s perceived success and the advance of the Eastern Front toward Warsaw in 1944 convinced underground military leaders that they were facing their last opportunity to launch a city-wide insurrection. Their rebellion, now known as the Warsaw Uprising, failed. Remaining German personnel in the city were reinforced and crushed the insurrection, slaughtered civilians, and destroyed the city. This chapter argues that military conspiracy, like Catholic resistance, had its successes but was ultimately dependent on the international situation and could not secure the practical support of the Grand Alliance in the face of both German and Soviet opposition.

Chapter 6, “School of Hard Knocks: Illegal Education,” considers the second great intelligentsia occupation success: illegal underground education. From fall 1939, the Nazi General Government administration closed schools, universities, seminaries, and conservatories that served Polish students, arresting and imprisoning teachers and professors. This was a deliberate German attempt to control Poles in the long term and ensure German control over Lebensraum in the Polish space, since Nazi plans intended to utilize Poles as unskilled laborers and wanted to deprive them of education and the opportunity for social advancement. Warsaw University and city high schools re-formed underground, and “illegal” education taught pupils from childhood into their twenties. Studying initiated young people into underground political conspiracy, exposing them to great danger. It also kept teachers and professors employed and trained a new Polish intelligentsia to replace those killed in the genocidal campaigns of 1939-1940. As occupation continued, teaching and studying increasingly became the purview of Polish women as more and more Polish men turned to violent resistance. Despite draconian punishments, underground education was one of the most important successes of the occupation.

Chapter 4 focuses on reforms in the first two decades of this century, which represented, for both Israel and the human rights community, fixing childhood’s spatial and age boundaries in line with legal standards. Key among them were the separation of incarcerated Palestinians under 18 from their elders; the establishment of the world’s only “military youth court”; raising the age of majority under military law; and assessment of the rehabilitation chances of Palestinian youth. Contrary to claims by Israeli officials and their human rights critics, this chapter reveals that some reforms have made no actual difference while others have served to fragment, monitor, and suppress Palestinians. Five broader issues exemplified by these reforms are discussed: the blind spots of human rights actors; the complicity of child law and children’s rights in the oppression of disempowered communities around the world; the growing convergence between military and nonmilitary Israeli law; the multiple forms of separation Israel imposes on Palestinians, which operate to divide and conquer them; and Israel’s attempts at confining Palestinian minds beyond the prison walls. Also examined are Palestinian acts of resistance: running study groups in prison, smuggling sperm of incarcerated men, and conducting readings and discussions in public protests.

As in other areas of social engineering, Sweden is considered as world-leading in creating systems that address social inequality. One of the cases in point is the Swedish day-fine system which has been considered as pioneering by systematically considering both the wealth of the offender and the seriousness of the offence when imposing the penalty. This chapter analyses in detail the Swedish day-fine system. The case study of Sweden sheds light on the pros and cons of day-fines by recalling the discussion in Sweden prior to introducing the system and the recent academic debates on extending the use of day-fines. The chapter also offers an account of the comprehensive prosecutorial guidelines as well as an analysis of the relevant case law, particularly in relation to adjustment of day-fines. The chapter argues that the Swedish day-fine system overall must be considered as a largely successful project which holds high esteem among courts and practitioners. The common view is that it is a merit of the system that it forces the courts to consider the economic circumstances of the accused and to articulate openly for the way in which such consideration has been done.

The Statute does not specify the penalty for specific crimes, leaving it to the Trial Chamber to fix a custodial sentence to a maximum of thirty years and, ‘when justified by the extreme gravity of the crime and the individual circumstances of the convicted person’, life imprisonment. Reflecting developments in international human rights law, the Court excludes any possibility of capital punishment. It may also impose a fine. The main objectives in imposing sentence are retribution and deterrence. Aggravating and mitigating factors are set out in the Rules of Procedure and Evidence. The convicted person may apply for early release after serving two-thirds of the sentence or, in the case of life imprisonment, after twenty-five years. Sentences are served in the domestic prisons of a State Party that has been so designated by the Trial Chamber.

The failure of the 1848 revolt scattered Young Ireland leaders across the globe. Whether transported or in exile, they carried on their campaign in the only way they could – through their writings. Taking their lead from the Nation, many founded newspapers and wrote history, memoir and ballad. Foremost among them were Michael Doheny, Thomas D’Arcy McGee and John Mitchel. Mitchel’s Jail Journal and The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) were strongly influenced by being composed in prison and in exile. The former became a seminal text for generations of Irish nationalists, who saw it as an eloquent and fervent denunciation of the cruelty and hypocrisy of the British Empire. Exile also provided the perspective to write on the Great Famine of 1845–1848, a catastrophe so great that it rendered most nationalist writers mute with shame and bewilderment. Mitchel. though, chose to deal with it not as an isolated and unprecedented disaster, but, in historical context, as the latest and most ruthless of England’s attempts to crush Irish resistance once and for all. His interpretation of the Famine as a deliberate act of genocide became the accepted view of many nationalists, in Ireland and abroad. The same period was covered in less vitriolic style by Mitchel’s erstwhile colleague Charles Gavan Duffy who put his main emphasis on the political failings and flaws of Daniel O’Connell and the idealistic self-sacrificing patriotism of the Young Irelanders. The apparent moderation of Duffy’s writings and the caution and compromises of his later political career led many younger nationalists to identify with the more rebellious Mitchel. Chief among these was John O’Leary, whose noble character and unflinching idealism made him one of the most influential of the Fenians. It was O’Leary who introduced the young W. B. Yeats to the writings of Young Ireland, and though the mature Yeats later dismissed much of their work as shallow and chauvinistic, he continued to acknowledge its enduring capacity to move and inspire.

The Williams’ gang slaves illustrate the long history of wrongful convictions of defendants of color in US courtrooms as well as the compatibility of slavery with incarceration. Still, it was not until the demise of slavery as an institution that black and brown people became a majority of those incarcerated. That trend continues to the present. The latest innovation in the long history of racism and the carceral state is the emergence of private, for–profit prisons and the prison–industrial complex. Much like the domestic slave trade of another time, captives of color are redistributed to locations where their labor is in highest demand for the profits of others. But already by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the historical memory of the internal slave trade was growing dim, the rich history of slavery in the very capital of the United States forgotten.

This chapter discusses the Easter Rising of 1916 and its aftermath. The rebellion had a largely Catholic cast, which has produced a belief that Catholicism and republicanism are connected. This chapter traces the experiences of those Protestants, members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, who rebelled in 1916. It also discusses those Protestant nationalists who did not take part but who observed the rebellion. This chapter discusses religious conversion and the Rising, and shows that the majority of Protestant rebels did not convert to Catholicism. Many Protestant rebels first realised the increasingly Catholic nature of their movement while held in internment camps in Britain. The final section assesses the occasionally negative reactions of Protestant republicans to this realisation.