I. Five Women, Eleven Gallows

On 4 July 1946, thousands of people gathered at Biskupia Górka, a hill in the Polish city of Gdańsk, to witness an extraordinary public execution.

Eleven condemned prisoners were brought to the gallows. Five of them were women: Elisabeth Becker, Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, Wanda Klaff, Gerda Steinhoff and Ewa Paradies.

They had served as guards in the Stutthof concentration camp system, established by Nazi Germany near Gdańsk. They had been tried and convicted for their participation in crimes committed against prisoners. Among those prisoners were women who had been subjected to humiliation, violence, forced labour and systematic degradation.

The condemned women were not the architects of National Socialism. They had not developed its racial theories, designed its administrative machinery or determined the strategic objectives of the Third Reich. They were participants in an institutional system whose ideology and practices had already defined certain human beings as less deserving of protection, dignity and, ultimately, life.

On that July afternoon, the condemned prisoners stood on vehicles beneath the gallows. The vehicles were driven away, leaving them suspended before the assembled crowd.

The executions were themselves a disturbing spectacle of public punishment. Yet what interests me is not the mechanics of the hanging, nor the satisfaction that some spectators may have derived from witnessing the punishment of Nazi perpetrators.

It is a question about what had happened before.

How had these women come to participate in an institution in which the suffering of other women had become an ordinary feature of organisational life?

Their sex had not prevented them from participating in brutality against other women. Whatever expectations society might attach to female empathy or solidarity, those expectations had not prevailed over the roles, hierarchies and practices of the concentration camp system.

This does not establish that women are naturally cruel, or that women in positions of authority are less compassionate than men. It establishes something more uncomfortable: membership of a particular social category does not guarantee moral solidarity with other members of that category.

Institutional allegiance can prevail over it.

The responsibility of the Stutthof guards was individual. But their conduct took place within a system that had already developed an elaborate language for distinguishing between those entitled to protection and those whom the institution was authorised to degrade.
That language did not begin with the gas chambers, executions or physical violence.
It began with classifications.

II. When Classification Becomes a Moral Permission

Modern psychology provides several frameworks for understanding how people participate in conduct that would otherwise conflict with ordinary moral expectations.

Albert Bandura's concept of moral disengagement describes mechanisms through which individuals can disconnect their conduct from the moral standards by which they would ordinarily judge themselves. Harmful actions may be justified through appeals to authority, responsibility may be displaced onto superiors, and victims may be described in ways that diminish their perceived humanity.

Organisational research offers another useful concept: normalisation of deviance. Practices that should initially appear unacceptable can become routine when they are repeatedly tolerated, rationalised or rewarded.

Group conformity supplies a third element. People do not make moral decisions in isolation. They observe the behaviour of colleagues, interpret organisational expectations and adapt to what their environment treats as normal.

None of these theories excuses the crimes of Nazi perpetrators, and none can establish the private psychological motives of the five women executed in Gdańsk.

They do, however, help explain a broader institutional danger.

An organisation does not necessarily need every member to be independently committed to cruelty. It may be enough for the organisation to establish categories of people, attach expectations to those categories, and make conformity with those expectations part of ordinary professional behaviour.

The decisive transformation occurs when a description ceases to be merely descriptive.
A label becomes a reason for differential treatment. Differential treatment becomes a procedure. Procedure becomes routine. And routine begins to acquire the appearance of legitimacy.

This is why I regard institutional labelling as a serious problem in its own right.

I do not accept the proposition that an organisation may casually tolerate its representatives attaching unverified, degrading or identity-based labels to other human beings, provided the organisation has not yet taken any consequential action.

History has given us ample reason to distrust that proposition.

Nazi Germany did not begin with the industrialised murder of millions of people. Its persecution developed through ideology, propaganda, legal exclusions, administrative classifications, dispossession and escalating violence. The process was neither automatic nor inevitable, and it depended upon deliberate political choices and individual participation.

But it demonstrated how catastrophically dangerous a system of state-sanctioned categorisation can become when institutions abandon the principle that individuals must be judged through evidence, lawful authority and their own conduct rather than through an imposed identity.

I am not suggesting that contemporary administrative disputes are equivalent to the Holocaust. They are not.

I am suggesting that the historical experience gives us an enduring reason to examine the earliest stages of institutional dehumanisation, rather than waiting until their consequences become extreme.

