Research impact

The “refugee crisis” has brought into sharp relief the difficulties facing protection seekers in reaching safety. Global cross-border deaths have reached nearly 40,000 since 2014, with almost half the total recorded in the Mediterranean. Against this background, Dr Violeta Moreno-Lax's research has led civil society, policy makers, law-enforcement, and strategic litigation actors to recognise, at different levels, that extraterritorial border controls are problematic, as they impede access to asylum. The research has led them to acknowledge that there is a need for refugee-specific safe and legal pathways to protection, informing both the understanding of the problem and the identification of possible solutions. Engagement with the research has:

• Influenced policy and law makers to recommend the adoption of humanitarian visas and similar actions that allow refugees to reach the territory of issuing countries through legal and safe means so as to request asylum without risking their lives;
• Led grassroots organisations involved with ‘boat migration’ to cooperate and together establish SAROBMED, a new research-led observatory that monitors, analyses and disseminates data on human rights violations in the Mediterranean resulting in improved rescue and advocacy efforts benefiting seaborne refugees;
• Shaped key strategic litigation actions in potentially paradigm shifting cases that may shake the foundations of the prevailing understanding of how and when human rights obligations bind States in extraterritorial situations concerning protection seekers, particularly at sea.

Disruptive technologies combining Cloud Computing, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence have disrupted the law and regulation of IT services, leading to much legal uncertainty and inadequate regulatory responses. Professors Christopher Millard, Ian Walden and Christopher Reed are long-established researchers at Queen Mary, specialising in information technology law. In response to these challenges, they launched the Cloud Legal Project (CLP) at Queen Mary in 2009, with the objective of identifying the legal and regulatory issues. CLP was the first legal research project focussing entirely on the Cloud, funded by inter alia Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and the European Commission.

The CLP’s research has had significant impact in three distinct ways:

1. Informing the legal framework applying to Cloud contracts, leading directly to the shaping of law relating to contractual terms and the resulting empowerment of cloud users,
2. Drafting legislation enabling law enforcement agencies to access data stored remotely by foreign cloud companies, and
3. Shaping policy and regulators’ approaches to Cloud applications combining big data and artificial intelligence, leading directly to recommendations by the House of Lords AI Committee.

The direct beneficiaries of the research include governments, law enforcement agencies, the EU Commission, international bodies (esp. UNCITRAL), and leading businesses operating in the Cloud sector including Microsoft. The ultimate beneficiaries are Cloud users in general, namely consumers, businesses and governments, due to increased certainty and fairer regulation.

Find out more about research from the Cloud Legal Project:

• Institute Focus: Cloud Legal Project
• Cloud Legal Project finds days of ‘one-size-fits-all’ cloud contracts are numbered

In December 2018, the Ministry of Justice arranged for Professor Rachael Mulheron and Nicholas Bacon QC to carry out an independent review of the Damages-based Agreements Regulations 2013, with a view to re-drafting the Regulations so as to resolve some of the difficulties which have arisen under the 2013 Regulations.

Professor Mulheron is currently accepting feedback on the redrafted DBA Regulations 2019.

Find out more about the Project.

The Disclosure Pilot in the Business and Property Courts of England and Wales commenced on 1 January 2019. The Pilot, which is governed by the provisions of PD 51U, is ‘intended to effect a culture change. The Pilot is not simply a rewrite of CPR Part 31. It operates along different lines driven by reasonableness and proportionality’: UTB LLC v Sheffield United Ltd [2019] EWHC 914 (Ch) [75] (per Sir Geoffrey Vos, Chancellor of the High Court).

Moreover, it is intended to be a ‘living pilot’, whereby feedback and comments received from those who are involved in the Pilot will be closely taken account of by the Disclosure Working Group, and where necessary, amendments to the content of PD 51U may be made as the Pilot progresses.

Find out more about the Disclosure Pilot in the Business and Property Courts project.

Duncan Matthews’ research has demonstrated that patenting strategies of pharmaceutical companies lead to excessively high prices, block cheaper generic medicines and obstruct access to medicines. The research has identified ways to address this anti-competitive behaviour. It has:

• equipped international organisations (UN, OECD), governments and NGOs with evidence and policies to improve access to medicines;
• shaped the debate on the relationship between patents, competition law and medicines.

In particular, this research has been:

• explicitly referred to as evidence in the final report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines;
• used by ASEAN, UNASUR, China/South Africa and the OECD to initiate policy.

Further details about this research.

The massive growth in inadequately or unregulated online gambling has had a catastrophic impact on many players worldwide. Professor Julia Hörnle’s research is helping to reduce the devastating risks of online gambling by strengthening regulation and its enforcement.

In particular, the research has benefited player protection and improved regulation worldwide through five key impacts:

1. provided capacity building by providing evidence for regulatory priorities;
2. influencing legal frameworks;
3. assisting regulators to adopt more effective enforcement practices for better player protection;
4. providing evaluation tools for assessing the effectiveness of regulation; and
5. creating a framework for international co-operation.

By informing and equipping regulators in this way, the research has enabled regulators to safeguard online players using approaches or measures that have not been considered or available previously, thereby benefitting online players.

Find out more about Professor Hörnle’s research.

Dr Miriam Goldby’s research represents a key contribution to the achievement of digitalisation in international trade. The performance of cross-border sale transactions is still heavily reliant on paper. The current drive of the global trade community towards digitalisation is prompted largely by the desire to increase the speed and reliability of business-to-business and business-to-government communications to reduce documentation costs, which, as estimated by a recent World Bank study, constitute about seven per cent of the global value of trade.

Find out more about A Legal Framework for Paperless Trade.

Professor Kate Malleson’s research, with her collaborators, was triggered by fears that constitutional changes were threatening judicial independence. The results informed and influenced key stakeholders regarding the relationship between the Judiciary and politicians – both in the executive and Parliament. As a result of the project:

• both the Judiciary and politicians recognised that judicial independence and accountability are best served by more engagement;
• the Lord Chief Justice was persuaded to provide a detailed report to Parliament annually;
• Parliament had been given firmer grounds to be able to ask judges to give evidence before select committees;
• the Judicial Appointments Commission in England and Wales revised its governance so as to provide greater protection for its independence; and
• the Judiciary in Northern Ireland argued for greater judicial involvement in managing the courts.

Countdown to Annihilation: Shifting the global discourse on the genocide of the Rohingya by Professor Penny Green, Dr Thomas MacManus and Dr Alicia de la Cour Venning has analysed and articulated the precise nature of the persecution experienced by the Rohingya at the hands of the Myanmar state. The primary impact of this research has been in the widespread adoption of the term ‘genocide’ (as opposed to e.g. ‘ethnic cleansing’, or ‘intercommunal violence’) as the primary descriptor of Myanmar’s state crimes against the Rohingya. The main beneficiaries of our research are those making the case for genocide:

1. the UN and international justice mechanisms – specifically Republic of The Gambia legal team at the International Court of Justice (ICJ);
2. Rohingya civil society and advocacy campaigns;
3. the global mainstream media; and
4. sections of the UK Government.