Felly, mae'r gydaeth yma yn y cyfathol ymdweithio gyda'r cyllid yn cyd-rhyw pwblik, o ddweud i'r leisio Zedafod Williams. Zedafod Williams amser yn 2001 o'r cyfathodd y cyfathoddau a'r cyfathoddau a'r cyfathoddau a'r cyfathoddau a'r cyfathoddau. Sir David was an imminent public lawyer who specialised in the control of public power and in constitutions. He was very much one of the founders of modern public law in this country. He was a passionate about constitutional government and his energy helped to launch the development of administrative law in this university. From being Rouseball Professor and President of Wolfson College, Sir David moved to be the first full-time Vice-Chancellor of this university. He was energetic in reforming the university but also in promoting the different disciplines within the university, including law. And in his retirement he was energetic in raising funds for the university, for law and for the Squire Law Library. But most of all he was energetic in his support for younger scholars and always had time for younger scholars to listen to what they were doing and to encourage them. We're very pleased today to have with us Lady Sally Williams and members of her family. We're also grateful to Mr Michael Russ and to Mr John Nolan through whose generosity this lecture is funded but who unfortunately cannot be with us this evening. It's a great pleasure to invite Professor Cheryl Saunders to deliver this lecture. She is one of the most preeminent constitutional lawyers in the world. She's an expert on comparative constitutional law as well as on various national constitutional laws. She is a laureate professor at the University of Melbourne and has been a visiting professor at a number of universities, including the University of Cambridge, where she was a good heart professor from 2005 to 2006. Among her notable achievements she has been president of the International Association of Constitutional Law from 2003 to 2007, which is an indication of the international esteem in which she is held. That was a major role in developing constitutionalism across the world at a time when many constitutions were very fragile. She's published numerous books on Australian constitution and on Asia-Pacific constitutions, but more recently she's published also general work of the Rowclitch Handbook of Constitutional Law. Like Sir David, Cheryl Saunders has been giving advice over many years to a range of governments about constitutional matters. Her eminence is widely recognised. She was awarded the Order of Australia in 1994 and although knighthoods are currently a controversial subject in her own country, she has a knighthood from an impeccable source. In July 2012 she was made a chevelier de la légion d'honneur in recognition of her standing as a constitutional lawyer and for her contribution to scholarship in France. More specifically in relation to today's topic, she's written extensively on the division of powers in federal systems across the world, both in relation to economic powers and to the division between legislative, executive and judicial powers. She's eminently placed to present her subject tonight, which is of major importance to this country at the moment. Her title has echoes of the first Sir David Williams lecture given by Sandra Day O'Connor, but her perspective will be very different. It's with very great pleasure that I invite her to talk tonight on the title of devolution federalism constitution from here to where. Lady Williams, members of the Williams family, distinguished guests, colleagues and friends, I'm very honoured in fact to have been invited to deliver this year's Sir David Williams lecture. While I was a long time admirer, I did not get to know Sir David well before my term in Cambridge as the good heart professor. Spending time with David and Sally Williams was a particular pleasure during that most enjoyable year. David was unfailingly supportive, generous with his time and intellectually curious about every aspect of public law including the odd variants that are found in Australia. I very much regret that he's not still here to give us the benefit of his views on some of the more recent developments in public law in both our countries, not least in the field in which he initially made his name, the endless battle between liberty and democratic accountability on the one hand and national security on the other. I owe the general theme for tonight's lecture to Lady Williams. We last met in Cambridge in September, two days before the referendum in Scotland. Devolution was the hottest of hot topics, readily confirmed as the subject for the lecture when Sally reminded me of David's interest in Wales. I didn't need much reminding. Sir David Williams was a proud Welshman who remained engaged in Welsh matters throughout his life including as the first Chancellor of Swansea University in 2007. During my time in Cambridge we talked a lot about both devolution and Wales and he arranged for me to give some lectures in Swansea which I very much enjoyed. Sir David wrote a lot about devolution himself generally from a Welsh perspective informed by deep knowledge of Welsh history. He was caustic about the initial devolution scheme for Wales in the 1998 act describing it as neither fish nor fowl and rightly anticipated further change. He remained critical of the absence of straightforward legislative devolution under the new legislation in 2006 as what he said a recipe for continuing irritation and frustration. I'm sure he would be fascinated by the strides since made in the rollout of devolution in Wales including in the command paper inconveniently released this afternoon that I have skimmed but I have to say not read. Devolution in the United Kingdom is frequently described as a process and not an event. The description doesn't seem to me to be entirely accurate or particularly comforting but it's apt enough for present purposes. My objective tonight is to explore two distinct although related directions in which the process might be heading. One is to establish the United Kingdom as a federation and the other is to adopt for the United Kingdom a written entrenched constitution in which devolution is enshrined. I don't seek to be prescriptive about either. Rather I will try to place devolution in the United Kingdom in comparative perspective both to identify some of the issues that would arise in either case and to draw on the positive experiences of the United Kingdom for other federal type systems. The comparative perspective will include although not be confined to Australia. As it happens however federalism reform currently is under consideration in Australia as well raising at least some of the issues that are relevant here. I don't need for this purpose to come down one way or another on the question of whether the United Kingdom already is a federation of sorts. I'm content to assume that it's not for all the reasons usually given. The asymmetry of the devolution schemes for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland the absence of any form of devolution for England the lack of an entrenched constitution and its concomitant assumption of parliamentary sovereignty. But I note that the increasing diversity of acknowledged federations makes it difficult to determine which if any of these features necessarily precludes describing the United Kingdom as a federation particularly if convention effectively constrains parliamentary sovereignty where devolution is concerned. I'm also unable to resist quoting David Williams' observation that legislative devolution is federalism without the courage of its convictions. Nevertheless the definitional question can be avoided because on any view the United Kingdom has enough federal features to be characterised as a federal political system making comparison both defensible and worthwhile. So in what follows I deal separately with the possibilities of federation and constitution. There's an obvious overlap between the two but I conceive them tonight as presenting distinct issues. For federation these include the design of central institutions the division of power for federal purposes and the structure and operation of intergovernmental relations. Under the rubric of constitution I'll consider options for content including the treatment of constitutional arrangements for the devolved jurisdictions and judicial review on constitutional grounds. Most of the lecture is concerned with institutions but first I turn to the question of culture an important, if elusive ingredient in any federal political system. What might be characterised as federal culture has implications for the policies and practices of each jurisdiction their relations with each other the expectations of their people and judicial doctrine. It's a complex notion that follows from the nature of federalism itself. Federalism involves shared and therefore limited power. Jurisdictions may act alone in the exercise of their own allocated authority for which they're accountable to their people. In this case uniformity may be sacrificed to the values of subsidiarity including effectiveness, responsiveness and enhanced potential for innovation. Jurisdictions also may collaborate where this is mutually beneficial but the decision making process may be messy and slow at least by the standards of a unitary state. A truly federal culture requires the downsides of governing in a federal political system to be accepted with equanimity and the advantages to be valued and maximised. Equally importantly it requires trust, fair dealing and mutual respect between the institutions of the jurisdictions that collectively constitute the state. Logically and imperative of any federal type arrangement this requirement is reinforced in a democracy by the respect due to institutions that are chosen by and accountable to their people. In some respects the United Kingdom is well placed to develop and maintain such a culture. National diversity isn't acknowledged along territorial lines. The Union has long since accommodated distinct institutions and differences in laws. The United Kingdom has a refreshingly tolerant theory of the state which places no restrictions on diversity and allowed for a referendum on secession with relative calm in comparison for example to the position in Spain. This may help to explain the extent to which judicial doctrine has responded with some sensitivity to novel questions raised by legislative devolution in the United Kingdom. There's more to be said on this important issue however to which I will return. But powerful factors also militate against a federal culture in the United Kingdom. Cultural adaptation is difficult in any transition from an essentially unitary state to a federalised one requiring the surrender of power by central institutions. In the case of the United Kingdom the difficulty is exacerbated by two of the most distinctive features of the current devolution arrangements. One is the reality that the central institutions are dominated by the representatives of the people of the unfederated segment of the state namely England. These institutions also by default exercise for England powers that are devolved to regional authorities elsewhere. The other is that the parliament at Westminster enjoys absolute legal sovereignty at least in theory from which Whitehall also derives benefits and responsibilities. The consequences that follow range from the superior status of Westminster legislation under for example the Human Rights Act to the continued potential of formal intervention by the United Kingdom government in devolved matters which can never entirely be disavowed. Australian experience suggests that Westminster-style responsible government offers testing terrain for the development of a federal culture.  