That brings me to a considerably more mundane activity: rebuilding my website.

III. The Visible Woman and the Invisible Woman

During the past month, following an unexpected wave of international media coverage, I decided to reconstruct my website.

I approached the exercise as an engineer.

The initial problem appeared relatively straightforward. I had accumulated several professional and creative identities, and I needed a coherent information architecture through which visitors could navigate them.

I divided the website into two principal areas: Visible Woman and Invisible Woman.

The Visible Woman was comparatively easy to organise. She is a lawyer whose professional work began in company and commercial law and has increasingly extended into public law. She works with artificial intelligence, develops technical skills, writes, teaches and creates digital content.

These identities are not mysterious. They are the result of qualifications, choices, work, intellectual interests and professional development. They can be described, documented and revised by the person who actually lives them.

The Invisible Woman presented a more complicated architectural problem.

Over the preceding period, I had discovered that several institutions appeared to possess their own descriptions of me, some of which had acquired administrative or operational significance.
These descriptions had not been created by me. Some had not been communicated to me. Others emerged only through litigation, complaints, disclosure requests or the reconstruction of events from official documents.

The contrast interested me.

In one part of my website, I was describing the identities I had constructed for myself.
In the other, I was attempting to understand the identities that institutions had constructed for me.

As someone interested in legal technology and documentary analysis, I decided to treat this as a research problem.

I asked my AI models to examine the available documentary record, extract the terminology used about me, identify the institutions employing that terminology and reconstruct, wherever the evidence permitted, the chronology through which particular descriptions acquired administrative significance.

The exercise was not intended to establish my innocence of an allegation. Nor was it intended to prove that every institutional decision was unlawful.

I wanted to understand the architecture.

Who had described me in a particular way?
Where had the description originated?
Was it a fact, an allegation, an inference, a security assessment or merely somebody's opinion?
Had it been independently verified?
And at what point, if any, had that description become a basis for a decision?

The resulting analysis suggested two related problems.

The first concerned the transformation of labels into administrative action.

The second concerned the transformation of a human being from the object of institutional decisions into a participant capable of challenging them.

IV. The Label Factory

My documentary analysis covered several institutional environments: NATO and MARCOM, the Spanish Ministry of Defence, the UK Ministry of Defence, the Royal Air Force Police and Hertfordshire Police, together with the relevant complaints and oversight bodies.

The models identified different forms of classification across those environments.

In the Spanish military and NATO-related materials, the language was frequently relational. My significance appeared to derive primarily from my association with a Spanish naval officer and from biographical characteristics, including my origins.

In British Ministry of Defence materials, the position was more complicated. There were references to the security investigation involving my former partner, to my place of birth and to the legal or administrative basis of my access to a military establishment.

In the police and complaints materials, additional descriptions appeared, relating to my conduct, my presence at the site, alleged investigation status and the legal characterisation of an incident.

These are not interchangeable categories.

A person's birthplace is a biographical fact.
A personal relationship is an association.
An allegation of misconduct requires evidence.
A security assessment requires an appropriate decision-making framework.
A legal status depends upon applicable law.

Treating them as though they were the same thing creates the risk that one form of information will acquire a significance it was never capable of supporting.

My research therefore concentrated on the transitions.

A social characterisation may become a security concern. A security concern may be communicated between organisations. An organisation may then make its own administrative decision. That decision may be recorded in a system and subsequently acted upon by personnel who have no direct knowledge of the information from which it originated.

At each transition, there should be questions about accuracy, authority, necessity and responsibility.

The fact that one institution possesses information does not establish that another institution is entitled to adopt it uncritically.

Nor does the existence of an administrative record prove that the information underlying it is correct.

One of the most important distinctions in my research was between transmission and validation.
If an institution receives an adverse characterisation from another organisation and independently checks the facts before making a lawful decision, that is one situation.

If it receives a characterisation, gives it operational effect without adequate verification and later defends the resulting decision through a different explanation, that is quite another.

My documents raise questions about which process occurred. They do not yet establish every step in the information chain.

But that uncertainty is precisely why I have been asking for explanations.

V. The Decision Nobody Told Me About

The clearest illustration comes from the British military access system.

