Another cracking year for the UK Human Rights Blog

27 December 2012 by Adam Wagner

Hello all, and happy holidays! 2012 has been a cracking year for the UK Human Rights Blog. As is customary, below are the top 2012 posts by hit count, but also a few of my own highlights of 2012:

• After just over two and a half years in operation the blog is now achieving our aim (we hope) of informing and enhancing the human rights debate, which is no less controversial and caricatured than it was in March 2010.

• My personal highlights of the year have been our regular posts on issues which have not always been covered fully elsewhere, such as the secret civil court plans, the Bill of Rights Commission, prisoner votes, environmental rights, the law of social media and our regular (and very popular) poor human rights reporting posts.

• The weekly Human Rights Roundups have become one of the most popular features of the blog, thanks to our fantastic updaters Daniel Isenberg, Sam Murrant and Wessen Jazrawi who moved on to other things in 2012.

• In our third year we smashed one million hits and are already getting close to two million. We are regularly quoted across the media and for the first time this year, in the Northern Ireland Assembly. We are now getting close to 100,000 hits per month and are consistently ranked as the top legal blog on the ‘e-buzzing’ influence rankings.

• We have over 4,000 email subscribers (just enter your email address in the box to the right to subscribe for free), over 2,000 on our Facebook fan page and 2,000+ on our @ukhumanrightsb Twitter account. You can also follow me on @adamwagner1 and my fantastic co-editors Angus McCullough QC on @amccqc and Rosalind English on @rosalindenglish.

• Thank you to all of the fantastic contributors from 1 Crown Office Row (the barristers’ chambers which runs the blog)  as well as guest contributors from elsewhere, who have contributed to almost 1,500 individual posts. I have taken more of a back seat editorial role this year so as to get on with my day job (I am a practising barrister, honest – you can read about me here), an arrangement which has strengthened the blog.

• Thank you also to all of those who have commented on individual posts both on the blog and on Twitter, which has been particularly vibrant in legal debates this year. Some of those debates have been fantastic and they add immeasurably to the content on the blog. As always, we welcome comments on any aspect of the blog, including the refreshed design which you may have noticed in the past few days. Thank you also to the growing army of fantastic legal bloggers (see our links section on the sidebar) who regularly link to the blog in their own post.

• One final reminder: all of our blog posts are categorised by legal topic and article of the European Convention on Human Rights: you can access the categories by way of the drop down menu on the right sidebar (for example family law, technology, Article 8 etc) as well as by clicking categories under individual posts. Our index of European Convention Rights is here.

Without further ado, here are the top twenty posts of 2012:

1. Why Stephen Lawrence killers were sentenced as juveniles and under old law
2. Introduction to Human Rights
3. Twelve weeks in prison for sick jokes on Facebook? Really?
4. Freemen on the Land are “parasites” peddling “pseudolegal nonsense”: Canadian judge fights back
5. Article 8 and a half – wider than thought, but will it work?
6. What’s so wrong with incest? The case of Stübing v Germany
7. Court bans autistic woman from having sex
8. Immigration judges ‘named and shamed’ by Sunday Telegraph [updated]
9. The sovereignty of parliament and property: this week’s human rights roundup
10. Freemen of the dangerous nonsense
11. UK loses 3 out of 4 European human rights cases? More like 1 in 50, actually
12. German court rules child’s religious circumcision can be a criminal offence – Analysis
13. A war on Judicial Review? [updated]
14. Delay in transferring mental health patient for treatment amounted to “inhumane treatment”
15. The Assange Reality Distortion Field
16. Christmas elf….and safety!
17. Feature | Are the courts taking child protection too far in abuse claims?
18. Big Brother or crime fighting? DNA evidence under the microscope
19. Abu Qatada and the law of time – Carl Gardner
20. A bluffer’s guide to human rights courts

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