The importance of the powers of the devolved administrations of the United Kingdom became clearer following the Prime Minister’s announcement that we were to begin relaxing the lockdown restrictions and each of the administrations adopted a slightly different approach. This week we speak to Prof Aileen McHarg, Dr Evelyn Collins CBE and Prof Daniel Wincott about the differing responses to the virus across the UK and about the potential effects that these responses might have on a further devolution of power in the future.

In this week's podcast, we speak to Professor David Cole, Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, about human rights and the rule of law in the USA. We examine the USA's response to the Covid crisis and what it tells us, not simply about the strength of the rule of law there but what the consequences of the US experience might be for the rest of us and the international legal order.

This week the Matrix Law Pod addresses the human rights implications of how Governments are increasingly turning to technology, not least data tracking, to help ease us out of lockdown.

In countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, the authorities have been using location data from peoples phones to identify all those who have been in the close vicinity of a person diagnosed with Covid in order that they can be isolated before they infect others. Contact tracing has long been a feature of public health – for example, doctors would sit down with those diagnosed with TB or HIV and discuss who they might have had been in relevant contact with – and then try and track those persons down – a slow and inefficient task that even when it identified contacts might do so long after they had in turn infected many others.  Technology offers the promise of doing those tasks in fractions of seconds with far greater efficacy.

This is a subject of great interest to the UK authorities and to the data companies who advise them, or would like to advise them. In this episode we explore not just the benefits that this tech might bring but what the dangers and downsides might be.  To what degree can law, or should law, provide a means for balancing the benefits that tech can bring with its dangers – and how can that be achieved?    

Richard Hermer QC, Murray Hunt and Helen Mountfield QC are joined by Cori Crider, a US qualified lawyer and the co-founder of Foxglove which is an NGO created to address the threat of the misuse of mass data collection.

This week we speak to Afua Hirsch and Martha Spurrier about the impact on existing inequalities within our society, most particularly race, gender and poverty, in times of crisis. It is becomingly increasingly clear that whilst the coronavirus itself does not discriminate, its effect does and is cruelly amplifying existing inequalities.

Afua is a barrister and well known author, journalist and broadcaster, for amongst others the Guardian, LBC and Sky News. Her new book Brit(ish): Race, Identity and Belonging is a Sunday Times bestseller.

Martha Spurrier is a barrister who has enjoyed a successful career both at the Bar and in house at Mind and then Public Law Project, and is currently the Director of the prominent civil liberties organisation, Liberty.

The Sound Of Silence: The Vacuum In International Leadership And Its Impact On The World’s Poorest

This week we are continuing to look at the international response to the coronavirus crisis but turning from examining the impact on wealthy, albeit troubled nations, to those toward the bottom end of the economic scale or at least in which a significant proportion of populations live in extreme poverty.

Richard Hermer QC, Phillippa Kaufmann QC and Murray Hunt talk to the Open Society’s Foundations Africa Director, Muthoni Wanyeki about the impact not only in her home country Kenya, but across the African continent more generally, and to Colin Gonsalves, one of India’s most prominent human rights lawyers, on the challenges thrown up or amplified by the state’s response to the virus.

This week's podcast focuses on how other countries are reacting and in particular how regimes governed by populist governments are coping. Richard Hermer QC, Phillippa Kaufmann QC and Murray Hunt are joined by human rights activists from around the world to discuss the situation in Hungary, Israel and the OPT, and Hong Kong.

Launching with ‘Public Emergencies and the Rule of Law’, Phillippa Kaufmann QC, Murray Hunt and Richard Hermer QC will discuss the UK’s approach to the Covid Crisis including whether all the government's measures are lawful and whether human rights are being sufficiently protected.