Jessica Benton

@jessbenton.bsky.social

280 Followers 522 Following

27 🇬🇧 - she/her - first year PhD International Criminal Law and justice for disabled persons, Leeds Beckett. Former local gov officer and disability support worker.

A flyer for the protest against proposed disability benefit cuts organised by Crips against Cuts. Saturday 22nd March at 3.30pm at Dortmund Square, Leeds, LS2 8RE. Masks mandatory- one will be provided if needed
I beg of you to do the right thing and oppose these cuts as fiercely as I know you are capable of. For my mother, for my best friends, for justice. I gave up a potential career because I couldn’t stand what this country’s systems have done. I know you can take the first steps to make this right if you find it in yourself and you stand up for us. The government should abandon this horrific green paper entirely. We should focus on preserving and getting back the basic rights of disabled people in society and co-produce any new changes with disabled people’s organisations and disabled academics. All future decisions should have bearing from the UN’s damning report on the deaths and harm done to disabled people by Covid and the DWP. Disabled people affected and families who lost loved ones to the cruelties of the benefits system, to weaknesses of response to Covid and this pervasive poisonous rhetoric around disabled people should see reparations. Kind regards, Jessica Benton
An email screenshot to Jess Phillips MP. It reads Hello Jess I understand it’s been a difficult time for both you personally and us all politically since we met in December and I firstly wish you well. However, it is with great concern and frustration that I must now write to you again to urgently protest the proposed disability benefit cuts. I’m sure I’m not the only constituent to contact you on this but I want to offer additional perspective both personally and how it relates to my PhD study in international criminal law. This email bears a piece of my heart.
Screenshot of my abstract submitted for the LBU PGR conference. It reads; Disabled people have endured and continue to endure targeted and systematic violence and atrocity. These egregious violations of rights may show elements of Crimes Against Humanity as described under the Rome Statute. Despite this, there remains a lack of discussion of disabled people routinely experiencing these egregious violations in the interational criminal justice field. This research aims to answer the question comprehensively of how International Criminal Justice has responded to egregious human rights violations against disabled people as a group. Then, subsequently, answer how their decisions and views shaped the gap in justice and discussion of disability in international criminal justice. The thesis will make proposals for how intermational criminal justice processes and scholarship should address crimes against disabled people and create lasting progress towards equality. The contribution of this project to existing knowledge in this ares will be two_fold This will be through testing the use of Disability Legal Studies as an approach to analysing and critiquing international criminal law. Another contribution will be to construct a full, connected narrative of how disabled people and disability issues have been viewed by international criminal justice processes in relation to the development, investigation, and prosecution of Crimes Against Humanity.
The Howard Assembly Room at Leeds Opera North pre-concert, with a picture of a recovered music transcript displayed on screen