That was driven by consideration of the composition and powers of the Senate but it contains more than a germ of truth in other contexts. The cultural attitudes associated with responsible government in many respects are the antithesis of federalism. Responsible government places a premium on the speed and efficiency of public decision making accepts that the winner takes all, encourages competition and conflict between two powerful sides of politics, assumes an umbilical link between taxing and spending and relegates relations between governments to the realms of executive power where transparency is weak. None of this precludes the development of a workable federal culture but it suggests that the issue needs deliberate attention. Instant cultural change is no easy feat. The efforts of the United Kingdom to lay down new principles and practices from the outset of devolution are interesting for this reason. In evaluating them for comparative purposes two observations might be made. One is to draw attention to the use of constitutional convention to underpin, for example, the undertaking of the United Kingdom government that the parliament will not normally legislate with respect to devolved matters except with the agreement of the devolved legislature. The mechanism of constitutional convention is available elsewhere for this purpose but may be uniquely effective in the United Kingdom where an uncodified constitution gives it prestige and rationale. The second is that the changes may not be as far-reaching as at first appear. The Sewell and related conventions were necessary to give devolution teeth in conditions of parliamentary sovereignty. The volume of Westminster legislation that continues to be enacted in devolved areas, however, in reliance on Sewell-type procedures might reflect successful intergovernmental collaboration but might equally suggest that the reality of legislative devolution is only just beginning to hit home. The remaining practices set out in the MOU and other documents relate to the nuts and bolts of collaboration, communication, consultation, exchange of information, collection of statistics, confidentiality. They're useful as long as they work on a reciprocal basis but they don't clearly represent the shift in the character of the state. In a perceptive article written shortly after the first MOU came into effect, Richard Rawlings bemoaned the failure to clearly articulate what he described as a fundamental constitutional of comity or mutual respect which he then detected as locked in the memorandum of understanding and waiting to escape. Judging by the recent call by Lord Smith for greater respect between governments, the principle remains in confinement still. I now move to examine the three key issues suggested by comparative experience to the United Kingdom as a Federation, the design of central institutions for the purposes of what federal scholars sometimes describe as shared rule, the federal division of powers and the government relations. The participation of the federated regions as regions in central institutions is an element in the design of all federations. It helps to provide the glue for the federated state. In symbolic terms, it acknowledges the shared ownership of the state. For practical purposes, it enables the needs and perspectives of the constituent parts of the state to be fed into decisions made at the centre. The principle mechanism associated with shared rule is a second chamber of the federal legislature representing the constituent regions and contributing at least to decisions that affect them. Not all federations have a second chamber, however, as the very different example of Canada shows. And not all federal second chambers play an effective federal role in practice. The Australian Senate is a case in point. Senators in Australia vote along party lines with little, if any, attention to federal considerations. But, on the other hand, the equal representation of states in the Senate has symbolic importance in the Australian context, gives smaller states a larger voice than they might otherwise have had and has proved to have some doctrinal significance. Federal chambers are the most prominent, but by no means the only mechanism through which federation affects the constitution of central institutions. In some federations, the constituent regions have a guaranteed minimum of seats in the popular legislative chamber. Regional representation is often a factor in the composition of courts and in particular apex courts with final responsibility for adjudicating federal questions. Ministries often are composed with anire to the federal balance. The federal form of the state may affect the organisation of the civil service and the armed forces and so on. Against this background of theory and practice, other federations were somewhat bemused when the examination of House of Lords reform and the first tranches of devolution took place in the United Kingdom, largely in isolation from each other. Once again, however, the distinctive features of the compound state of the United Kingdom are the explanation. Famously, the number and population size of the devolved regions in the United Kingdom vis-a-vis England, make it implausible to reconstitute the House of Lords entirely as a federal chamber, even if, as in Germany, the majority principle is given some weight. It may be as the Labour Party recently has proposed that the House of Lords could be reconceived more generally as a territorially representative chamber in a way that included Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but subdivided England along the lines of regions and perhaps cities. Even in this case, however, questions remain about whether the powers of the new chamber should be federalised as well or whether they should remain as they are. Of course, in the United Kingdom as elsewhere, the functions of shared rule need not depend on the second chamber alone. Albeit in a highly asymmetrical form, various institutional devices that provide a measure of shared rule are already in place or under discussion here. These include the guaranteed minimum seats for Wales in the House of Commons, the somewhat coy provision in the Constitutional Reform Act that presently ensures that Supreme Court includes judges from Scotland and Northern Ireland and a shared civil service that must nevertheless be able to devolved administrations when acting in that capacity. The device of a territorial secretary of state with a seat in cabinet for each of the constituent nations is another interesting innovation from the perspective of federal design, which however tends rather to be an instrument for central control than shared rule, at least as I understand it. In fact, mechanisms to give the three constituent nations in the institutions of the central state have not been a major focus of the devolution debate. Rather, perhaps ironically, concern has centred on excluding representatives of these jurisdictions when central institutions perform their other role of governing for England. These are waters that as an outsider I would prefer not to enter, but let me just paddle at the edges. Clearly there is potential for the so-called English problem to raise concerns about the fairness of democratic representation that also can be exploited politically. From a comparative perspective, however, it may be overstated. The West Lothian phenomenon must occur in any partially or unevenly federalised state. The population size of England and its dominance of the membership of both parliament and government serve to diminish its practical effect. If England wanted devolved institutions moreover, presumably it could have them. Unless and until that occurs, there's no perfect solution to an issue that has the potential to derail devolution more generally. In the circumstances, it's tempting to sympathise with Lord Irvine's view for which I'm indebted to Mark Elliott in his always perceptive analysis of these matters, that the best solution to the West Lothian question is, or at least was, to stop asking it. Now that the journey is out of the bottle, however, it may not be possible to go further than the McCabe Commission and to rely on the familiar constitutional tools of parliamentary processes and convention to ensure that the views of the representatives of English constituencies are known, heard and generally given effect when powers that are devolved elsewhere are exercised in relation to England. Now let me move to power. Federation involves a division of legislative, executive and judicial power in a way that gives each jurisdiction final responsibilities. Comparative experience suggests standard lines along which this occurs. Power may be divided vertically so that each jurisdiction administers its own legislation or horizontally, separating legislative from executive power. The former is more common in common law federations and the latter in Germanic federations, but there's enough contrary practice in each of them to demonstrate that generalisation is fraught. Legislative power that's divided vertically may be assigned to either or both of the two spheres of government exclusively or on a concurrent basis. Concurrency at least requires further provision about which law is to prevail in the case of conflict. Whichever mechanism is chosen, a range of other choices must be made about the delineation of incidental power, the assignment of the residual powers, the treatment of authority to tax and spend and whether and if so how and when central intervention can occur in the affairs of the federated units. The latter, coupled with successive phases of change, makes the United Kingdom a cornucopia of experience with the federal allocation of power. Arguably, there's a default assumption that East jurisdiction administers its own legislation, although at the extent of the devolution of executive authority to administer acts of the Westminster Parliament gives the United Kingdom some characteristics of an integrated federation. Thanks to the operation of Sewell-type conventions, devolved powers effectively are assigned exclusively, albeit with parliamentary sovereignty lurking in the background. Surprisingly, the treatment of residual powers differs between jurisdictions at least at the moment. In relation to Scotland and Ireland, it rests with the national legislatures through the general conferral of power subject to powers retained by Westminster, which also effectively are exclusive. By contrast in Wales, again at the moment, the heads of devolved legislative competence are specified and the residue by implication lies with Westminster, although this is foreshadowed to change under this afternoon's announcement. All three devolution statutes use a broadly familiar formulation to delineate the bounds of incidental power. All are restricted in their revenue raising authority and heavily dependent on revenue redistribution from the state. Both the use of a block grant for this purpose and the still tentative forays into the devolution of tax powers, however, are pro-federal features. They make the United Kingdom an interesting case study for Australia, presently struggling inconclusively with both questions. Even apart from the elephant of parliamentary sovereignty, however, there are other features of the scheme that depart from familiar federal practice. One is its complexity, including the detail in which powers are devolved withheld in some form or both. A second is the degree of surveillance of the exercise of devolved power by institutions representing the central state through requirements for prior approval and provision for retrospective intervention. These run counter to the democratic logic of federation and suggest that the transition from a unitary to a federal mindset is still underway. One final issue for consideration under the rubric of federation is intergovernmental relations. These are a dimension of the operation of all federations, whether so described or not. Governments operating within a single state in relation to the same people necessarily interact in various ways. Intergovernmental relations are used for a variety of purposes, information sharing, harmonisation of the exercise of power, dispute avoidance or resolution, the transfer of funds on conditions acceptable to both Donor and Doni. They rely for these purposes on some standard devices, intergovernmental meetings, agreements and undertakings, joint institutions, pooled legislative power. The precise form of the intergovernmental arrangements in each federation depends on the system of government in which they are embedded, historical context and prevailing political dynamics. Intergovernmental relations in Westminster-style parliamentary systems tend to expand the power of the executive branch in both spheres of government. The explanation for the phenomenon of what is often called executive federalism has been well rehearsed. Intergovernmental meetings and agreements fall entirely within the conception of executive power in common law legal systems. Governments typically exercise considerable control over parliaments in any event, making them compliant when legislative approval is needed. The culture of secrecy that attends cabinet deliberations extends easily to meetings of ministers across jurisdictional lines. Executive federalism presents problems for democratic accountability to both parliaments and the people, and for legal accountability through tribunals and courts with implications for the rule of law. Behind the closed doors of intergovernmental meetings, executive federalism may also lend itself to central dominance and to bureaucratic rather than political control. The potential solutions have been well rehearsed too. They include the formalisation of intergovernmental procedures, whether in statutory or other form, the greater involvement of legislatures in making and scrutinising intergovernmental arrangements, the management of intergovernmental fora by independent secretariats responsible to all participating jurisdictions, mandated transparency for intergovernmental decision making, and the legal enforceability of at least some intergovernmental agreements. A recent comparative study of intergovernmental arrangements in selected federations in which I was involved suggests that principles of this kind are beginning to be given effect across the federated states of the world. Powerful forces arranged against them as well, however. As always, there's a trade off between the flexibility that accompanies informality and the accountability and predictability to which more structured procedures lead. Political players do not necessarily perceive that their interests lie in greater transparency and accountability, although in the context of intergovernmental arrangements, I think they may be wrong. And there's also a version to what one member of the House of Lords Constitution Committee recently described as letting those damn judges in the door through more formalised procedures. Again, the United Kingdom fits into this picture well enough for comparative experience to be relevant here and vice versa. There's a plethora of bilateral and multilateral intergovernmental meetings of ministers and civil servants from the Joint Ministerial Committee down. Memorander of understanding, concordants and agreements of other kinds set out understandings between jurisdictions on procedural and substantive questions. Parliamentary sovereignty obviates the need for complex legislative schemes, but on the other hand, the sole and related conventions that govern the enactment of Westminster legislation for these purposes themselves involve intergovernmental relations of a kind. Judged by standards elsewhere, intergovernmental relations in the United Kingdom have some quite progressive features. The memorandum of understanding and the concordants are publicly available, although they seem to be systematically collated and published only in Scotland and Wales. The Joint Ministerial Committee issues both communicase and an annual report, although in a form that's rather too brief to be useful. Significantly, the three national legislatures that has taken active interest in intergovernmental relations and the doctrine of legitimate expectations offers potential for the soft law of concordants to play a role in the judicial review. But there's plenty of evidence that there's more to be done to improve the effectiveness of intergovernmental relations and their fit with democracy and the rule of law. One of the key recommendations of the Smith Commission concerned reform to the intergovernmental machinery as a matter of urgency. In his forward to the report, Lord Smith referred to the need for a more productive, robust, visible and transparent relationship based on greater respect. Some of the particulars of the problems have recently been explored in evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution. These include the paucity of parliamentary involvement, particularly at Westminster, central state dominance of the intergovernmental decision making machinery, and the generally unhelpful nature of the information publicly available about what is going on. These are familiar concerns, but the government's response so far has been a bit lackluster. The experience of other federations suggests that those interested in such matters should seize the momentum presented by the Smith Commission and press for changes to intergovernmental practices and procedures. Now, finally, the topic of constitution. For some time now, of course, consideration has been given in this country as to whether to adopt a written and in that sense codified constitution. The debate is not necessarily linked to devolution or to federation. While it's customary for federations to have a codified constitution, constitutions need not provide for federalism, and indeed discussion of a written constitution here is often driven by other aspects of the constitutional arrangements of the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, given development since 1998, if the United Kingdom were now to adopt a written constitution, it's unthinkable that devolution would not be included in it. For present purposes, I'm prepared to assume that such a constitution would be entrenched. I acknowledge, but I don't intend to engage with the legal puzzle of how this might occur, in this at least, if there literally is a will, there will be a way. I note, however, that it would be possible to reduce constitutional arrangements to written form without entrenchment, and at least some of the observations that I make on the subject would apply whether the constitution were entrenched or not. It should go without saying, moreover, that a decision for entrenchment says nothing about the degree of difficulty of constitutional change. So, in what follows, I deal with three aspects of a written constitution. Content, the treatment of the constitutions for the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, and the methodology of constitutional review. Federation is more than an add-on to a unitary constitution. Federal features are likely to infuse the institutional arrangements for the central state. Federation may require consideration in designing mechanisms for constitutional rights protection, as the example of Canada shows. Generally, the federal form of the state is reflected in any preamble and affects the design of procedures for constitutional change. Federation itself is a complex arrangement with several dimensions for which a codified constitution normally would provide. I've mentioned three already. The institutional arrangements for shared rule, the distribution of power, and a framework for intergovernmental relations. Others suggested by comparative federal experience include matters for which common standards are sought across the Federation and aspects of unity that are deemed to need protection in a compound state. Parts are a typical example of the former. Protection for unity may be sought in relation to, for example, freedom of movement and the equality of treatment of citizens, each of which may be threatened by the dynamics of competing jurisdictions. Path dependency is inevitable and appropriate in any new constitution. But in drafting a codified constitution for the United Kingdom, some matters necessarily would change. Let me identify five drawing on my earlier observations. First, moving to a written and trench constitution would force decisions on the thorny issues of the constitution and powers of the House of Lords and on the West Lothian question. The latter might be ameliorated by the constitutional provision of a mechanism to allow further federalisation by or in relation to parts of England if the will to do so emerged. Secondly, drafting a written constitution may cause reduction of the asymmetry in the design of institutions and the allocation of powers in relation to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, already dwindling through the release of the command paper this afternoon. It would not necessarily eliminate asymmetry entirely, but it would require departure from symmetry to be justified. Third, on a related point, reflection on the implications of abandoning parliamentary sovereignty might in any event prompt change in the method of the devolution of legislative and executive power in relation to Scotland and Northern Ireland and soon to Wales. Questions that would arise include whether there should be a list of identified powers for the constituent nations as well as the central state, whether residual power should continue to rest with the former and whether some or all powers should be stipulated as concurrent in the sense that they might be exercised by either sphere of government. Fourth, the description of the powers themselves would be likely to change in the course of developing a codified constitution, not least to abandon much of the detail in which they're presently prescribed. And equally, fifth, both the detail and the principle of central powers of intervention in the affairs of devolved jurisdictions may need to be revisited. It's relatively unusual for federations in developed states to make constitutional provision for intervention by the centre and where it occurs, as for example in Germany, safeguards are provided in the form of procedures for approval by the institutions of shared rule coupled with judicial review. A particular aspect of the question of the content of a federal constitution is what, if anything, should be said about the constitutions of the constituent jurisdictions. Federal constitutional practice varies in this regard. In some federations, the constituent jurisdictions have their own constitutions prescribing their own institutional arrangements subject to any overriding constraints in the federal constitution. In others, the constitutional arrangements for the constituent regions are prescribed in the federal constitution, although sometimes in a form that gives the relevant jurisdiction some say in their alteration over time. In a South African variation, the central constitution prescribes the constitutional arrangements for the provinces but authorises the latter to draft their own constitutions if they choose subject to certification by the constitutional court, which has proved to be a very high hurdle. As matters presently stand, the constitutional arrangements for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are prescribed in devolution statutes in an exercise of reserved power following consultation and approval. While satisfying the proprieties of devolution in conditions of parliamentary sovereignty, it's improbable that this particular aspect of the status quo would be maintained under a federal constitution. Change of some kind therefore would seem inevitable. As a generalisation, discreet constitutions for constituent jurisdictions are less usual in federations formed by devolution rather than by aggregation, if only for the pragmatic reason that they didn't exist before. But this is not entirely the case in the United Kingdom if the devolution statutes are treated as proto-constitutions. This consideration may suggest that if the United Kingdom were to constitutionalise a federal form of government, each jurisdiction might be authorised to draw up its own constitution subject to central constitutional constraints, the extent of which would need to be determined. In a codified constitution, the provisions constituting the federation as well as all or most others would trigger, would be able to trigger review by the courts on constitutional grounds. On the assumptions that I've made, constitutional review would apply to legislative as well as executive action even by the Westminster Parliament. In recent years there's been growing comparative interest in the reasoning of courts with a constitutional review jurisdiction. The work done so far suggests that the differences are considerable and that the reasons for the difference lie deep. In relation to federal constitutional review, there are at least two sets of variables. One concerns the mechanisms and principles used by courts to determine the validity of challenged action. A prime example is the techniques to determine whether a law is supported by a constitutional power which