Francis FitzGibbon

After Brexit​, the public face of criminal justice will look much the same as it does now. The UK has resisted many of the European Union’s moves towards harmonisation of substantive criminal law and procedure, and it is unlikely to use its new-found freedom from the restraints of EU law to decriminalise things like child pornography, cybercrime and people trafficking. The EU’s...

If​ Britain votes to leave the EU it will take several years to disentangle what’s to be kept and what discarded from our EU-saturated legislation. The law of the European Union has left few areas of life in the UK wholly untouched even though the EU can only legislate in areas for which it derives what are known as ‘competences’ from the treaties member states have...

Until​ the Supreme Court gave its landmark judgment in R. v. Jogee on 18 February, it was possible for someone to be convicted of a crime which they did not personally commit or intend to commit, under the common law doctrine of joint enterprise. If they were involved with an accomplice in one offence, and they foresaw that the accomplice might go on intentionally to commit another, they...

Zakat, the Quranic obligation on Muslims to give alms for the relief of poverty, is one of the five pillars of Islam. The Holy Land Foundation, founded in 1988 by American citizens of Palestinian heritage, raised money for distribution by zakat charitable committees in Gaza and the West Bank. Most of it went to buy food, clothes and education for children. Between 1992 and 2001 the foundation raised at least $56 million. On 3 December 2001 the US Treasury Department decreed that the HLF was a ‘specially designated global terrorist’.