September 2, 2010 by Adam Wagner
Yesterday, Sharon Shoesmith was given permission to appeal in the judicial review of her dismissal by Haringey council as a result of the Baby Peter scandal. The case itself is complex and fascinating, but the detail should not overshadow the open and forward-thinking way in which the case has been dealt with.
The case was always likely to be full of controversy, complexity as well as salacious detail. This is not in itself remarkable; public law is often the cutting edge of social and political issues. What is unusual is the manner in which Mr Justice Foskett (full disclosure: he is a former member of my chambers) approached his task by not just in looking inwards to the legal system, but also outwards to the general public.
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Posted in Art. 10 | Freedom of Expression, In the news, Judges and Juries | Tagged Sharon Shoesmith | 1 Comment »
September 2, 2010 by Adam Wagner
Some of this week’s human rights news, in bite-size form. The full list of our links can be found on the right sidebar or here:
FCO decision on human rights report ‘puts businesses at risk’ – The Law Gazette: The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has threatened to cut back on its annual international human rights report. The President of the Law Society has said human rights are an “increasingly a prominent risk factor in business”, but it is not clear what this really means, beyond corporate social responsibility which is at most seems a peripheral business consideration. We questioned earlier this week (see post) whether foreign policy and human rights could or should mix.
Treasury attacked over equality impact of budget – The Law Gazette: More details of the Fawcett Society’s threatened judicial review of the budget, on the grounds that the Treasury did not carry out an appropriate equality impact assessment. Apparently, research by the House of Commons library has shown that 72& of the savings will come from women’s income. See our post on the disappearing Public Sector Equality Duty.
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Posted in Blog news, In the news | Tagged human rights | Leave a Comment »
September 1, 2010 by Adam Wagner
R (C) v Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis [2010] WLR (D) 193 – Read judgment
Last month, Matt Hill posted on a case relating to the retention of DNA profiles and fingerprints by the police, for which the full judgment is finally available. Permission has been granted for an appeal directly to the Supreme Court, and the outcome of that appeal may have interesting implications for the status of European Court of Human Rights decisions in domestic law.
It is worth revisiting the decision in order to extract some of the principles, as although not novel, they do highlight the difficulties for claimants who have taken a case to the European Court of Human Rights and won, but who are still waiting for their decision to be implemented by the UK government.
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Posted in Art. 6 | Right to Fair Trial, Art. 8 | Right to Privacy/Family, Case summaries, European, International, Judges and Juries | Tagged European Court of Human Rights, DNA | 5 Comments »
September 1, 2010 by Adam Wagner
I hope you will excuse a brief promotional interlude, but my fellow Blogista, Rosalind English, is organising the second annual Burnham Market Book Festival which runs from 1st to 3rd October 2010 in Burnham Market, Norfolk.
The festival will feature plenty of fascinating speakers, including Simon Jenkins, Sara Wheeler, ‘Nicci French’, General Sir Richard Dannatt (former British Army Chief of General Staff) , Ben Macintyre and Jane Fearnley Whittingstall. Interviewers include Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times and Francine Stock, radio and TV presenter.
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August 31, 2010 by Adam Wagner
The Foreign Secretary William Hague has sought in today’s Daily Telegraph to re-emphasise the “centrality of human rights in the core values” of UK foreign policy. On the face of it, this is a laudable aim. But does it really mean anything? And may it in fact amount to an unrealisable promise?
The editorial evokes Mr Hague’s early commitment to put human rights at the “irreducible core” of UK foreign policy. This pledge has been questioned recently due to the potential reduction in scope of the Foreign Office’s annual human rights report. Mr Hague addresses this directly, although with little new detail:
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Posted in CONVENTION RIGHTS, In the news, International, Politics / Public Order | Tagged international human rights, William Hague | 1 Comment »
August 31, 2010 by David Hart QC
A Geneva-based international committee has just said (provisionally) that domestic judicial review law is in breach of international law in environmental cases. Why? And does it matter? In this post we will try and explain why, and suggest that it does matter.
On 25 August 2010, the UN-ECE Aarhus Compliance Committee issued draft rulings in two long-running environmental challenges which, if confirmed, may have wide implications for how environmental judicial reviews are conducted in the UK. A key finding was that such challenges were “prohibitively expensive” to mount and this puts the UK in breach of its “access to justice” obligations under Article 9(4) of the Aarhus Convention. In addition, the Committee ruled that the UK’s grounds for judicial review of the substantive legality of decisions were too narrow, and said that the domestic rules as to timing of these challenges were insufficiently certain.