involves a search for pith and substance in Canadian terms but only sufficient connection in Australia. The other concerns any underlying assumptions that affect judicial understanding of the task to be performed. These may relate to the nature of federation itself including its purpose and core features. The Australian High Court for example decided long ago is somewhat idiosyncratically that federation involves two spheres of government separately organised to which power is relatively unimportant. This understanding has underpinned a jurisprudence that fiercely protects the institutions of each jurisdiction from attack by the other while dramatically expanding commonwealth power through constitutional review. The United Kingdom already has considerable experience of judicial review of the devolution arrangements. The devolution legislation itself quite unusually prescribes the technique to be applied in determining whether an act relates to a prescribed matter by reference to purpose and having regard to effect. By 2015 enough cases have been decided on devolution questions for some tentative observations about an emerging jurisdiction to be made. The meaning of relates to as the touchstone for determining whether a challenge law is within power has been spelt out in a small handful of decisions from Scotland and Wales that interestingly at least for the moment attach no significance to the differences in the context in which the term is used. Likewise there's now a small body of authority about the scope of the incidental power although variations in the formulations used could prove significant over time. At a more conceptual level the court has accepted that the devolution acts a constitutional statutes, that acts of the legislatures they establish are primary legislation and that the policy assessments of these democratically elected legislatures are entitled to a degree of deference in determining consistency with convention rights. These holdings are important markers in devolution jurisprudence in this country. Even on the basis of the current devolution settlements foundation questions remain to be resolved however. Some flow from the still ambiguous nature of the devolution acts. Should they be interpreted in a way that relies on their constitutional character and if so what might that involve? Alternatively if their statutory nature is emphasised do all the rules of statutory interpretation apply including for example the principle of legality. This later line of inquiry has the potential to further limit the competences of the legislatures of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. These are already vulnerable to treatment as second class legislatures for the purposes of judicial review as some of the reasoning in the recent Welsh case shows. Many although not all of these questions would persist under a codified constitution although the framework of reference for them would differ. The stakes for judicial review would be dramatically changed however. Most obviously questions of competence would become more acute given the greater difficulty of constitutional change. This reality could be expected to feed into the methodology of review in both technique and underlying assumptions. What that would mean in practice would depend on the model adopted. Designation of powers as exclusive or concurrent and the treatment of residual powers makes very different demands on the methodology of constitutional review. So finally by way of conclusion devolution in the United Kingdom has added new dimensions to comparative experience with federal type systems. Much of the devolution settlement is distinctive but five features stand out in particular at least for me. They are the acceptance of asymmetry, the progressive transferal of competence, the effective reliance on self control by the centre to maintain the boundary with devolved competence, the explicit recognition of the democratic rationale for devolution particularly in the courts and the tolerance of the possibility of secession. It's far from clear that any of these can be cloned for use elsewhere. They depend in many ways on local conditions including historically distinct and territorially bounded communities, developed democratic institutions, a long tradition of constitutional pragmatism, a practice of sophisticated discursive reasoning in the judiciary and a generally relaxed approach to the concept of the state. Even if only as an example however, devolution in the United Kingdom offers insights for many countries in transition struggling with the imperative to provide for local self-determination but apprehensive about whether it will work and where it might lead. It holds lessons for many developed federations as well including my own which is much less comfortable with asymmetry, even more jealous of central authority and slow to recognise the democratic advantages that federalism can bring. My intention this evening was to place the United Kingdom in comparative perspective not only to identify what devolution offers but to explore where it might go next. You may think that either full blown federation or an entrenched written constitution is unlikely in this state and that a combination of both is entirely implausible. On present indications I would be inclined to agree. On the other hand there's plenty of evidence including from the United Kingdom that constitutional opportunities sometimes present themselves suddenly as a result of a conjuncture of personalities and events in ways that cannot be foreseen. And on any view it's likely that devolution in the United Kingdom will move a little bit further down each of these paths. On that assumption comparative experience suggests a range of issues that are likely to need attention even from the standpoint of effective devolution. In no necessary order of importance these include the institutions of shared rule the degree of detail with which competence is devolved and withheld, unnecessary asymmetry and the structure and transparency of intergovernmental arrangements with anire to the demands of democracy and the rule of law. Underpinning them all is the imperative for the development of a federal culture to give devolution substance and depth. Many thanks for attending tonight. I'm conscious of my cheek in talking on this topic to such an informed audience. I hope that what I've had to say is of some interest and I also hope, although I'm by no means confident that Sir David would have approved. Thank you.


For example, I put the ball there, you need to speak with this one to go there, okay? Because if he's here, and you are coming here for example, the fullback is there, he's completely alone, and the other fullback has to leave his position, so the ball is there, or is there, if he's there, he's coming alone, you can't go, he can't go because if he goes, the space is there, if you are coming, the space is behind you, who should we go? That one, okay? So you go in there, go, then you here, the other one, more or less here, and then the other winger there, so have you seen? Two-four, but always one, then is the opposite, the ball is going there, and this one is coming here, that one should go there, you here, the other one here, and then the other winger there, okay?


I see before me a multinational brigade unified in purpose. A lot of people talk about interoperability, but you've demonstrated it. Predict the future, but the best way to be prepared is to do exactly what you've done these past two weeks.


So, hi everybody. Today what I am going to talk about is a system we implemented in Firefox OS which implements a keyboard prediction algorithm into the present system on how Firefox works. So, before I actually go into the details of how we did it and what we actually did I just wanted to ask how many of you know about Firefox OS? Wow, that is a revelation. Now then again Firefox OS is completely all the apps and everything is based on JavaScript and it runs in a gecko engine which sits in behind which is called boot to gecko. Now the problem becomes or it starts with every app you create for it apart from the third party apps the native apps are also JavaScript and they have to run on the device. Now as some of you may have known there was a device launched in India a very low cost device which is 35 dollars I think 2000 rupees and it is called Intex cloud effects any of you have it. So, how are you happy with the performance of it especially the keyboard part? Okay, right. So first let us see what is the problem. So, when Firefox OS first hit the market and the market audience was low cost devices and those devices which run on very limited hardware. So, the problem was optimizing the apps or native apps whatever for example for us this was keyboard for these systems. Now one of the plus point of having Firefox OS was that we tried ourselves that we have we support a lot of languages lot of localist languages. For example, it has Bengali, Hindi and all these keyboards inside it. So, the problem was prediction part. Now every one of you who has an Android or iOS device once you start writing something in the keyboard and if it is not in English but you are using the English letters to write it anyhow a localist word.  So, that was our work that okay how actually can we keep on predicting them and keep actually learn. So, why does a multilingual framework actually matter? So, when we actually started this, this was not the case. We wanted to implement for a very specific looper that was initially in Bengali but when we actually started doing that present how it was implemented in prediction algorithm. So, we could predict words in Bengali or in another language but they were very limited there was no learning part involved. So, we wanted to do that once we started doing that we realized if we can make it modular it makes a lot of other languages and we can actually make it a framework. So, that's how it began. So, what do we have today which are in open source from where we can we can take inspirations. We have Swift, Swifty, Swipe, the Android keyboard, the AOSP and a lot of other in other platforms. Among all these the only source code we have available is of the AOSP keyboard and we kind of utilize some of it. How? So, how does Firefox fit in? So, the problems we actually faced was that this is like I told this is in JavaScript and it runs in Gaia. So, Gaia is a keep like UI interface which runs on top of Gecko which shows you everything in Firefox OS. So, we will go into how actually we did it and one of the goals of doing it was that the learning part has to be there and it has to be language agnostic. It is especially true for Indian or Indic languages where we have lots of more characters than the Roman alphabet. Now, starting that how does yeah how does the suggestion localize builds have worked. So, we started with first Bengali and then Hindi to actually see that how it actually performs. First not in a device just in a simulator then in a real device and then in low cost devices. So, it has its own problem we will go into it. So, what was the plan? So, first the keyboard has to learn new words then it has to show it in a prediction and it has to work with the previous prediction algorithms which are were already implemented. Now, how does it work right now? Like whoever you have the Firefox OS device right now this is already there. So, how does it work is that they have a word frequency list and from word frequency list it actually predicts your world. So, what is a word frequency list again? So, we have a list of words built from a corpus which are already available and it actually goes through a whole list sees which of the words are repeated most frequently in those documents in the whole corpus and assigns a weightage to that. So, that is the word frequency list which is already in a device whenever you type something if you are typing something like for example, you are typing welcome you type W ELC and then it realizes ok of the all the words I have this is the word which has the most high weightage which starts with W ELC. So, actually it does not work right now like this for welcome it will work like W ELC O M CO till this word it will actually get all the things and only the last two word it will suggest you. So, that is how it is implemented now the word frequency lists are mostly taken from