Jon Yorke

Research Associate, Death Penalty Research Unit (DPRU)

Jon Yorke (LLB; LLM; PhD) is the Professor of Human Rights and Director of the Centre for Human Rights at Birmingham City University. His teaching, research and consultancy focuses upon international human rights with a thematic emphasis on the death penalty and an institutional engagement with the UN’s Human Rights Council and the Universal Periodic Review. He is a member of the Pro-Bono Lawyer’s Panel, Consular Assistance Department, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and a founding member of the International Academic Network for the Abolition of the Death Penalty and Cruel Punishment. He is a former trustee of Amicus and provides teaching on international law for their biannual training of UK law students and the legal profession to contribute to the assistance of those charged in the United States with capital offences or who are incarcerated under sentence of death.

He utilises his teaching, research, and publications to inform his international consultancy and submission of legal briefs in human rights cases. He has contributed to the drafting of the Human Right’s Committee’s General Comment No. 36 on the right to life, submitted complaints on behalf of victims to the UN Special Procedures (SPs on Executions and Torture), submitted an expert opinion (SP on Sale and Sexual Exploitation of Children), and drafted legal briefs filed into US state and federal courts (including the US Supreme Court for the amicus curiae brief of the Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland in the case of Linda Carty), the Court of Appeal in the Khartoum North and Sharg-el nil Criminal Circuit, and the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (in the defence of Meriam Ibrahim).  For the work in Sudan he was awarded three Human Rights and Democracy Programme grants by the FCDO (formerly FCO HRDP funding).        

He has advised on multilateral and bilateral proceedings for human rights regions and governments, and in various other diplomatic levels. He was the International Law Expert for the Permanent Missions to the United Nations of the sponsoring governments of the resolution, ‘Question of the Death Penalty’ during the UN Human Rights Council’s 54th session. He has advised the British government on the UN General Assembly resolution, ‘Moratorium on the use of the death penalty,’ and was a member of the drafting committee for the Working Group on EU Instruments in the Fight Against the Death Penalty. He was a consultant for the British Institute of International and Comparative Law project, The Death Penalty and Legal Tools for Commonwealth Africa. On the invitation of the Myanmar Human Rights Commission and the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions, he advised the government of Myanmar on the constitutional and criminal law amendments necessary for abolition. For the development of external abolitionist policies he has advised the governments of Belgium, Gambia, Kazakhstan, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Research interests

Consultancy Reports and Legal Submissions:

The Universal Periodic Review

He has been awarded six doctoral student scholarships by the Arts and Humanities Council’s Midlands4Cities Consortium and each of the student’s theses has used the UN’s Universal Periodic Review as a methodological lens to analyse: 1. The USA and the death penalty; 2. Islam and the death penalty; 3. Portugal and human trafficking; 4. Sexual orientation and gender identity; 5. UK migration policy; and, 6. UK engagement with the UN and the political process. Utilising the impetus of these doctoral awards (with colleagues in the BCU Centre for Human Rights) he created, ‘The UPR Project at BCU’ which is now the leading university project submitting Stakeholder Reports to the UPR, having filed 32 reports in 30 government’s UPRs.

He provides capacity building for UPR stakeholders and National Human Rights Institutions, to help ensure that UPR recommendations are translated into domestic legal change in member state parliaments. The Stakeholder Reports are frequently cited by the UN Working Group to the Universal Periodic Review. He has partnered with UPR Info which organises the UPR pre-sessions at the UN in Geneva. He has submitted in the pre-sessions of South Africa and the United Kingdom, and has presented in the Informal Exchange of Views with European Union Member States’ Permanent Missions to the UN.

In July 2023, he co-led with UPR Info and the International Bar Association a side-event in the Human Rights Council on the role of the legal profession in the UPR. In 2022-2023, he was awarded the Equality and Human Rights Commission grant for the project, Universal Periodic Review 2022 – UK Civil Society Engagement, which was co-delivered with 4 King’s Bench Walk, Inner Temple. The project provided support and training for civil society in England and Wales to engage effectively with the UK’s UPR. The 4th Cycle was the Project’s focus providing training sessions in the UK parliament, including with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the United Nations and the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and then for the legal profession a round table was held at Mountford Chambers, London, for a discussion with barristers and solicitors on how to utilise the UPR in legal proceedings.

Complaints Submissions and Policy Development  

With Dr Joel Zivot (Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Surgery, Emory University School of Medicine), and Professor Deborah Denno, (Fordham School of Law, Fordham University), he submitted a Complaint on behalf of Mr. Alan Eugene Miller in custody under sentence of death in the Alabama Department of Corrections, to Dr. Alice Jill Edwards, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Mr. Morris Tidball-Binz, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Monday 12th September, 2022. He has provided an expert submission on the 2010 Secretary General’s Quinquennial Report on the Death Penalty, to the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, 20th session, United Nations, Vienna.

