Amy Kellam

This article considers emerging data on the escalation of domestic abuse in lockdown and, with reference to the proposed Domestic Abuse Bill 2020, explores how the depiction of, and response to, domestic abuse during lockdown sheds light on wider socio-legal issues and challenges. 

This was published in the open-access journal Amicus Curiae and can be viewed here:  https://journals.sas.ac.uk/amicus/article/view/5162
It considers emerging data on the escalation of domestic abuse in lockdown and, with reference to the proposed Domestic Abuse Bill 2020, explores how the depiction of, and response to, domestic abuse during lockdown sheds light on wider socio-legal issues and challenges. At the time of writing the draft Bill was progressing through parliament, and since the publication of this article the Bill had amendments which are the focus of ongoing research.

This article examines the history of suzerainty in international law and the use of that term in the 1914 Simla Agreement between Britain, China and Tibet.  The Agreement has the distinction of being simultaneously obscure and a conspicuous issue of geo-political conflict. The Simla Agreement is obscure in the sense that, to date, there has been no comprehensive study of it within the discipline of international law. Yet, the Agreement has had, and continues to have, significant impact. It was a direct cause of the Sino-Indian War of 1962, and continues to be the subject of dispute today.  Existing scholarship on the Simla Agreement positions the term suzerainty within the discipline of international relations.  A dominant premise of this work is that the Agreement's use of the term suzerainty is best interpreted within the context of regional political history. Whilst this approach has proved capable of highlighting wider issues, such as the impact of the colonial encounter upon local diplomatic traditions, it nonetheless offers only a partial glimpse of the intended function of the term suzerainty in the 1914 Agreement. This function was inextricably bound to the specific goal of the negotiations, which was to conclude a peace treaty between China and Tibet. As shall be discussed below, the term suzerainty has no clear, singular definition in international law. Its legal significance varies on a case by case basis. Rather than being interpreted as an attempt to translate a traditional diplomatic relationship into Western legal terminology, this article argues that the Agreement's use of the word is better understood as an attempt to forge a new consensus in which suzerainty operated as a peacekeeping mechanism. As such, the negotiation over Chinese suzerainty should be viewed as part of a wider international legal tradition in which the concept of suzerainty has been employed to mediate shifts in geo-political power.

In the case of Tibet the persistence of religious belief in the population remains a matter of considerable political sensitivity to the Chinese state. Despite similarities between the goals of national ethnic law and law governing religious activity, there has in recent years been a distinct effort to separate the two. Thus, whilst China's Regional National Autonomy Law may appear to be the logical framework within which to address religious affairs in Tibet, the government has shown itself willing to intervene directly with centrally promulgated legislation that specifically and exclusively regulates Tibetan Buddhism. One of the most striking examples of such a law is the 2007 State Religious Affairs Bureau Order Number Five 'Management Measures for the Reincarnation of Living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism' (MMR). The fact that this legislation was issued under the rubric of national religious regulations, rather than regionally specific national autonomy regulations, has ramifications not only for the function of regional autonomy and ethnic law within the People's Republic of China (PRC), but to the coherency and structure of the Chinese legal system generally. This article surveys the legislative framework of the MMR and places it in historical perspective. As well as examining the relevance of the MMR for regional national autonomy, the present work will consider inconsistencies created by the PRC's efforts to give limited legal recognition to a uniquely Tibetan Buddhist institution; an institution that had no counterpart in traditional China and in contemporary China is ideologically incompatible with the founding principles of the atheist socialist state.

In 1951 Tibet was incorporated into the People’s Republic of China by the Seventeen Point Agreement. Today the legal status of Tibet remains a matter of contention between the PRC and the Tibetan-Government-in-Exile. Both rely upon on legally ambiguous British engineered treaties to make their case.

The inconsistent representation of Tibet’s status in treaties is not, however, a reflection of the ambiguity of Tibet’s status itself; it is a reflection of the ambiguity of such treaties in the context of the positivist-colonial encounter.

Drawing upon British Government archives, this book examines the issue: to what extent, in what ways, and with what effects has the British imperial legacy in the region converged with Chinese formulations of law and governance in Tibet to prejudice understanding of Tibet’s legal status. This addresses a significant gap in international legal literature, which seldom discusses Tibet outside of considerations of minority rights within the PRC.

This book argues that an assessment of imperialism and its relationship with nineteenth century international law is essential to explaining the events of 1951, but it is only through a reassessment of the postcolonial that the absence of discussion of Tibet’s status in international legal discourse can be explained. The history of Tibet’s legal status highlights contradictions embedded within modernity and exposes the mythological foundations of the modern secular state’s narrative of progress.

Manufactured Obscurity concludes that the much emphasised clash between Western and East Asian values in the field of international law in truth operates along a much narrower divide than might be presumed. This is best assessed as a reflection of the contradictions inherent to the postcolonial within international law; involving both a pushing away of the imperialistic past and a reaffirmation of its continuity in order that modern commitments to the rule of law retain value.