AOSP. So, Android kind of works like this and they have their word frequency list ready. So, we actually utilized most of them some of them we had to build. So, this was there, but there was no way to actually make it learn these lists are pre-made with pre-processed it and they are into into the put into the device. So, there is no way I can actually make it learn the new world. So, plan so, since it has to integrate and we cannot just introduce a new whole new paradigm of how we can do it because that is just not possible it has to plug into this existing system. So, the first target was ok for Bengali create a word frequency list and then make that list learn. So, we created a word frequency list and from a purpose which was provided to us by fuel team in India and we started experimenting with that. So, the performance was an issue which we tackled later. So, that was first how we actually started from creating the word frequency list. So, this is how it actually is implemented right now in most of the devices you have till Firefox version 2.5 which is going to come or probably is already there you can flash your devices this is implemented in version 3 the one I am going to talk about is going to come. Right now what it has is a bloom filter. So, just previously this talk you have seen that when you type something in Google it predicts word right that is a very complex mechanism which is done in the back end. But if you want a very simple representation of what goes in this is how the prediction works. So, we have a word frequency list stored in a node we have a tree. So, it actually goes through the whole weighted tree and it goes to the whole word in the last two words checks which node it belongs to and which weightage it has and it just gives you the prediction that is how it works right now. Now how do we implement the change? So, we already have that implemented and we have made a Bengali word frequency list. What we do now is that that list is pre-processed and put into the device. We create an alternate ternary tree structure into the device which when you buy the device will be blank there will not be anything. When you keep typing new words the words which are not present into the previous dictionary it will keep added to it. Keep note that we don't check the words. So, whatever may be the word is a real word not word you are doing a typo doesn't matter whatever you do it gets added to the ternary tree structure and a weightage is added. So, we have a very simple way of doing the weightage for this section. Whenever the how many times you are using the same word again and again will automatically increase the weightage and the word you are using will be compared with the one we have already have in a word frequency list. For example, okay, so maybe someone doing a typo. So, when somebody types welcome that is already present in the dictionary. When somebody types will it is present in a dictionary, but when somebody wants to write wills fargo w e l s that is not part of the dictionary. So, first it learns okay this is a new word just put into the dictionary and it assigns a weightage to it. Next time somebody again tries to write wills it will go through the list and see that will has a more weightage to the wills. So, it still won't predict it unless there are no other words for prediction available, but if your user keeps writing the wills word again again that weightage will bump and it will trump the one which already is in the word frequency list previously. So, now it will come to the main prediction for you. So, that is how we started tackling the problem. Now, this kind of works and this works pretty well for new devices and everything and this also solves a new like new segment of problem we have which is this is specified to the user. So, every user will have a different result with it. So, if somebody and is a personalized because we are not taking the data back to any server and we are not training on it. So, what whenever you are using it your dictionary will be radically different from somebody else who is using it the one we are actually building here. So, let's see a demo of what we have till now. But before that let me show you how it works in a device right now. Actually, I will show it later. Yeah, I did that. This is exactly why we have all this. So, as you see I will try with a few words and see this word is not available. So, here is a one of the like contributors in a Mozilla Bangladesh I was trying with his name. So, as you can see the predictions are coming up here and you see the his name is not part of the prediction yet. The current was part of the prediction not the remaining part. Now, I will remove it in case some of you missed what is going on there will be more like a few more words still not there I tried with my name. This was simulated in computer. So, you see the typing is pretty slow. The catastrophic is not present. I try again till not present. Now, so this is how it is implemented right now. But there are very big varying problems in it. So, as you can see the alarm is right now coming. This is interesting Mozilla was not there Mozilla was there. But anyway, okay, you get the drift what is going on. Let me show how it is right now. That is more or less you can see it. So, that is a flame that is a Firefox OS device. Something you can see. I will try to write something the keyboard. I will try the same example may be interesting. Okay, Modi is now there. Anyway, so I, okay, let us try JSU that is probably not going to be there. But yeah, the JSU is not there as you can see it is nothing with JSU. But yeah, so it does not matter how many time I try here. It will actually not learn it. So, as you can see and this is running a fairly advanced version which I will show you. So, yeah, this is running a 2.5 pre-release, which is going to come, but it still has not been implemented there. Okay, so what we wanted to implement just as a implementation part, okay, this is how we learn and it goes on. Now the problems we actually come when it becomes a multi-lingual prediction system. These are the problems we faced, phonetic ambiguities, loopy phonetic nature of our languages and multiple input variants, so on. We will tackle a few of them and I will show you how do we actually tackle them. So, first phonetic mapping ambiguities, which starts with how many number of Roman letters we have and we can accommodate in a keyboard and how do we actually predict when it comes to like predicting new words which are not part of that. So, there are two ways actually we can write in any other language like Bengali or Hindi, which is either a fixed layout keyboard or a transliteration system like overall keyboard or something like that, where you just write using Roman letters, but it will produce you Hindi or Bengali word, which is actually applicable for most of the Indian languages. So, that actually creates a little problem. So, that's one of the example is that in Hindi actually, the later initiated D, we can write it, so with that can represent as B is all these, the, the, all these right. Now, we have to handle that other problem we face is loopy phonetic nature. What we write or what we actually lot of times try to write is not strictly phonetic. For example, Bershwin that is what we write as B-A-C-H-P-A-N not as B-A-C-H-A-P-A-N which would be the strictly phonetic nature. So, that is what we do and we cannot force users to do something specific. So, we have to compensate for that. So, our system also has to learn how to actually people are writing it and don't produce false predictions, which will completely throw off the system. The other one is that multiple input variant for the same word, we can use like different inputs and it should still produce the same output. For example, Rashtrapati, we can write it in all different ways like this. Rashtrapati, Rashtrapati-A-T-H-I and all these. These should produce a single output instead of multiple wrong outputs, because every wrong output throws off our system a bit. So, how do we deal with it? This is the work I am, this is still going on and some of them has been dealt with in implementation part, not all of them are dealt with in implementation part because then comes engineering problem, I'll just touch a little. First, how do we actually deal with like multiple input variants and those things? So, we start with alphabet mapping definition. For this, we use a very basic solution or you can say way. So, we start with regular expressions. So, we create rules for every Roman alphabet in set of rules that for every alphabet, we create a rule that this alphabet if you type it, then these are the output natures you can have. Then we actually go back and create with multiple alphabet like A, B on those things and we create from a corpus that, okay, these two letters can produce these kind of outputs. We create a mapping definition for all of them. Next, we create a training data. So, we already had a corpus which has all like we have like 11 GB corpus for Bengali and that has all the letters of words, whatever you use in literature. Now, we say it specifically on that the alphabet rules we used to create, we use those regular expression based rules on the corpus we have to come up with specific words snippets which generally are used, which we validate if they're real words or they're really used or something just generated by your rule. Since these are regular expression based rules, they can be altered or adapted for other languages as well. But you have to do the creation part. Once you have it, then we actually create different classifiers for every training data. For example, when you have different alphabet mappings, they each will produce a different set of outputs. You have a different classifier for each of them. And we also try to implement a portion where we actually check what are the nearby words so that we know that these are the words most likely to appear with these other words. Otherwise, these are not likely to appear there. So their weightage will be less. This is how we actually calculate the weightage and just to keep the actual training data which has like a 5 lakh unique Bengali words about took about like 30 to 40 minutes to train after the first two parts and that also will in a power PC cluster we have. So how do we actually that decision? I mean, how do we actually predict it after all these? So we use a very basic decision tree model to go through all the data and the new weightage. This part is not in the mobile device because it will actually kill the device. So the index model which was launched in India has like 128 MB of RAM. And if you implement this in JavaScript and if you run it there, you can guess what might happen. So that is an engineering problem that is still going on. So once we have it, this is this was a very interesting problem. When you type in Bengali or Hindi, sometimes you use English words in between. And those are the words. So for example, I'm going somewhere translates to Hindi, like I'm going to say the name of the place, I'm going to the J S home or my convention center page around. So this convention center word is not Hindi. But if it thinks that, okay, that is Hindi, it will try to come up with like convention C O N. So if it can try to come up with, okay, what what are the rules I have for C O N if it matches with any Hindi word like that. But we cannot just do that for English words to segregate the English words. What we do is that we just have a lookup table. Once the word frequency list we already have for English dictionary, we just look it up there. If the words are present there, it won't try to translate it. If it's not there, then only it will translate it. So that is how we are working with this. And so this was specifically for Firefox OS and in JavaScript mostly code is available in GitHub. It is not merged into modular central yet. So you can find it in my GitHub and a few others. So one of the generalization idea after we came up with that is that since this is a general framework, you can see how it goes on. You can try to improve on it or you can implement it in other things. For example, Wikimedia has recently come up, not recently, one year I think now, come up with an editor called Visual Editor which is based on Etherpad and Ether Editor actually and which is right now used for most