The ICC has hit the news again today because its prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has issued an indictment against Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, for his involvement in the atrocities in Darfur.

Involving the ICC in major conflicts around the globe can be far from straightforward – and in this case, the international community faces an extremely difficult dilemma, in judging whether everyone’s objective of ending the conflict and helping those who had had their lives devastated by it, is best achieved by involving the ICC, or whether that would do more harm than good by endangering ongoing peace negotiations among the parties there (some discussion of this is on the BBC here). This is a very similar dilemma to that which the international community faced a few years ago in deciding whether or not to refer Sudanese involvement in the conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (with bases in Sudan) and Uganda.

I’m not close enough to negotiations on these issues to make an informed judgement on this precarious balance. Certainly it would be a very difficult call to make potentially to endanger promising peace negotiations by involving the international court.

But generally I strongly believe that we should be supporting the cause of criminals around the world who are not subject to effective legal sanction in their own country, being brought before the International Criminal Court. Some of these will be formally private individuals, but some will be in government – for although Omar al-Bashir is the first serving head of state to be indicted by the ICC, the court is part of the same family of international criminal tribunals on specific countries which brought to justice figures such as Yugoslavia’s Slobadan Milosevic.

The idea that people guilty of such major crimes, who are not ever going to come before a court in their own country, should therefore be brought to justice at international level, is a really major step forward.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, and Captain of the Praetorian Guard of Brownism, launched a stinging attack on low educational attainment in 638 secondary schools across the country. These schools failed to get even 30% of their pupils to achieve 5 decent GCSEs (ie at grades A*-C) including English and Maths – a basic standard in being able to participate in the modern world. The tone of the DCSF press release is all very constructive and moderate, but the way in which it was presented to the media, which they duly followed, was of ‘failing schools’ being presented with an ‘ultimatum’ to improve, or ‘be closed down’ (here, here and here, for example)

His attack caused fury (and not just metaphorically, but literally) from teachers who felt they were being unfairly attacked by someone who hadn’t really understood the problem. Even if Balls’ take on this situation is “right”, then in the short-term at least he significantly demotivated the very people he needs to taker action to address it. A week after the initial attack, the TES published figures giving some of the greater complexity of the position, and specifically pointing out that of the 638 schools, a quarter had actually been graded as “good schools” by the schools regulator, Ofsted, and a few even “excellent”, the very top grade.

So who is right here?

Well firstly let’s take a look at the raw figures. If you look at the statistics and see only 20-odd percent of pupils get 5 A*-Cs including Maths and English, it does indeed seem that there is be a difficult group of schools who stubbornly fail to provide a good basic GCSE-level education to even a third of their students. It’s very easy to say that This Simply Isn’t Good Enough and so Something Must Be Done. I find it very difficult not to have some sympathy initially with this position. This is the life prospects of our young people that we are talking about here (as well as the economic future of the nation, if that kind of language gets your juices flowing more) and we need to get it right, not fail large numbers of them, as these figures imply.

Balls, a very political Minister who really wants to be able to show that he has made a transformational difference in this job, wants to do something to tackle this. In the thinktank and economics world in which he spends a lot of time, shifting the actual numbers and results is what it’s all about, and much of what follows in the next paragraph just sounds like whinging and making excuses.

Read the rest of this entry »

Under the system of Foundation Trusts within the NHS, governors* elected by members of the trust are responsible for representing the views of local people to the hospital.

I’m one of the governors of Whittington Hospital in Archway, so this post is really aimed at local people, appealing for any views you may have about Whittington and its development. I’m elected to represent the “south” constituency, which covers Islington, Camden, Hackney and pretty much anyone else who lives south of the hospital – but I’m not going to refuse any comments from anyone in other areas!

And I am specifically elected to represent not just patients of the hospital (who elect their own representatives) but anyone who lives in these areas, whether you have been a patient there or not.

Since being elected at the end of March I have been learning about the hospital, and am currently in the middle of a round of visits around it. It is a hospital very much in the middle of change at the moment – some of which is visible, such as the great new entrance, and some of which is not.

From what I have come to know I think this is very positive for the hospital and the local community, but it is my job to represent the views of local people so please help me to do that by telling me them!

You can contact me by email on jeremy.hargreavesATwhittington.nhs.uk (replacing the word AT in the middle with the @ sign – sorry about this, it is an attempt to avoid spammers!).

* some trusts use a different term, such as members of the members’ council.