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Posted in Art. 6 | Right to Fair Trial, Case law, Costs and Procedure, Environment, European, In the news | Tagged Aarhus Convention | Leave a Comment »
August 31, 2010 by Adam Wagner
A new report from the think-tank Civitas argues that increasing community sentences and cutting prison numbers will lead to more crime and add to costs too.
This is contrary to the the view of the Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, who has argued recently that there is no link between the rising level of imprisonment and falling crime.
The report, Prison, Community Sentencing and Crime, is by Ken Pease, a professor at the Manchester Business School and a former Home Office criminologist. It does not present any significant new research; rather, it seeks to put the other side of the debate on prison numbers, in light of the “apparently concerted attempt to justify an increasing use of community sanctions in place of custody for convicted criminals”.
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Posted in Art. 5 | Right to Liberty, Art. 6 | Right to Fair Trial, In the news, Politics / Public Order, Prisons | Tagged Ken Pease, prison numbers | Leave a Comment »
August 27, 2010 by Adam Wagner
Patel, R (on the application of) v Lord Chancellor [2010] EWHC 2220 (Admin) (27 August 2010) – Read judgment
The wife of the purported ringleader of the ’7/7′ London bombings has failed in her judicial review of the Lord Chancellor’s decision to refuse her funding for legal representation at the inquest into the bombings.
Ms Sumaiya Patel, the former wife of Mohammed Sidique Khan, had her initial application for funding to the Lord Chancellor refused. She sought a ruling from the High Court to quash that decision.
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Posted in Art. 2 | Right to life, Case summaries, Inquests and Inquiries | Tagged 7/7 bombing | Leave a Comment »
August 27, 2010 by Adam Wagner
Posted in In the news | 1 Comment »
August 26, 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated 27 Aug (17:15) | A High Court judge has branded the Legal Service Commission’s recent and highly controversial tender for legal aid work as a “dreadful” and potentially irrational decision.
The comments of Mr Justice Collins came in a permission hearing (i.e., only the first stage of a two-part process) on the application by the Community Law Partnership to judicially review the LSC’s recent tender, and specifically the rejection of CLP’s own application. It appears from a Law Society Gazette article that the hearing was adjourned, with the judge warning the LSC to consider its position carefully, and that if it fights and loses the decision could set a dangerous precedent. The hearing is to resume in around a week and a half.
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Posted in Art. 6 | Right to Fair Trial, Children, Family, In the news, Judges and Juries | Tagged LSC tender | Leave a Comment »
August 26, 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated, 1 Sep | The high-profile criminal trial of a German popstar who caused her former partner to be infected with HIV has resulted in a 2-year suspended sentence. In other words, she has been convicted but escaped jail. What would happen in similar circumstances in the UK?
The facts of Nadja Benaissa’s case were relatively simple. She had been infected with HIV since the age of 16 and is 28 years old now. She had sex with three people without telling them she was infected, and as a result one of them became infected himself. She claimed that she did not intend to infect him, and that she had been told by doctors the risk of passing on the disease were “practically zero”.
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Posted in Art. 2 | Right to life, Art. 6 | Right to Fair Trial, Case summaries, Criminal, In the news, Medical | Tagged Nadja Benaissa, HIV, Dica, No Angels | 2 Comments »
August 26, 2010 by Adam Wagner
The government is moving away from the wide-ranging public sector equality duty which was due to come into force in April 2011.
The Equalities Office has announced a consultation on the public sector equality duty imposed by the Equality Act 2010. Reading the consultation document, it is clear that the government intends to delegate the equalities duty to the general public, rather than imposing top-down standards from Whitehall:
We do not intend to prescribe how public bodies go about their business, but we will ensure that we put in place the right framework which empowers citizens to scrutinise the data and evidence on how their public services perform.
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Posted in Art. 14 | Anti-Discrimination, Employment, In the news, Politics / Public Order, Public/Private | Tagged Equality Act 2010 | 2 Comments »
August 25, 2010 by Adam Wagner
In a fascinating new essay, Samuel Moyn, a history professor at Columbia University, examines the history of human rights. He concentrates on the concept of international human rights from a U.S. perspective, but many of his observations are highly relevant to those with an interest in UK human rights. As is often the case, examining the movement’s history provides interesting clues as to its future.
Moyn begins by recalling US President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 inaugural speech, when he said that “Because we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere... Our commitment to human rights must be absolute.” Our own Foreign Secretary made a similar commitment after the May 2010 election. But whereas now the concept is well known, in 1977, Moyn says, many people had never heard of “human rights”, and no previous president had mentioned the concept in any substantive way. Interestingly, the current US president Barak Obama has barely mentioned human rights during his time in office, and this may well be a reaction to his predecessor George Bush’s invocation of human rights to justify the invasion of Iraq.