of the Wiki edits and you can use your own language. It will automatically translated and those things. One of the ideas we had was like, yeah, if they are interested, you can just take this and implement it so that each writer gets their own personalized things available there which might or might not be a good idea. So those are the normal general ideas we had surrounding this. So this is mostly what I had. So this part I really need to do. So I am grateful for these people. So Mandar Mitra, Majumdar and Amandavadhai, they actually gave me access to their corpus data which was invaluable for actually creating the word frequency list and whatever we did. And in general that's from L2, C2, Shankar Shanmukhapadhai from Red Hat, Alonita Sharma who was in Wikimedia once I was doing it and right now in Twitter engineering. So they actually helped with a lot of ideas on how we can do that and obviously the Mozilla team for all the value inputs for this one. That's mostly what I have today and I'm open for questions and if you have any suggestion on how we can improve it or how it can be done better and if you can contribute, that's awesome. I think he has a question. Hello. You said that you collected data from 50,000 Bengali peoples or I'm not sure peoples or something. Words. Of 50,000. How much time it will take? Yeah how much time it like I have in India there are 18 languages, national languages you can see. So how much time it will take to manipulate all this data? So yeah first we actually did was in 5,000,000 words and it was part of a 11GB corpus which was provided to me. So it really depends. So this is a pre-processing part. We are not going to do it in mobile of course and so when I was doing it I had access to a pretty good system which was a cluster of like 32 CPUs and everything and it took me like an hour every time I wanted to pre-process it with new rules or something like that. So just pre-processing or for creating the word frequency list is not that hard if you want to just create a word frequency list and there are even codes available in python codes and they are like if you want to do use WECA or something you have codes available which you can do it. But if you want to implement the other parts for example creating the alphabetical rules they actually you have to manually do it and then implement in your system to actually do it. The processing part is actually not that much. So it takes time but with the like mostly the fairly powerful systems we have I had a cluster of PCs and it was quite okay. It was not that hard. But yeah for every language you have to actually build for example Kannada or any Tamil, all the languages you have to first build the alphabet mapping definition first. That is the hard part actually doing it and not every so for example I only knew about Bengali mostly Hindi I had heard from people otherwise you cannot actually create it unless you know about the language mostly. Yeah another question like you said you have defined the rule manually. So like there are 18 languages we have to hire 18 people from different languages who can code right. So that is one of the plus points we have. We really have a very good and very vibrant Mozilla community around India. I know in Bangalore in Hyderabad there are a lot of places and all the localization part of all the Mozilla products are done by volunteers. So you go to MDN, you go to any Firefox, all the localization part is available there is done by volunteers right. And so they already are doing that. You just need to sync up with somebody who can suggest okay this is how the words are gonna do and going on with somebody pair up with somebody who actually does the coding okay so this is how you can do it. Let's try that something like that. So that is possible. Thank you. Hi. You said you are using a word frequency list and a bloom filter. So are you assuming statistical independence between those words or are you considering a pentagram model language model or something like that? Oh no so that part actually would have been better if we wanted to do something else. But I was told so this we cannot touch what is already there that will actually break the old system. So what frequency list what is inside that is also a ternary search tree but implemented by google and so they have a specific way of how they did it right. And so what frequency list they just have created the list and created in a dict format item. Nothing in there that's like bunny data block we have. So we just take it we use it. But other part I mentioned where we actually create the ternary search tree that is in device and that is in the JavaScript. There are plus and minus points of it. I didn't actually touch the limitations. Limitations are when I create a ternary search tree in device or in JavaScript in memory performances are not impressive when I actually do the operations on it like look up creating new entries. So one of the problems we might have and we actually really need to see it so if a user keeps using a device for maybe one or two years with lot of new words we right now have no way to actually know how it will impact the device especially with a device we want to integrate in the RAM or something like that. Those are the things we need to take care of eventually. Yeah I had one more question. You were discussing about shwar deletion taking an example bachpan as an example. So do you have a JavaScript implementation of shwar deletion which even takes care of the example of dharkan? Dharkane? Oh, you said bachpan bachapana and then difference between bachapana and bachpan. So that is not in JavaScript. That was my pre-processing part. Oh is it? Yeah. So we actually have something and that was not implemented by us. Have you heard of omicron lab? Yes. So Avro keyboard, once they came up with the iBus and their JavaScript implementation they tried to do that and so I actually went back to and talked with them that okay so easier something we did and they have something which doesn't quite work. Okay. So we took a step back that we instead of trying to handle it in device I'm actually tuning them out through the fwb mapping use. Since I have contest-aware predictions which are going to be there which is not in the demo I showed which are going to be there so in that case we actually tune out a lot of things like that and so for example the bachpana yes a bachpana is taken care there but the rashapati part is not. Okay. Thanks. Hey. Hi. So you said you're happy to have contributors for this project that could you please elaborate on how people could get into this and that is a very good question. We have mailing list available I should have put it here. So we have mailing list available there are IFC channels in Mozilla so I worked this with BFH Isla whom I'm working with in the other projects so I will not work directly I'll call about this on other things so you can just sync up with me and there's somebody called Tim Midian who kind of use the whole keyboard part so yeah we can hook you up so there are that's not a problem just and about the GitHub repo you didn't would like to see that as well the GitHub repo where the code is oh the whole so what I showed today the demo every part that is already there if you go to my GitHub and just pass your via gai you have the whole code base and how to like implement in your device just so that is already there so the other processing parts they are also part but they are kind of fragmented so you actually need to know that okay so this is how I'm going to implement everything is in GitHub but they are not properly documented that okay somebody can go in okay this is how I'm going to do it so separate portions are there you can use them right now yeah thank you I have a question yeah yeah while demoing on your Firefox device when you started typing js-foo so it started suggesting usf something so what is the logic behind that ideally it should not suggest anything from j right yeah yeah so that's what I thought initially but remember one of the things I talked about how this is implemented right now so this portion is how it is right now implemented in the device if you see in the three even with the weightage it weights for the whole world in the last two characters for js-foo it weighted for js-foo then only the last double o it wanted to see that if there is a word so if apparently you couldn't find anything in the dictionary which starts with js-foo yeah ideally in that case it shouldn't have suggested anything but it started suggesting yes usf text something like that not starting with you right yeah yeah so that is currently a problem I think I haven't actually seen why it suggests to you this thing I will see but I just changed the whole portion of how it suggests to implement my part so yeah probably I'll see why it starts with you or not something with you thank you hi so are the weights solely decided on the frequency of the words or do you have some other algorithms like most recently used something of that sort um not most recently used no uh so again implementation what there is is based on word frequency list and the turn SS3 on the new one coming up again what I talked about after that which is we are like still processing the part and then putting in the right even there we are not considering the recent or how decent you have typed something which is we are obviously considering the frequency of how how frequently you type something obviously that is already considered but along with that how those words actually appear with other words in a different literature that is what we are taking from the purpose that if you are typing some word like her so what are the immediate words which come with her so uh like the context kind of thing which sometimes works sometimes doesn't give a good result but yeah that's what something we are and does it make sense if we have these words defined on different contacts for example if it's a sms amp so if we store it for different contacts because uh some words we specifically use for some contact and uh so is it even feasible to do that and helpful it all depends on uh once we generate the data on those how good or bad uh like tradition it gives for example the context one i told that kind of gives us a fit or miss like it's still 50 50 percent like not exactly it's like 50 40 false positives are 40 in that case that's not quite like good thing to actually implement that even we have electric so yeah so these are all we are trying that see how we can actually improve it without putting the processing in the mobile device itself and the other problem is we cannot for the privacy person of policy we cannot actually take whatever the user has actually typed in the device put it back which actually everyone other like every other thing does like swipe uh or um swift key they all have a like portion in the cloud if you enable it or by default enable what whatever you train it gets the data and it trains yes itself on it which we should not do actually thank you yeah hello I just saw uh it's really like to answer the question uh coming from there like uh why the specific word has existed when start with j and suggest it with go so it's not only the part of especially prediction it's in a part of auto solution as well so in keyboard layout j and u are quite especially close so when you start with any word with j it it especially give you a suggestion that they suppose not to be j they're supposed to be specifically you yeah so that was part of the fixed layout keyboard which was already implemented yeah hi uh hi great talk thanks so how do you test something like this very badly so I have a few people in for Bengali part at least I kind of reached out to the community ask them that how many of you are ready to test it like specific build for me may not be in your daily driver device but you at least the type everything every day from type something there and a real thing you type not just gibberish you type there and for that case I actually had it enabled for people to log it and send me the logs where I can train it so this uh I work last year till august and uh from august it was done I had like three months data for 30 people from Bangladesh community and that's why uh so there is another problem which I haven't talked about the corpus I used has both words from Bengali B N I N and Bengali B N B D and there are certain words which are not available in B N I N available in B N B D and vice versa so you have to be really careful to see how you train that part so it's kind of I think biased towards that you know that was my case thanks thank you thank you Ravima folks we break for