The UK Ministry of Defence's Summary Grounds of Resistance, filed in November 2025 in my first judicial review, records that an instruction was made that I should not be permitted escorted entry to the Northwood site.

I was not informed of that restriction when it was created.

On 26 August 2025, I attended the Northwood Visitor Centre in connection with matters involving my former partner. The restriction was enforced, RAF Police became involved, and Hertfordshire Police subsequently attended.

I had not arrived knowing that a claimant-specific administrative restriction existed against my name.

That is the central point.

My objection is not simply that I was refused access to a military establishment. I understand perfectly well that military installations have access-control systems and that admission is not an unconditional entitlement.

My objection begins earlier.

I object to institutions attaching labels to people, particularly labels based on identity, origin, association or unverified assumptions. I regard the casual institutional tolerance of such practices as unacceptable.

I object even more strongly when those labels acquire operational significance: when decisions are made, information is entered into systems, restrictions are imposed and officials take action against the individual concerned without that individual even being notified that the decision exists.

In my case, the Ministry of Defence's subsequent legal position expressly denied that any UK decision-maker had determined me to be a threat to national security. Yet the same pleading stated that my place of birth was relevant to the circumstances being considered.

It also described my permission to enter the establishment as parasitic upon my former partner's access.

The latter is a legal characterisation of derivative access, not necessarily a statement about my personal worth. Nevertheless, its appearance alongside an individual restriction and references to my origins raises questions that I consider legitimate.

What exactly was the original decision?
Who made it?
Which facts were verified?
Which considerations were material?
Was the restriction independently justified?
Why was I not notified?
What mechanism existed for me to challenge it?

Those questions are not answered merely by explaining that a military base has the power to control entry.

They concern the creation, basis and implementation of a particular decision about a particular person.

I did not go to court because I expected unrestricted access to Northwood.

I went to court because I wanted an accountable explanation of why institutions had considered themselves entitled to classify me, make decisions affecting me and implement those decisions without my knowledge.

I am not asking them to replace an unpleasant label with a more flattering one.

I am challenging the entitlement to impose and operationalise the label in the first place.

VI. From Object to Subject — Almost

The second part of my AI-assisted research concerned language.

I asked the models to compare institutional communications before and after formal complaints and litigation, paying particular attention to agency, acknowledgement, minimisation, attribution and the treatment of my actual questions.

The results were revealing, although not entirely in the way I had expected.

The British Ministry of Defence's language became increasingly formal as proceedings developed. There were pleadings, procedural correspondence, legal arguments, requests for extensions and responses from government lawyers.

The administrative subject of an internal access restriction had become a claimant in legal proceedings.

But formal recognition as a claimant is not the same thing as substantive engagement with the questions that claimant has raised.

My research identified a recurring phenomenon that I call issue substitution.

A person asks one question. An institution answers another, related question, often one that fits more comfortably within its existing procedures or legal defence.

For example, I challenge the creation of a personal access restriction without notification or reasons. The response concentrates on whether I possess an automatic right to enter a military establishment.

I ask about the legal powers used during a particular encounter outside a visitor centre. The discussion turns to whether I was entitled to remain on Ministry of Defence property.

I question information allegedly communicated to civilian police about my investigation status. The response concentrates on the general propriety of the officers' conduct or the boundaries of a complaints procedure.

In each example, the institutional answer may address a relevant legal issue. But relevance is not the same thing as responsiveness.

The central question is whether the institution has actually addressed the issue raised, or substituted another issue for it.

There is a further distinction that matters to me as a lawyer.

I do not regard the right to ask questions as something an institution graciously grants. Where a person has statutory, procedural or public-law rights to seek reasons, challenge a decision or pursue a complaint, the competent authority must deal with those rights according to the applicable legal framework.

That does not mean every institution must answer every question in precisely the form requested, irrespective of jurisdiction, privilege, confidentiality or statutory exemptions.
It does mean that an authority cannot resolve a properly raised issue simply by pretending that a different question was asked.

And I am not obliged to accept an answer to a substituted question as an answer to mine.
This distinction is particularly important in the complaints process.

The Service Police Complaints Commissioner recognised my standing as a complainant and conducted a formal review. Yet I dispute several aspects of the way my original representations were characterised, including statements attributed to me about the purposes of my visit and the legal significance of my citizenship and Power of Attorney.