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Posted in CONVENTION RIGHTS, Features, In the news, International, Judges and Juries | Tagged human rights | 1 Comment »
August 25, 2010 by 1 Crown Office Row
You will notice that posts now have options underneath them which may it easier to email, print and share (on Facebook and Twitter) UK Human Rights Blog posts. Why not give it a try? Enjoy!
Please feel free to use the comment option on this post to let us know if there are any other features which you would like to see on the Blog.
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August 19, 2010 by Adam Wagner
The new government is currently undertaking a review of anti-terrorism legislation, and Liberty, the human rights organisation, have been asked to contribute.
Update: The full Liberty response, ‘From War to Law’ can be downloaded here.
The response is predictable, which is unsurprising given how much time and effort the organisation has put into speaking out against New Labour’s more controversial anti-terror policies. Control orders, 28 day detention without charge, the use of wide stop and search powers (currently suspended anyway) and surveillance powers are all mentioned.
More interesting are the organisation’s comments on proposals to ban non-violent groups promoting hatred. This would, say Liberty, be a step too far and would risk “including innumerable organisations, potentially including political and religious bodies.”
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Posted in Art. 10 | Freedom of Expression, Art. 5 | Right to Liberty, In the news, Terrorism | Tagged Liberty | 3 Comments »
August 13, 2010 by Adam Wagner
DNA home-testing is likely to be an increasingly high-profile and controversial issue in the coming years, both from a moral and legal perspective.
I posted last week on the moral maze which surrounds DNA home testing, in light of new guidance for direct-to-consumer genetic tests published by the Human Genetics Commission.
The guidance has been greeted with mixed reactions. GeneWatch UK, a not-for-profit organisation which investigates how genetic science and technologies impact on society, have condemned the guidelines, lamenting that there will be “no independent scrutiny of companies’ performance or the claims they make about people’s risk of developing diseases in the future“ . The focus of their criticisms are that the HGC represents the interests of the genetic testing companies over those of the general public.
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Posted in Art. 8 | Right to Privacy/Family, In the news, Medical | Tagged DNA home-testing | Leave a Comment »
August 13, 2010 by Adam Wagner
David Kelly
It has long been accepted that the coroners’ courts, which investigate tens of thousands of deaths per year, are in urgent need of reform. But long-awaited changes are now under threat from Ministry of Justice budget cuts, leaving relatives of the dead with an inconsistent system of varying quality. This arguably places the state in breach of is obligations under human rights law.
A death is referred to a coroner when there is reasonable cause to suspect that it was violent or unnatural, or if the cause is unknown. In 2009, just under half of around 460,000 deaths were reported to the coroner, and 31,000 inquests were then opened. Inquests are rarely out of the news; for example, today calls were renewed for an inquest into the death of David Kelly. In the absence of obvious negligence or suspicious circumstances triggering a criminal investigation or compensation claim, inquests are often the only chance for relatives to get to the bottom of how a person died.
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Posted in Art. 2 | Right to life, In the news, Inquests and Inquiries | Tagged Coroners and Justice Act 2009, David Kelly, Inquest | Leave a Comment »
Older Posts »
Updated, 3 Sep, 16:35 | The Home Office is to announce a review of UK extradition agreements with other countries, including the controversial and some say unbalanced agreement with the United States. This represents a provisional success for campaigners against certain extradition agreements. 
UE (Nigeria) and Others v Secretary of State for the Home Department 
Adam Wagner
Rosalind English
E. R. Wrigley
Matthew Hill
1 Crown Office Row
Angus McCullough QC
Philip Havers QC
Kate Beattie
Isabel McArdle
Kate Beattie
Rachel Marcus
Caroline Cross
Matt Donmall
David Hart QC
Contraception, capacity and coercion: when does a woman lack capacity to decide whether to use contraceptive treatment?
August 25, 2010 by Caroline Cross
In the first case of its kind, the court was asked to consider whether a young married woman lacks capacity to decide whether to use contraception, and whether it would be in her interests to be required to receive it.
Mrs A was a 29-year-old woman who suffered from serious learning difficulties, which put her intellectual functioning at approximately 0.1% of adults her age. In 2004 she gave birth to a daughter, and in 2005 she had a son. Both children were removed from her at birth because she did not have the capacity to take care of them.
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Posted in Art. 8 | Right to Privacy/Family, Case comments, Medical, Mental Health | Tagged mental capacity, Sterilisation | 1 Comment »