After a short year like last year going into the offseason everyone says right after Christmas time That's when you start to get the itch coming back once you get on the field you're competing and then offseason We'll get that competing factor. So once everyone's back there. It's it's a blast All this and you want to get a little more. I mean you can you can work to get more. Yeah Got her This is what I like. I like this shoulder open. So you see in the play everything right here and as I move Found out I was playing first base this year counsel and Stearns gave me a call At a time when they were thinking about signing someone and that person being Colton So they're just giving me a kind of a heads up the possible moving over there And then once it kind of finalized everything out that we were signing Colton They said I'll be heading over first and just want to give me a heads up. So I wasn't blindsided Right, I mean you're you're 40 feet off the back You never I don't need You can give your comfortable playing right here. You're doing as much as you ever do Any more than this Just don't get too close off.  Yeah, this is kind of a traditional like Okay, she got to get find the bag get to as quick as you can When you get changed to a different position, you never really know what to expect It's not it wasn't that I couldn't handle it or you know, I'm scared or you know I'm nervous anything like that was just more like oh, okay, you know, I'm playing first base now And we're still taking it pretty Not necessarily slow, but kind of just learning the basics getting the routine stuff down Figuring out positioning around the bag and how the field ground ball, you know, which which way you want to go and all that So I mean so far it's been hasn't been too bad at all. You know, I'm really enjoying it And it's a lot more than just catching a baseball. You know what a lot of people think There's a lot that goes into it and you know having pretty fun time doing it


Welcome back to Latin American Directions. My name is Nicola Susman, and today we have our guest, Jimena Medellin, a lecturer and researcher from SIDE in Mexico to talk about a very interesting, sensitive, and important issue, a very current issue, the case of Ayotzinapa, a situation that took place actually eight years ago on the 26th and 27th of September in Mexico. And well, let's have Jimena tell us about the case. Jimena, welcome. It's great to have you here and to get your insights from this case. Hello, Nicolas. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's a pleasure to be here to talk about, as you said, this very sensitive, sad, but relevant case in Mexico. Yes. So Jimena, I think let's start by providing some context to our audience if you could just briefly tell us what happened on the 26th and 27th of September, 2014, in this Ayotzinapa case. Exactly, when we talk about the Ayotzinapa case, we are actually referring to tax carried out, especially by local police forces, or starting with local police forces. Again, several people, it's not only the 43 students that we normally concentrate in, but there were so many other victims. So this happened during the night and the early hours of the 27th, the 26th and the 27th of September of 2014, as you said. And it was followed by the disappearance of these 43 students. The case of the facts actually took place in Iguala, which is a city of the southern state of Guerrero in Mexico. But we call it Ayotzinapa because the students, the 43 students were actually doing their training program to become teacher professionals, professionals or teachers for elementary school in Ayotzinapa, which is one of the small towns in Guerrero. So that is what we mean when we said Ayotzinapa. Again, we concentrate a lot on the disappearance of the 43 students, but there are more victims and that is always important to remember. Right, so let's talk about the students first and then how the events evolved after that. So as you say, the main victims after the attention has been directed to these 43 students, they were trying to get to Mexico if I understood correctly to participate in some demonstrations and then they had some clash with local authorities in collaboration perhaps or related to some illegal armed groups and what happened during this situation. Well, that's part of what is complicated around the case because we don't really know what happened. I mean, we know certain things as a fact. We know that they disappeared. We know, as you said, that they were in Iguala, that they took some buses, that they were trying to get somewhere using those trucks, but it's not perfectly clear where they were going or what they wanted. There are different versions of what happened or what were their intentions, but they took these buses, it was an illegal taking, let's just say, and part of the theories or one of the theories is that one of those buses had drugs inside of it and it was part of a network of drug trafficking towards the United States. That's at least one of the theories that had been put forward to try to explain the case or the violence that these students suffered, but they were distributed in five different buses and all of these transports were attacked by the local police, as you said, and some of the students, those that were not killed or badly harmed during the attack, were detained, illegally detained, and then everything points to them being hand over to one of the criminal groups, local criminal groups, and after that, everything gets more complicated because the first theory that the government put forward was that they were executed and then that their bodies were born in the Cajula dumping site, and after that theory was questioned by one of an independent group of international experts, that theory started to crumble and everything pointed out that the students were not really, the bodies of the students were not really burned in that specific site. So then the question became, so where are they? Are they still alive? What happened to their bodies if they were not burned in that specific site? And that has been part of the whole saga that we are still trying to discover, not we as a society, but especially their families. Right, right. And then my question would be, why did this become such an important case, not only for the society, I think it is shocking enough to become of social concern, but for the government, and don't take me wrong in this, but coming from countries that undergo severe violence, these cases are not uncommon, right? So why this one was so concerning for the government? It's great that you point that out because we need to remember that in Mexico, we have at this point, more than 100,000 people who are considered dispute. Either, I mean, not found, that's the phrase that the government wants to use because it's not clear if all of those people have been victims of a forced disappearance, or if they just left, and no one knows they were about, or if they were victims of any other crime. So we are only talking about people who are missing or are not really, or haven't been found, but we have over 100,000 people in that situation. So exactly, I mean, what you point is, it's a very, it's a breaking point, I would say in the public debate around the violence in Mexico. Up to that point, the government had to be very skillful, I would say, to say that all the victims of the violence that we have been experiencing, especially since 2007, were part of normal violence among criminal groups. So they had created this narrative that as long as you were a good citizen, that you behave well, that you were not involved in drug trafficking, no one will, nothing will happen to you, or would happen to you. And Ayotzinapa, it's a breaking point for that narrative. Ayotzinapa, it was very, very early, it became clear that these students have nothing to do with drug trafficking. I mean, in the very, very early stages, like I would say the next day, the government tried to start leaking that idea in the society, but the families and the NGOs that were embracing the families very quickly, were very skillful to dismount or to reverse that narrative. So the government very quickly had to accept that the students had nothing to do with the drug trafficking, that they were really victims of a senseless attack and the public pressure grew very fast. So within a couple of days, we had people on the streets demanding justice and demanding more explanation and that just grew within the next months. And that put a lot of pressure in the Mexican government. So the Mexican government wanted an answer and wanted it very fast to try to bring down all the protest and not to let these grow out of control. Right, right. And just to set the record clear, I know you don't have the answer and I know there are many hypotheses. So we mentioned one hypothesis is that they got caught up in this drug dealing scheme and one of the bosses was involved and they were in the crossfire, but there's also, I know a hypothesis that they were becoming uncomfortable for the local government, right? Because they were demonstrating, they were calling about things that were not properly done at the local level and perhaps that is one of the other reasons why they were disappeared. What do you think about that? Do you think it's believable? Do you think it's a combination of everything? I mean, it's truly, truly difficult at this point to say one way or another. Yeah, there was some part of the one, some of the explanations that were given at some point is that they were gonna go to protest against, especially the wife of the local official, the Presidente Municipal, the head of the county, let's just say, that she was gonna give a speech and explain about some of the achievements of the government that they wanted to protest against it. It sounds more and more unlikely that that is the main explanation. And that became more and more unlikely once we came to realize the extent of the number of, not only people that participated in this attack, but the level, the involvement of different corporations, either federal, state or local corporations, police forces, and even the military, which was one of the biggest red flags that not very early, but at some point came into the light. Just protesting against the local official, not even the official himself, but the wife of a local official turns very difficult to explain why the military would get involved in this, in attacking or covering up the attack of the students, because that is also, I mean, at this point, in the last couple of weeks, we have learned some new information that the new government, that the President Andres Manuel López Abrador Administration has been bringing to light. And now there is this possibility that the military was very much involved since the disappearance, since the very early hours, and actually that part of the students, some of the students were under the control of the military since the beginning, and that those students actually survived for a few days, that they were not killed in the first day as the rest of them were. And again, just the idea of some students, a group of students protesting against some local authorities, do not explain the level of involvement of so many different corporations, institutions, and bodies. Right, right, and that's a perfect segue for my next question, right? We know Mexico is a federal state, and it operates in the federal and the local level, the state level, the municipal level. At what points does this become an issue of interest for the federal government and for federal authorities? I know there's recent information that changes everything that has been discussed over the last years, but for me, it's interesting. For me, the question is, this is something that seems local, and all of a sudden it becomes a national case, a federal case with involvement from federal actors, from all nature, right, the military, but also the prosecution, the attorney general, the national government even. So before moving on to the role of these authorities, when does this