In my view, some of those characterisations altered the substance of what I had actually argued.

That dispute is now itself part of judicial review proceedings.

The wider lesson from the linguistic experiment is not that litigation automatically transforms institutional culture. It does not.

It is that litigation can change the procedural relationship between the institution and the individual while leaving deeper questions about institutional listening unresolved.

The person has become a formal participant.

Whether the institution has begun to engage with that person's actual position is a separate question.

VII. The Insider and the Outsider

During the same period, my former partner, Commander Laureano Pastor Veiga of the Spanish Navy, reappeared in my life.

We had some conversations. They prompted me to reconsider not only our relationship but also the different positions from which we had experienced the institutional events surrounding it.

He belonged to the Spanish military system. He had a professional identity within it, obligations to it and expectations arising from his service.

He has also challenged decisions made by that system through legal processes in Spain.

My position was fundamentally different.

I had never belonged to the Spanish military. When my former partner applied for me to become a member of the Spanish military community, as least within the administrative boundaries, his application was simply ignored. I now understand he is blamed by the same institution who ignored his duly submitted request for not doing it at all. His word against the Ministry's. But at per today, there is no evidence that I was ever enlisted, accepted its command structure or entered into a professional relationship with its Ministry of Defence, Ministeria de Defensa or NATO, or had any administrative status able to be described as "parasitic" to my former's partner's status at all, as stated by my own British Ministry of Defence, which decided to apply a personal specific restriction against me and still refusing to explain why.

His dispute, as I understand it, concerns how an institution treated one of its own officers.

Mine concerns the grounds upon which that institution, and other institutions interacting with it, considered themselves entitled to make consequential assessments and decisions about a civilian outsider.

An insider may ask why the organisation failed to treat him in accordance with the rules, obligations and expectations governing its members.

An outsider may ask a more fundamental question: by what authority did the organisation act upon her at all?

These positions are not mutually exclusive in law, but they create very different perspectives on institutional power.

Our recent conversations also made me reconsider the personal dimension of this distinction.
I began to question whether I had been understood as an independent person with my own intentions, choices and rights, or primarily through the role I occupied in somebody else's professional and personal world.

That is my interpretation of our interactions, not a claim to know his private thoughts.

But the distinction between object and subject suddenly seemed to extend beyond administrative law.

An object is described, assessed, positioned and acted upon by others.

A subject speaks, decides, refuses, challenges and defines the meaning of her own actions.

A relationship can contain affection and still reproduce an unequal distribution of agency. An institution can employ respectful language and still fail to engage with the person whose life its decisions affect.

In both cases, the essential question is whether the other person is recognised as an independent source of intention and judgement.

For me, that recognition is not negotiable.

VIII. The Woman at the Top

There is another historical paradox worth considering.

Before Nazi Germany became synonymous with dictatorship, racial persecution and industrialised murder, Germany had been one of the great intellectual centres of the modern world.

German philosophy had profoundly shaped European thought. German universities had been international centres of scholarship. German scientists, mathematicians, physicians, musicians and writers had made extraordinary contributions to human knowledge and culture.

That intellectual inheritance did not prevent Germany's descent into National Socialism.

Scientific accomplishment did not guarantee moral judgement. Philosophical sophistication did not guarantee resistance to authoritarianism. Cultural prestige did not make institutions immune to political conformity, antisemitism or participation in persecution.

Indeed, the Nazi state was able to draw upon the professional expertise of educated people, including administrators, lawyers, physicians and scientists.

The lesson is not that education and culture are worthless. It is that neither provides an automatic safeguard against institutional moral failure.

The same distinction applies to representation.

The five women executed in Gdańsk had participated in crimes against prisoners, including women. Their sex did not prevent their participation in the system.

Today, the Spanish Ministry of Defence is headed by a woman, Margarita Robles.

I find that fact interesting, but not reassuring in itself.

A woman occupying the highest political office in a ministry does not establish that the ministry's culture is sensitive to the autonomy, dignity or rights of other women.

Nor does female leadership establish that decisions made by subordinate officials are lawful, properly evidenced or subject to effective accountability.

Robles is not personally responsible for every action taken by every officer, security official or administrator within the Spanish defence establishment. Such responsibility cannot simply be presumed.

But a minister is politically accountable for the department she leads, and questions about institutional culture, safeguards and administrative practice are legitimate questions for its leadership.

