Editorial

Abstract

This issue of Law and Humanities is largely devoted to human rights and poetry. Five articles on ‘Human Rights and Poetry in a Global Context’ are presented as a special section edited by Rióna Ní Fhrighil and Anne Karhio, and by happy coincidence. This issue is completed by a sixth article, Chris Armitage’s ‘Lord Atkin, the Snail and the Foreigner: Loving the Neighbour and Oppressing the Alien’, which approaches its legal subject not from the perspective of poetry but theology. As long-term readers of this journal will know, its distinctive mission is to carry humanities scholarship that engages with and speaks to the subject of law, and we are delighted that the articles in the present issue fall squarely within that remit. It is also a special pleasure to be carrying work by authors none of whom have previously published with us. The special section edited by Rióna Ní Fhrighil and Anne Karhio is prefaced by their own editorial introduction, so it falls to us as General Editors of the journal briefly to introduce their introduction, and to introduce the two free-standing articles that make up the present issue. The group of five articles edited by Ní Fhrighil and Karhio is bound together by a shared thematic concern with human rights and poetry, but is nevertheless most impressive in its diversity, with contributions from Ireland, Greece, Nigeria, and Tibet. To our memory, the latter is this journal’s first publication with a focus on Tibet. A most welcome novelty. Sadly, there is no novelty in the awful events occurring in Ukraine as this issue goes to press, it is rather the recurring tragedy of human societies that they have so frequently waged unjust war on their neighbours. Amongst the myriad images that have daily accompanied this terrible assault, one of the most voluble, precisely because it speaks of the silencing of what is best in human endeavour, is the image taken in the city of Kharkiv of sandbags being piled up to surround and protect the statute of Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko. Where other images are visceral, this image speaks bloodlessly of the violence that inevitably accompanies systems of human power, or systems corrupted by powerful humans. Each of the five articles in the Ní Fhrighil and Karhio collection opens a way to understand, or to appreciate better, the power that the poetic promises for the improvement of institutions – the law included – which are always at risk of losing their contact with humanity. One of the articles in the special section – ‘“A black day, this”: Irish Poetry and the Fall of Srebrenica’ is concerned, as the editors say, ‘with events of 11th July 1995 and the subsequent genocide of approximately eight thousand male Bosniaks during the Bosnian War’. Twenty-seven years later, the calendar of dark days reminds us yet again of the need to live with respect for humanity, and (we would say) by the light of the arts and humanities. We leave it to Rióna Ní Fhrighil and Anne Karhio to introduce the five articles in their special