VOICES Project holds seminar on criminal responsibility and the CRPD

On the 22nd and 23rd of September the VOICES project held the first of their thematic workshops on criminal responsibility in the Institute for Lifecourse and Society. The first day of the workshop was a private day where the storytellers and respondents who have chosen this theme worked together with international experts in the area and a creative writing facilitator to develop their pieces for the final edited collection.

The second day was a public seminar on rethinking criminal responsibility in light of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD with presentations from  Dr. Florencia Heggelin, University of Buenos Aires, Professor Bebhinn Donnelly-Lazarov, Swansea University, storytellers in the VOICES project, Nicholas Clarke and John Kidney, their respondents, Dr. Nell Munro and Maria Gomez Carrillo de Castro, practitioners and members of our advisory board. The presentations looked at how key components of the criminal justice system, such as unfitness to plead and the insanity defence, can be reconstructed in a way that does not discriminate against people with disabilities.