become a national, a federal issue, and not just a local or state or state situation? That happened very early in the case. It was actually, I think, two or three weeks after the facts that the federal prosecutor, the general attorney, actually took over the case. Again, that happened very fast, and it was basically due to, or at least that's what we believe, or that's what it's been assumed, that that happened because of the public pressure that was building up and the presidency wanted it to end as fast as they could. So the federal prosecution takes over the case, basically takes it from the hands of the local prosecution, the state prosecutor, the Guerrero prosecutor, and a few months after that, the general attorney comes out on this press conference to announce the historical truth of the Ayochi Napa case, which has become almost like a slogan for the fight against impunity in Mexico. La verdad histórica has become like a breaking point where basically the general attorney at that point says, this is the real truth, this is what we accept as truth, this is what happens, and there is nothing else to discuss. And that's it. And again, at that point, we already had the representatives of the families have already requested some cautionary measures from the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights. And because of those, of that request, the Mexican government had to accept the creation of the international group of expert, independent experts. I'm sorry, I was thinking about the name in Spanish. Jai, that's how it became to be known in Mexico. So Jai had already been agreed, the creation of Jai had already been agreed. The specific people that at the end was part of Jai, I think were not appointed yet, but once the names were revealed, that was actually a great day, I think for many of the people that work in human rights in Mexico, because once we saw the people who were actually gonna be part of Jai, we recovered the hope. We said, okay, there is some hope to actually find the truth because there were people with persons with a lot of great reputation, with a lot of fantastic backgrounds in fights against immunity in different countries. And once Jai started to actually investigate the case, a lot of doubts started to come out. And that's where this historical truth started to be questioned left and right, and the families became very, very suspicious about everything that the government was putting forward. Right, so this is very interesting, right? So we have some sort of labeling by the prosecution say, this is the truth, right? Even using a very strong legal term called historical truth that actually is like a closing reparations term for victims, just to say, this is what happened and we will be over with this case, we already solved it, right? But then the pressure- Let me say even worse, it's probably something that lawyers have trained to never said. We are always trained to say, this is the legal truth, but never talk about historical truth because you can never guarantee that with the evidence that you have. You can actually, you can say that that is what has been proven, but you are never to absolutely assure that that is the truth and the full truth of nothing but the truth. Absolutely, absolutely. And then we have the family saying, no, this isn't happened, no, the citizenship also, this isn't happening. So I want to stop for a minute and rewind our movie a bit and ask you what happened with the families, with the civil society since the beginning because I believe it's the key to unraveling this case, right? And not allowing it to stay as the government initially want. So in the aftermath of the situation, what happened and how did civil society and the families organize themselves? Well, first to call for the HEA establishment and then to move the case and keep it alive eight years later, right? Another part of the case which has somehow been, I would say a little bit controversial. Let me say that because both the group of families and probably or especially the NGOs who have been representing the families have created this very tight group that is almost impossible to penetrate. They have been very jealous about not allowing, and I mean, not allowing many people to get their hands on the case. There are different opinions about this strategy as it normally happens with such a public case and such a public atrocity. Some people say that there have been extremely cautions and that they should be more willing to cooperate with other NGOs and with other organizations and movements in Mexico to try to put forward a more comprehensive agenda of fight against impunity because obviously they have almost become one of the most known or recognizable cases and faces that signifies the process of violence in Mexico. So for many people, if the families and their representatives agree to join forces with other movements and with other cases that would mean a lot for the fight against impunity and that will strengthen a more common agenda. Right. I mean, I'm not one, no one to judge either way. I think that's something that really belongs to the victims and how they want to organize the way that they explain their cases, the way that they communicate with society, the legal strategies. But at some point, I would say that I have to, at least I understand what they have done it because many cases, it's had been the experience that many cases go from one hand to another and they changed so many strategies and they become so politicized that the true goals and the interest of the victims evaporate through all these process, even with the best intentions of different organizations that get involved in the case. Right. So they have kept this very, very tight again group with a very clear strategy, I think, they have been very willing to cooperate with the government, which is another thing that has been criticized. Some different actors have expressed the opinion that they should be more demanding towards the government that they should not agree to everything, especially with this new administration that is a different one from the one that was in power when the attacks happened. I think there was a lot of trust that this new administration will have a different take on the case and that there was real political will to advance the investigations and to find the truth. So for example, they agreed to participate in a presidential commission that was tasked with investigating the case. And at the same time, there was an special prosecutor appointed to carry out the criminal investigations. What has happened in the last couple of days and we are really talking in the last couple of days, actually today we had the breaking news that the special prosecutor just resigned from his post was that the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, decided to basically trust more on what the presidential commission has done and not the special prosecutor. And that is a very complicated scenario because the special prosecutor had created a very, very well, I would say well and carefully with the families. There was a lot of trust between the special prosecutor and the families. There was obviously trust between the commission and the families, but the families have recognized that the special prosecutor was finally taking clear steps to not only find the truth, but find those responsible for the attacks and not only those that had materially carried out the attacks, but those who were in other positions of powers that could be involved or have participated in different ways in these attacks and the follow-up disappearance, which is a crucial part of it as well. But apparently there is some disagreement between the presidential commission and the special prosecutor or who should actually be responsible or named responsible for or accused to carry out these attacks. And especially some members of the army was part of the apparently big disagreement between the presidential commission and the, which is more sort of an inquiry commission or a truth commission, but is not a prosecutor. Right, right. Yeah, and I think you did have a really good summary of the current situation, right? So I would say that it's despite how bad the case is, it has been a bittersweet experience, right? A very bad experience at the beginning, right? With the government trying to set up a cover-up that was clearly discredited by the HEA and then supported by the other investigations, but also new breakthroughs with the inquiry commission and then with the special prosecutor. But then again at this moment, just in the last days, we see a drawback, right? With the resignation of the special prosecutor, who is the one, as you say, that eventually could lead into convictions, right? Which is perhaps one of just the families of the victims want. So maybe my last question and it would be, what is your anticipation of what could happen? And maybe a short takeaway, just to close the show, I could ask you questions for hours about this case. But just to keep our audience with a takeaway, so they keep an eye on this case and we see how it develops because it has been eight years, it has been an active case during eight years, which is surprising to some degree for what we see in our region. And also, yeah, just to keep it around, I think it's very important for the community, both in Mexico and the rest of the region, to keep an eye on it so we can have some justice for this sort of violations. I mean, I think we will keep seeing or keep witnessing these attempts to continue or move forward with the criminal cases. I don't think the criminal cases are over, but at the same time, I think they're losing, the general attorney, the office of the general attorney is losing a key element of that was gonna, if not guaranteed, but to improve the odds of success in the actual trials. I think the resignation of the special prosecutor really puts everything at risk, everything that has been gained through the criminal investigation, it's my opinion that it's seriously at risk and we might see everything crumble again. We can still have the presidential commission, but again, that is more of a fact-finding condition. It's not criminal investigation, but now the office of the general attorney is gonna basically try to support everything in the criminal trial based on the work of the presidential commission. And I think that's gonna lead to a lot of problems, a few process and probably illegality on some of the, or questioning the legality of some of the evidence and so on and so forth. So I think everything is gonna get more complicated. And all of this new entanglement has basically happened because our president, Andres Manuel López Obrador, I would still want to believe with the best intentions is trying to move forward the case, but with very little respect of the process and the institutions that should be in charge of these type of cases. He wants to be in control. He wants his commission, the presidential commission to be the leading voice on all of this process. And we need to understand that that is not the place of a fact-finding commission. A fact-finding commission has a place and it can be very important to unveil some of the truth, to unveil some of the facts that might not come to life in a criminal process. But the criminal process has specific rules and we need to observe and respect the process if we really want to create a new scenario of justice in Mexico. And again, as you said, Nicolas, this is one case, this is 43 people that are absolutely important as every human being is, but we have over 100,000 people who are still missing in Mexico. If every single investigation is gonna take us more than eight years, we're never gonna find the truth and we're never gonna find justice. We need to move forward to create, to establish new bodies, probably extraordinary bodies. Probably we need to start talking about transitional justice teams to really, really respond to the level and the amount of atrocities that have been committed in Mexico during the past 10, 15 years. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, we'll keep an eye on the case. Kim and Amadeen, thank you so much. And to our audience, thank you for viewing us. This was Latin American Directions. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. 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