Happy first birthday!

31 March 2011 by Rosalind English

On 31st March a year ago our blog was launched and to celebrate our entry into a second glorious year we thought we’d take a look at what we’ve done that pleased you most.

As with all internet sites, there are no prizes for guessing why Should people with low IQs be banned from sex? comes out with almost the highest number of hits, and no doubt some of the visitors to that page would have gone away disappointed, but we promise it is a fine piece on a very interesting issue. And the high score achieved by our post Brititsh airways strike and human rights – the union strikes back has less to do with law than travellers’ anxieties about their scheduled flights.

But we can pat ourselves on the back that Exclusion of Islamic preacher Dr Zakir Naik was lawful, Legal aid cuts announced, Wikileaks and the arrest of Julian Assange together scored over six thousand hits; France expulsion of Roma: the EU law perspective, The future of human rights, a decade on, Supreme Court extends meaning of domestic violence, New “loss of control” defence as murder law reforms take effect and No religion in court please cumulatively over four thousand.

Interestingly, our Introduction to Human Rights page has proved the most popular, which shows that people are still needing to remind themselves of the basic components of the Convention more than a decade after the coming into force of the Human Rights Act, and of all the rights in the Convention, the rapidly developing and highly flexible right to privacy/home life/physical integrity under Article 8 has proved to be the most visited page.

And before we go… chief blog editor Adam Wagner has just been nominated for the highly prestigious Orwell prize for political writing, which scans books, journalism and the blogosphere, for work which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’. Adam’s de-jargonising of law reporting has been a major factor in the success of this blog, and its reach.

So, onward and upward. We’ve scored well over quarter of a million hits this year; maybe next year a million?

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