This paper critically examines how the pervasive socio-legal vulnerabilities in the Criminal Justice System (CJS) could undermine the voluntariness and fairness of plea decisions in Bangladesh. Building on doctrinal, policy analysis, judicial observations, and institutional reports, it thoroughly investigates the risks of coercion, undue influence, and unconventional exercise of discretionary power by the legal actors involved in the CJS, and systemic inequalities for which the bargaining process may derail. It also assesses the readiness of justice sector’s key role players—in particular, investigating agencies, prosecutors, and courts—to manage such a development with fairness and accountability. The article concludes that without structural reforms and institutional safeguards, the introduction of Plea Bargaining (PB) may perpetuate injustice to the accused, particularly those who belong to the lower socio-economic strata of society, rather than resolve the current crisis.
For the last few decades, content creators and copyright advocates worldwide have increasingly sought to treat intellectual property (IP), especially copyright, as a form of tangible property. Copyright societies have been vigorously lobbying political organisations in power to increase private rights for copyright holders, resulting in a multichannel effort to expand copyright protection and criminalise infringement. The ownership discourse of property undergirds the ascendancy of private property and attempts privatisation of copyright in the garb of propertisation of copyright. This culture of propertisation is seen by the property sceptics as a rhetorical strategy driven by a ‘capitalist agenda’ of private acquisition. The ownership approach leans heavily towards the copyright enthusiasts and blatantly overlooks the rights of users, undermining the author-user equation of copyright law. The social discourse of property posits a starkly contrarian perspective while also revealing the inadequacies of the ownership discourse and emphasising the broad interpretation of property to include public entitlements. By embracing a social approach to property, the entire concept undergoes a transformation, questioning the necessity of aggressive criminalisation of IP. This paper advocates for a counter-narrative within the framework of IP propertisation, aiming to broaden the understanding of ‘property’ and demonstrate that propertisation is not inherently opposed to the public domain. In this paper, the authors weave an alternative and expansive property narrative stressing the equal relevance of community or shared property (users’ rights towards information and cultural resources) that can aptly shape author-user balance. Public property as a premise supports the idea of propertisation but may run counter to the agenda of copyright criminalisation and expansion. This paper is a treatise of the machinations of struggle, shenanigans, and rhetorical strategies to glorify private dominion over IP resources by the property romantics and how the public property concept counteracts such a position.
The digital permanence of judicial records has created lasting privacy concerns for individuals named in court proceedings. This note examines the Right to be Forgotten in India, tracing its origins from the European Google Spain ruling to its constitutional grounding in K.S.Puttaswamy v Union of India and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023. Applying a proportionality lens, it distinguishes the relatively settled protection afforded to victims of sexual offences, juveniles, and parties in matrimonial disputes from the uncertain, case-by-case treatment of acquitted accused persons. Through statutory provisions and recent judicial pronouncements, the authors argue that uniform application awaits clear legislative guidelines.
This essay, memorialising a keynote address delivered at O.P. Jindal Global University in March 2024, applies a legal realist, socio-legal lens to the intersection of political economy, health, and trade. Taking global COVID-19 vaccine inequity stark disparities in vaccination rates between high- and low-income countries, vaccine hoarding and waste, and the prolonged struggle over the TRIPS waiver as its point of departure, the essay argues that the relationship between trade law and public health cannot be explained by either legal positivism or crude structural determinism, but only by tracing the historical conditions and actual outcomes that shape it. The argument unfolds across three interconnected threads. The first examines the right to health and the treatment of "non-trade" concerns within international economic law, focusing on the TRIPS Agreement, the 2001 Doha Declaration, and the persistently permissive rather than mandatory legal form through which public health flexibilities have been granted- a pattern the essay also traces in the Kimberley Process on conflict diamonds. The second thread situates this within the longer decolonial struggle for sovereign equality in multilateral institutions, from the GATT's origins as a small club through the Enabling Clause, the Generalized System of Preferences, and the informal "Green Room" dynamics that have historically concentrated power among a few states. The third thread turns to TWAIL, race, and gender analyses as critical resources for reimagining international economic law from the ground up. The essay concludes that legal rules and the social and political mobilisation surrounding them are mutually constitutive, and calls for a dynamic model of trade that accounts for its distributive effects across employment, health, labour, environment, class, race, and gender.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a prescient reminder of the need to foster global cooperation in the fight against public health emergencies. One potential avenue for cooperation involves reforming the international intellectual property regime to ensure timely access to affordable treatments in low-and-middle income countries without compromising on the incentives of pharmaceutical companies to innovate. However, the discourse on this issue has become increasingly polarised, with one side proposing modest reforms to the compulsory licensing system and the other pushing for a waiver of intellectual property rights. This paper aims to explore new approaches to facilitate the cross-border transfer of health technologies through cooperation between pharmaceutical companies, technology-exporting countries and technology-importing countries. It highlights the need for concrete obligations on technology-exporting countries to mitigate the rent-seeking behaviour of pharmaceutical companies based within their jurisdiction. The paper explores a combination of carrots and sticks that technology-exporting countries may deploy to this end. As regards carrots, the paper explores the potential for technology-exporting countries to provide tax incentives to encourage cross-border voluntary licensing by pharmaceutical companies under concessional and non-commercial terms during health crises. This is supplemented with a deterrent in the form of compulsory licensing of trade secrets to rein in the abuse of intellectual property rights by pharmaceutical companies. Additionally, the paper evaluates the consistency of these approaches with international rules governing intellectual property and subsidies, emphasising the need to update these rules to effectively address future pandemics and other health crises.
