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The pedagogic research undertaken by the School of Law has produced an ambitious and innovative model of clinical legal education: the in-house live client model, which offers a university-based free legal service offering full representation to private clients and NGOs in the form of the Student Law Office. The Student Law Office integrates supervised legal service in the law curriculum, thereby delivering free access to justice to the wider community whilst benefiting the learning environment. Impact is three-fold:
This case study focuses on the right to assemble and to protest through International human rights' law. It has impacted upon judicial rulings of human rights' compliant approaches to monitoring and policing peaceful protest. Sustained research with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe's Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) has increased national and international understandings of and respect for one of the fundamental human freedoms through the development of the Guidelines on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly (Jarman et al. 2010). These guidelines are increasingly recognised as international soft law standards and they have been used by international and national human rights' organisations throughout eastern Europe and the south Caucasus including the United Nations. The beneficiaries of this research impact are governments and NGOs working across eastern Europe, the south Caucasus and central Asia. They include Amnesty International, Human Rights' Watch, Helsinki Foundation and the International Foundation for Human Rights (FIDH).
Research at Bradford has focused on the Biological Non-Proliferation work of the Bradford Disarmament Research Centre (BDRC). The research-informed impact of this work is two-fold. Firstly BDRC has influenced, and continues to influence, decision- and policy-making involving 170 States on how to strengthen global governance through improvements to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC). As a consequence of this influence BDRC has changed the practices of institutions and individual researchers and thus has, through novel training and curriculum development, helped foster a culture of biosecurity to reduce the risk of inadvertent or deliberate misuse of life and associated science research.
Dr Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling's research has developed new conceptual frameworks for the analysis of civil service reform in the post-communist world. His work has helped international policy-makers to understand the conditions under which interventions by international organisations are successful, and has influenced the strategy and operations of the European Commission and SIGMA-OECD.
The research has been widely disseminated and used in international collaborations across Central and Eastern European and Western Balkan states and China, and to date has had the most wide-reaching and significant effect in Lithuania, where his policy recommendations were accepted and endorsed in the amendment of civil service regulations by the Lithuanian Government and Parliament.
The ill-treatment of prisoners is a deep-rooted issue in several countries of Eastern Europe, with incidents of coercion and torture frequently appearing before the European Court of Human Rights. Professor Jim Murdoch's fact-finding missions to the Ukraine and Georgia on behalf of the European Union and the Council of Europe have resulted in changes to legislation, regulatory structures and procedural frameworks in the Ukraine and Georgia. Additionally, the reports produced by Professor Murdoch and his colleagues led to a €700,000 training programme affecting more than 7,000 judges, prosecutors, investigators and lawyers across the Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Moldova.
The impact of a research programme into quality assessment measures for publicly funded legal services has been the establishment of a peer review programme for all civil and criminal lawyers operating in Scotland, England and Wales. This programme has ensured that the quality of service provided by legal aid lawyers in Scotland is consistently high, with only 10% of providers failing routine reviews. Moreover, the errors that do emerge are primarily administrative failings rather than poor legal advice. The Scottish model has been the basis for pilot projects in the Netherlands, Finland and Moldova, and has been drawn on for a peer review programme for all Dutch notaries.
Professor Zhongyu (Joan) Lu's research contributed significantly to the development of a next-generation student response system (SRS) that is fully integrated with web services, Smartphones, multimedia and other ubiquitous technologies. By incorporating the use of widely available online equipment, the system has made SRS more affordable, easier to employ and applicable in a range of settings far more diverse than the traditional classroom scenario. It is now used in Europe and the US by both academia and industry and has served as the basis for a number of dedicated prototypes. Its success has also led to additional major funding streams for further research.
Paths to Justice is a landmark body of survey research that has provided critical data on the public experience of the justice system and transformed understanding of and government policy on the legal needs of citizens. Its impact has been both national and international, and it has led to:
Fair and effective complaints procedures are essential to maintaining public trust and confidence in the police, protecting against cultures of impunity and establishing accountability. Research undertaken at the University of Manchester (UoM) has formulated a regulatory approach to police complaints determination that is fair, effective and human rights compliant. The research has two strands. Firstly, considering complaints law and practice across Europe, via engagement with the Council of Europe (COE) Commissioner for Human Rights (CHR). Secondly, an assessment of internal misconduct investigations, focusing specifically on Greater Manchester Police (GMP).
Work undertaken with the CHR, notably the generation of an Opinion `Concerning Independent and Effective Determination of Complaints against the Police' has been picked up and utilised internationally by a range of governmental and non-governmental bodies, and is being used within a raft of training engagements. The report `Disproportionality in Police Professional Standards' has formed the basis for both ongoing internal discussion, and wider considerations concerning the issue of disproportionality within the professions.
The IRPP/SAAH (also known as the Ljubljana Process) is part of the Council of Europe's Regional Programme in S.E. Europe. It was designed to establish methodologies for heritage-led rehabilitation in countries undergoing political, social and economic transition: improving heritage management practices; increasing ministerial acceptance of responsibility for the built heritage which had been lost in the new world, post-communist order; establishing a transferrable model; and fund-raising for the rehabilitation of a wide range of sites, encouraging new sustainable uses and jobs. The project has had significant financial impact, raising over 76m euros by the end of 2010, by which time over 80% of the 186 identified sites had undergone or were undergoing rehabilitation. Its methodology has been endorsed by the European Commission which as a consequence has increased its funding for heritage sites as part of its pre-accession programme. Within the participating countries the programme has been fully endorsed by ministers of culture, and has received significant further endorsement from the ministers of culture within the countries of the Caucasus which are participating in the Kyiv Initiative Regional Programme. John Bold was project leader 2003-10: this role included leading full project meetings in Strasbourg, Thessaloniki, Sarajevo (BiH), Ohrid (FYROM) and Zadar (Croatia); and numerous country-specific meetings, with ministerial, institutional and stakeholder involvement in Tirana, Sarajevo, Sofia, Zagreb, Skopje, Podgorica, Bucharest, Belgrade and Pristina. The role further required the writing of reports and guidance documents, many of which were then published on the Council of Europe website. All of these were informed by research into the individual sites (historical and architectural) and situations (proposals for rehabilitation, management and business planning).