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Archive for the ‘Art. 9 | Thought/Conscience/Religion’ Category

Philip Havers QC of 1 Crown Office Row is representing Martin in the judicial review proceedings.  He is not the author of this post. Albert Camus famously wrote: ‘there is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.’  However profound a philosophical problem, the question of suicide or, more precisely, assisted suicide is proving quite [...]

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Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, has thrown  a firecracker into the consultation on gay marriage, which is about to begin in March. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph he declared that he did not agree that it was the role of the state to define what marriage is.  ”It is set in tradition and history and [...]

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R v Michael Peter Lyons [2011] EWCA Crim 2808- read judgment Moral objections to the UK’s involvement in Afghanistan do not constitute a defence to an insubordination charge, the Court Martial Appeal Court has ruled. The appellant was not entitled to disobey a lawful command on the ground of conscientious objection. At the age of [...]

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Raed Mahajna v Secretary of State for the Home Department IA/21/21631/2011 – Read Judgment 1 Crown Office Row’s Neil Sheldon appeared for the Secretary of State in this case. He is not the writer of this post. The First-Tier Tribunal (Asylum and Immigration Chamber), has upheld the decision of the Home Secretary to deport Raed [...]

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The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has reversed its plans to intervene in two European Court of Human Rights cases about religious discrimination.  Last month the Commission announced that it would intervene in European Court of Human Rights cases on behalf of religious believers who failed to convince the UK courts that they were being [...]

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Jakobski v Poland (December 2010) – read judgment Mahayana Buddhists have profound moral objections to eating meat. According to the rules, a Mahayana Buddhist should avoid eating meat to cultivate compassion for all living beings. Even peaceable Buddhists commit crimes sometimes and go to prison. Meat free diets however are not available in all European [...]

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In the midst of all the coverage of the phone hacking scandal and the mounting woes of News Corporation an interesting piece of human rights news from the past week got lost: the announcement by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (“EHRC”) that it is applying to intervene in four cases before the European Court of [...]

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Updated | SG v St Gregory’s Catholic Science College [2011] EWHC 1452 (Admin) (17 June 2010) – Read judgment Most people have their first taste of injustice at school. This is hardly surprising: an institution containing hundreds of teenagers for whom rebellion is a biological imperative is always going to be difficult to control. In [...]

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Yesterday Neil Howard and Rebecca Steinfeld asked via guardian.co.uk whether it is Time to ban male circumcision? The article was prompted by attempts to ban the practice in San Francisco. Male circumcision is common amongst Muslims and Jews, but judging from the 286 comments (so far!) to the article, there are a lot of people who feel [...]

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R (Imran Bashir) v. The Independent Adjudicator, HMP Ryehill and the Secretary of State for Justice [2011] EWHC 1108 – read judgment here. 1 Crown Office Row’s John Joliffe appeared for the Secretary of State for Justice in this case. He is not the writer of this post. The High Court held last week that disciplining a [...]

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CD v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] EWHC 1273 (Admin) Read judgment As readers of this blog will know, control orders have often been successfully challenged in the courts on human rights grounds. But in this case, an order forcing a person to relocate to a different part of the country was found to be [...]

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In a modern liberal democracy we take for granted the fact that laws apply to all individuals and are enforced by the courts without special consideration of religious beliefs they may happen to have. But for a while at least there was a very real danger of the dissolution of the divide between private orthodoxy [...]

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Human rights and discrimination law are often criticised in the press. Sometimes the criticisms are justified, but the level of anger which a system of universal rights can generate is sometimes surprising. Unfortunately, some of that anger is caused by inaccurate reporting of judgments. In yesterday’s Telegraph online, Cristina Odone blogged on a recent “scandal” [...]

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The relationship between the expression of religious beliefs and practice and equality law is a fraught one, and particular difficulty has been experienced in the matter of the application of the law outlawing discrimination. Equality law, as currently interpreted, treats the six prohibited grounds of discrimination – age, disability, race, religion, sex (including transgender status) [...]

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Johns v Derby City Council and Equality and Human Rights Commission (intervening) [2011] EWHC 375 (Admin)- Read judgment Religious views opposing homosexuality are a legitimate fostering concern and the local authority’s approach to this question did not constitute religious discrimination. The claimant husband and wife applied to the defendant local authority to be approved as [...]

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