Legal Briefs:

He has drafted and/or provided consultancy on the below legal briefs filed into the indicated courts:

Floyd v. Filson, Brief of Amici Curiae in Support of Petition for Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc, in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 3 January 2020.

Linda Anita Carty v. The State of Texas, Brief of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as Amicus Curiae in Support of Petitioner, No. 18-50, in the Supreme Court of the United States, 8 August 2018.

Walter v. Pennsylvania, Brief of Amici, the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales, the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, and the Paris Bar Association, in support of the application for certiorari, No-09-6158, in the Supreme Court of the United States, 14 October 2016.  

In Re Linda Anita Carty, Brief of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as Amicus Curiae in Support of Petitioner Linda Anita Carty on Application for Post Conviction Writ of Habeas Corpus, CCA Case#WR-61, 055-02, in the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas, 31 October 2014.

Publications:

Edited Collections

The Right to Life and the Value of Life: Orientations in Law, Politics and Ethics, (Routledge 2010).

Against the Death Penalty: International Initiatives and Implications, (Routledge 2008).

Series Editor

(co-editor, with Dr Anne Richardson-Oakes) Routledge series, Controversies in American Constitutional Law.

Chapters in Edited Collections

(with Alice Storey) Towards a World Without the Death Penalty, in Peter N. Stears, (ed) The Modern History of Death (Routledge, 2020).

(with Amna Nazir), Imagining Utopia: The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty, in Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker (eds), Comparative Capital Punishment (Edward Elgar Publishing 2019).

(with Amna Nazir) Monotheism and the Death Penalty: Towards a Homogenous Exegesis for Abolition, in Russell Sandberg and others (eds), Research Handbook on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Law and Religion (Edward Elgar Publishing 2019).

Deconstructing a Sovereign Right: The Hybridization of the Anti-Death Penalty Discourse in Europe, in Nicolas Lemay-Hebert and Rosa Freedman, (eds) Hybridity: Law, Culture and Development (Routledge, 2017)

Capital Punishment, in Joel Krieger, Margaret E. Crahan, Craig N. Murphy, and Ayse Kaya, (eds) The Oxford Companion to Comparative Politics (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Sovereignty and the Unnecessary Penalty of Death: European and United States Perspectives, in Austin Sarat and Juergen Martschukat (ed) Is the Death Penalty Dying? European and American Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Inhuman Punishment and the Abolition of the Death Penalty in the Council of Europe, in Luis Arroyo, Paloma Biglino and William Schabas (ed) Towards Universal Abolition of the Death Penalty (Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia, 2010).

The Council of Europe, the Right to Life and the Abolition of the Death Penalty, in The Right to Life and the Value of Life: Orientations in Law, Politics and Ethics (Routledge 2009).

The Evolving Human Rights Discourse of the Council of Europe: Renouncing the Sovereign Right of the Death Penalty, in Against the Death Penalty: International Initiatives and Implications (Routledge 2008).

[Spanish translation] La evolución del discourse de los derechos humanos del Consejo de Europa: la renuncia al derecho del soberano a imponer la pena de muerete, Luis Arroyo, Paloma Biglino and William Schabas, (ed) Hacia la Abolición Universal de la pena capital (Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia, 2010).

The European Union Strategy Against the Death Penalty: From Internal Renunciation to a Global Ideology, in V. Raghuram (ed), Capital Punishment: Concept and Context (Icfai University Press, 2008).

Journal Articles

An Experience of Time in the Capital Judicial Process, (2018) 24 Texas Journal of Civil Liberties and Civil Rights 189.

Comity, Finality and Oklahoma’s Lethal Injection Protocol, 69 Oklahoma Law Review 4 (2017) 545-621.

(with Christian Behrmann) The European Union and Abolition of the Death Penalty, 4 Pace International Law Review Online Companion 1 (2013) 1-82.

Inhuman Punishment and Abolition of the Death Penalty in the Council of Europe, 16 European Public Law, 1, 2010, 77-104.

[Spanish translation]: Trato Inhumano y Abolición de la Pena de Muerte en el Consejo de Europa, Luis Arroyo, Paloma Biglino and William Schabas, (ed) Contra el Espanto: Por la Abolición de la Pena de Muerte (Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia, 2012). 

The Right to Life and Abolition of the Death Penalty in the Council of Europe, 34 European Law Review 2, 2009, 205-229.

[Reproduced in: Peter Hodgkinson, (ed) The International Library of Essays on Capital Punishment (Routledge 2013)]. 

Frankenstein’s Monster: A Review of Recent Literature on the Death Penalty in the United States, 54 International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 4 (2005) 1032.

Europe’s Judicial Inquiry in Extradition Cases: Closing the Door on the Death Penalty, 29 European Law Review, 4, 2004, 546.