I have raised questions with Spanish authorities about the treatment of my identity, my relationship and the decisions that affected me. I remain dissatisfied with the explanations and avenues of redress available to me. I raised questions before Margarita Robles as early as September 2025. I received a total dismissal of my concerns due to "lack of evidence".

Here we go - September 2026 and "Red Sparrow" label admission on the international level, Señora Robles.

This is the culture you have probably inherited, that's fine. But it was your decision not to challenge it.

That is my position, and I intend to continue pursuing those questions.

What interests me is not the biological sex of the minister. It is the danger of confusing representation with institutional virtue.

An institution does not become just because it is led by a woman, any more than it becomes just because it employs highly educated people, possesses sophisticated procedures or speaks in the polished language of administrative law.

The test is what it permits its representatives to do, what it requires them to justify, and how it responds when someone challenges their authority.

And that returns us to the women of Stutthof.

Their crimes cannot be reduced to their gender, nor explained away by their institutional roles. They were responsible for their conduct. But their history reminds us that identity, education, professional position and institutional belonging are no substitutes for individual moral responsibility.

The same principle should inform our scrutiny of institutions today, even though the nature and gravity of contemporary disputes may be entirely different.

IX. I Am Not Your Labels

When I began rebuilding my website, I thought I was solving a problem of digital architecture.
I was deciding how to present several professional and creative identities within a coherent structure.

Instead, I found myself investigating a different kind of architecture: the systems through which institutions describe people, transform descriptions into administrative decisions, and defend those decisions when challenged.

The first part of the exercise was lexical. I examined words and categories.

The second was procedural. I examined how those categories appeared in documents, records and decisions.

The third was relational. I examined the language institutions used when I asked them to explain themselves.

What emerged was not a final verdict on every dispute. My legal proceedings remain separate, and disputed facts must be determined through appropriate processes.

What emerged was a clearer understanding of my own position.

I object to institutional labelling. I regard the uncritical use of identity-based assumptions and unsupported characterisations as dangerous, particularly when they are tolerated within organisations possessing coercive or administrative power.

I object to those labels being transformed into decisions that affect people's lives.

I object to those decisions being implemented without notification, where notice and an opportunity to respond are required or where their absence demands proper justification.
And I object when, after discovering that such a decision exists, the person affected is confronted with an institutional explanation that answers a question she never asked.

My litigation is not an expression of wounded pride because I was denied a privilege.

It is an attempt to establish who made decisions about me, what information was used, what legal authority was exercised, what procedural safeguards existed and why I was not given an effective opportunity to challenge the process before its consequences were imposed.

This is also why I distinguish so carefully between being an object and being a subject.
I do not need a ministry, a military command, a police force or a regulator to confer personhood upon me. My legal personality and fundamental dignity do not depend on institutional approval.

What I demand is that institutions recognise the consequences of that fact in the way they exercise power.

I have no objection to being described accurately in an administrative record where there is a lawful and legitimate reason for doing so.

I have every objection to being reduced to an imposed identity that becomes a substitute for evidence, individual assessment and accountable decision-making.

And I have an even stronger objection to discovering that institutions have acted upon that identity before I was ever told it existed.

Eighty years ago, the executions in Gdańsk marked the punishment of individuals who had participated in one of history's most brutal institutional systems.

Their story belongs to its own historical and moral context. It should never be trivialised by treating ordinary administrative injustice as equivalent to Nazi persecution.

But history is not useful only when present events reproduce past atrocities. It is also useful when it teaches us to recognise dangerous habits of institutional thought before they become normal.

The willingness to reduce a person to a category is one such habit.

The willingness to treat that category as sufficient justification for action is another.

And the willingness to defend the resulting action without examining the original classification may allow the process to perpetuate itself.

I began this essay with five women who had participated in an institution that classified human beings before deciding how they could be treated.

I end it with a question addressed to the institutions of my own time.

Who decided who I was, by what authority, on what evidence, and why was I the last person to know?

I am not asking you to tell me who I am.

I am asking you to explain why you believed you had the authority to decide — and to act on that decision without even telling me.

And today's song is Mujer. I wrote it in Spanish about a woman, who is a subject, not an object. Sung by a Spanish man, who respects, loves and protects a Woman.