Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Features’ Category

The late US law Professor Paul Miller reflected recently that Beethoven, Stephen Hawking and Elton John were examples of individuals whom, if they had been tested for serious genetic conditions at the start of their careers, may have been denied employment in the fields in which they later came to excel. Earlier this month the [...]

Read Full Post »

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has launched the Human Rights and Democracy- The 2011 Foreign & Commonwealth Office Report, which aims to provide “a comprehensive look at the human rights work of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) around the world in 2011“. The report makes for essential reading for anyone with an interest in [...]

Read Full Post »

In his thought-provoking Guardian post Climate change is a human rights issue – and that’s how we can solve it, Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, makes a case for human rights playing a radical new part in our response to climate change. His argument involves a number of propositions: (i) global [...]

Read Full Post »

Free speech is under attack. Or so it seems. The last few weeks have been abuzz with stories to do with free speech: a Supreme Court ruling on the Reynolds defence to libel; contempt of court proceedings against an MP for comments made in a book and the latest in a growing line of criminal [...]

Read Full Post »

This post, by Angela Patrick, Director of Human Rights Policy at JUSTICE, is the fourth in a series of posts analysing the UK’s draft “Brighton Declaration” on European Court of Human Rights reform. It’s a busy week for the debate on human rights reform. Today at 2:15pm, the Joint Committee on Human Rights will question [...]

Read Full Post »

This is the third in a series of posts analysing the UK’s draft “Brighton Declaration” on European Court of Human Rights reform. Although not a “supreme law bill of rights”, the Human Rights Act 1998 is a significant constraint upon the political-legislative process. In this post, I argue that the extent of that constraint would [...]

Read Full Post »

Stott v Thomas Cook Operators and British Airways Plc [2012] EWCA Civ 66 – read judgment If you need reminding of what it feels like when the candy-floss of human rights is abruptly snatched away, take a flight.  Full body scanners and other security checks are nothing to the array of potential outrages awaiting passengers [...]

Read Full Post »

On 25 January 2012 Justice Edwin Cameron, Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, delivered an emotive and thoughtful talk entitled “What you can do with rights”. The Law Commission’s annual Lord Scarman Lecture covered apartheid, AIDS denialism, LGBT rights and delved into the essence of moral humanity. It was a lecture delivered with skill and fluency, [...]

Read Full Post »

In October 2011, I posted on an important consultation, Cost Protection for Litigants in Environmental Judicial Review Claims, in which  the Ministry of Justice wheeled out its proposals to get it out of the various scrapes caused by the expense of environmental challenges.  The Aarhus Convention requires that environmental challenges not be “prohibitively expensive”, and both the European [...]

Read Full Post »

Behind the Times paywall Anthony Lester today declares that “Sniping at Strasbourg will only hinder reform”. In his guest column, he says that Court is suffering unfair criticism from “sections of the British media” and “politicians who accuse it of over-reaching its power”. That may well be the case, but the most searing and authoritative [...]

Read Full Post »

Cost Protection for Litigants in Environmental Judicial Review Claims  In this consultation announced this week, the Ministry of Justice is trying to get itself out of the multiple Aarhus problems facing UK justice. Infraction proceedings are threatened in the EU Court, and adverse conclusions were reached by Aarhus Compliance Committee; all  much posted about on this blog, for which see [...]

Read Full Post »

When a Convention right arises in circumstances which also engage EU law, which court is the final arbiter of their meaning and application? This is not as arcane a question as it appears, since in the UK many cases engage points of EU law, so Convention rights, which are part of the “general principles” of [...]

Read Full Post »

There are somewhere in the region on 12 million people worldwide who have no nationality. Being stateless can create enormous problems, from being unable to rely on diplomatic assistance to having no home country with an automatic right to return to. The risk to stateless of people of having their human rights breached to is great. [...]

Read Full Post »

Access to environmental justice is as topical as ever. Delegates at the recent conference of the United Kingdom Environmental Law Association (UKELA), held in late June at UEA in Norwich (yards from the Climatic Research Unit much in the news) argued that the current regime in this country is unsatisfactory – because of the cost, but [...]

Read Full Post »

A recent guest post from Begonia Filgueira celebrated the move by the Bolivian Parliament to accord rights in law to Nature. It rightly commanded considerable attention but not all readers were ecstatic. So when last week DEFRA came out with a rather different approach to valuing nature in its Natural Environment White Paper – the first in 20 years – it was [...]

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »