25 June 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
The Supreme Court will hand down Judgment on Wednesday 27th June 2018 in R (on the application of Steinfeld and another) v Secretary of State for the International Development (in substitution for the Home Secretary and the Education Secretary).
The claimants are Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan who contend they were unlawfully refused an opportunity to register a Civil Partnership at Chelsea Town Hall on the grounds that the Civil Partnership Act 2004 reserves that status strictly for same sex couples. They do not want to enter into marriage as they say that it is patriarchal and is not consistent with their values.
The Civil Partnership Act 2004 created a regime for the recognition of same sex relationships modelled on that in Vermont which pretty much entirely replicated the rights and responsibilities available through marriage. One of the only anomalies was a less favourable provision for survivor benefits from an occupational pension but even that was equalised courtesy of the Supreme Court in Walker v Innospec Ltd.
The exclusion of different sex couples from Civil Partnership started to appear somewhat anomalous when the government opened marriage up to same sex couples by way of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013. The effect of that was that same sex couples in England and Wales (and Scotland – but not Northern Ireland) had a choice of marriage and civil partnership but different sex couples only had the former option.
This Blog has covered the story of the Steinfeld from the very beginning. The original hearing was in front of Mrs Justice Andrews and the arguments were examined by Professor Rob Wintemute in these pages. Ultimately, as reported by Adam Wagner, Mrs Justice Andrews ruled that the current law does not breach the human rights of opposite-sex couples who cannot obtain a Civil Partnership.
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21 June 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
On 15th June 2018 the Canadian Supreme Court handed down two interesting and closely related judgments involving Trinity Western University: Law Society of British Columbia v Trinity Western University and Brayden Volkenant 2018 SCC 32 and Trinity Western University and Brayden Volkenant v Law Society of Upper Canada 2018 SCC 32
Trinity Western University (TWU) is a Christian University – indeed, in its own words, it is “a distinctly Christian university” (here, page 2). It takes “the Bible as the divinely inspired, authoritative guide for personal and community life” (here, page 1) and seeks“to develop godly Christian leaders”.
Prospective TWU students must sign a ‘Community Covenant’. That Covenant requires them to commit to “reserve sexual expressions of intimacy for marriage” and abstain from“sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman” (here, page 3). This rule applies both on and off campus(the Abstinence Rule, see paras [1] and [319]).
The Law Society of British Columbia (LSBC) refused to approve TWU’s faculty of Law because of the Abstinence Rule (I will call this the Decision). The question before the Supreme Court of Canada was whether this was lawful. The issue in Law Society of Upper Canada dealt with a similar decision of the Law Society of another province(Ontario)to approve the TWU law school.
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19 June 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
R (Parkinson) v. HM Senior Coroner for Kent and Others – read judgmentIf anyone had the lingering hope that the door to argue “system failure” in any but the most exceptional case of medical negligence remained ajar after the decision of the Grand Chamber in Lopes de Sousa, then the recent Divisional Court decision in Parkinson shows the door has been well and truly slammed shut.
Background facts
On 9th January 2011 Mrs Kathleen Parkinson died at the A & E Department of Darent Valley Hospital. She was aged 91 and dying. She had been taken to hospital by her son. On arrival in A & E she was assessed by a nurse and then by a Dr Hijazi. Dr Hijazi formed the view that she was dying, that there was no useful treatment that could be given her, and that as she was in the last moments of life, doing anything would not have been beneficial to her. Her son who, wanted her to be treated, became aggressive and eventually attempted to perform mouth to mouth resuscitation although advised against this by A and E staff. Mrs Parkinson deteriorated rapidly and died soon after arriving.
An inquest was convened and although Article 2 was kept under review throughout the inquest, the Coroner determined that it was not an Article 2 inquest. He rejected the submission that he ought to enter a verdict of gross negligence manslaughter and found that Mrs Parkinson died of natural causes and that any additional treatment that could have been provided to her in the short time she was at the Darent Valley Hospital would have been ineffective given the advanced stage of dying she was in. He refused the request to provide a report on the prevention of future deaths under paragraph 7, Schedule 5 of the Coroners’ Justice Act 2009.
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18 June 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
Pimlico Plumbers Ltd & Anor v Smith [2018] UKSC 29 – read judgment
The Supreme Court has unanimously dismissed Pimlico Plumbers Ltd’s appeal and upheld the Employment Tribunal’s ruling that the Respondent – Mr Smith – a plumbing and heating engineer had been:
(a) a “worker” within the meaning of section 230(3) of the Employment Rights Act 1996;
(b) a “worker” within the meaning of regulation 2(1) of the Working Time Regulations 1998 (SI 1998/1833)
(c) in Pimlico’s “employment” within the meaning of section 83(2)(a) of the Equality Act.
Questions concerning the true employment status of individuals who are presented to the paying customer as being an integral part of the business in question are increasingly common. Despite being presented to the end customer as such, the purported legal reality is that the individual is self-employed for both tax and employment law purposes. This is partly what is described by such arrangements being part of the so-called “gig economy”.
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18 June 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
R (on the application of Jollah) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 1260 – read judgment
The Court of Appeal has upheld an award of damages for false imprisonment in the context of immigration detention. The Court found that an unlawful curfew which required residence at a specific address between specific hours each day and which was backed by the threat of criminal sanctions and electronic tagging gave rise to the tort of false imprisonment.
Background law and facts
The claimant was released from prison in 2013 and then detained in an immigration centre. He was then released on bail which came with restrictions on where he could live. When the bail period ended, the secretary of state tried to maintain these residence restrictions. She purported to use her powers under the Immigration Act 1971 Schedule 3 Paragraph 2(5) to impose a curfew on the claimant which required him to stay at his home address between 11pm and 7am every day. The claimant was fitted with an electronic tag and told that he would face a fine or imprisonment if a court found that he did not comply with the terms of the curfew. This curfew was in place for two and a half years, from February 2014 until July 2016.
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15 June 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
In Episode 35 Matthew Hill discusses the lessons and warnings from the Bloody Sunday inquiry and the Hillsborough inquest in a talk recorded at One Crown Office Row’s 2018 seminar.
In Episode 36 , drawn from the same seminar, Emma-Louise Fenelon discusses the challenges around secrecy, anonymity and public information in major inquests and inquiries
In Episode 37 Gideon Barth considers when public inquiries are established or inquests reopened.
Law Pod UK is available for free download from iTunes, The Podcast App, Overcast, Audioboom and a number of other podcast platforms. Please rate and review us to help LawPodUK continue to grow.
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11 June 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
In the matter of an application by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission for Judicial Review (Northern Ireland) [2018] UKSC 27
On 7th June 2018, the Supreme Court handed down judgment in the case of regarding the controversial issue of the legal framework regulating abortion in Northern Ireland.
The judgment could not have come at a more heated moment in the debate between pro-choice and pro-life campaigners in Northern Ireland. Only two days earlier, MPs at Westminster debated potential decriminalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland through repeal of sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. Considering the recent result in the Irish referendum on abortion, where the abortion ban was overturned by a clear majority, the issue of abortion is prominent in our political conversation.
In a lengthy judgment, the court dismissed the appeal by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC), on the basis that, in the view of the 4-3 majority, it did not have standing to bring the proceedings.
Nevertheless, the justices went on to express the views that they would have come to in the event that the NIHRC had been found to have standing, with a differently constituted 4-3 majority considering that the general prohibition on abortion was incompatible with the right to private and family life under Article 8 ECHR.
The Background
The Offences Against the Persons Act and the Criminal Justice Act (NI 1945) criminalise abortion in Northern Ireland. In conjunction, these Acts (of the UK and Northern Irish legislatures respectively) imposes an obligation upon a pregnant woman that, unless there is a risk to her life or of serious long-term or permanent injury to her physical or mental health, she must carry the pregnancy to term.
These proceedings were brought by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (“NIHRC”) challenging the compatibility of the law in the following respect:
The prohibition of abortion in cases of
- Serious malformation of the foetus;
- Pregnancy as a result of rape; and/or
- Pregnancy as a result of incest
was argued to be incompatible with
- Article 3 (the prohibition of torture and of inhuman or degrading treatment);
- Article 8 (the right of everyone to respect for their private and family life); and/or
- Article 14 (the prohibition of discrimination)
In the High Court, it was held that the law was incompatible with Article 8 insofar as it criminalised abortion in the the following circumscribed cases:
- Fatal foetal abnormality
- Rape up to the date when the foetus is capable of being born alive
- Incest up to the date when the foetus is capable of being born alive
The Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland, however, concluded that the general prohibition on abortion gave rise to no incompatibility with any of the articles of the ECHR.
The NIHRC appealed to the Supreme Court in London.
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7 June 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
In Episode 34 of Law Pod UK, Rosalind English talks to Professor Karen Yeung of Birmingham University about questions of civil liability of algorithm-run systems, the difficulties of regulating something we cannot truly predict, and the so-called “alignment problem” – how to align the utility function of intelligent machines with the values of the human race, which are very difficult to define.
Professor Yeung is Interdisciplinary Fellow in both the Law and Computer Science Schools at Birmingham, and recently gave evidence before the House of Lords Select Committee on AI. We posted on the report ‘AI in the UK: ready, willing and able?’ in April.
Law Pod UK is available for free download from iTunes, Overcast and Audioboom.
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6 June 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
Michael Rhimes is the fourth référendaire to Judge Vajda at the Court of Justice of the European Union. He was not involved in the Coman case. This blog post is written in a purely personal capacity and reflects only the author’s views.
I have three points on the judgment, which is summarised in part 1.
1. A narrow judgment: A free movement case, not a gay marriage one.
The judgment is a narrow one. On a basic level, for the “Coman” rule to be engaged, a number of conditions must be satisfied:
-
- At least one of the parties to the marriage must be a Union national;
- One of the Union nationals in question must have exercised their free movement rights (otherwise Article 21 TFEU will not be engaged, see C-434/09 McCarthy, paras 49 to 55)
- The couple must be married in a Member State that solemnises same-sex marriage.
In addition, the reasoning of the Court focuses on the right to free movement in Article 21 TFEU. The Coman judgment is not one that is predicated upon the growing recognition of same-sex marriage within the EU (on this, see my third comment, and para 56 to 58 of the Opinion) or, indeed, on fundamental rights (on this, see my second comment). Member States have to recognise the third country same-sex spouse of a Union citizen, but only so that Union citizen may freely exercise their free movement rights.
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6 June 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
This week the US Supreme Court handed down judgment in Masterpiece Cakeshop et al v Colorado Civil Rights Commission et al. This is a decision which is of interest in the UK for its factual similarity with the case of Lee v Ashers Baking Company, otherwise colloquially known as the “gay cake” case which is currently being considered by the UK Supreme Court (and which has been discussed previously on this blog).
In both cases Christian bakery owners refused to create certain cakes for customers on the basis that it would contravene their religious objection to gay marriage. The judgments in Masterpiece may foreshadow some of the arguments to be discussed in the upcoming UK decision.
In this case, the US Supreme Court held that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission failed to approach the matter in accordance with its obligation of religious neutrality. The baker’s appeal was therefore upheld — but only on technical grounds.
Background
The owner of Masterpiece, Jack Phillips, refused to create a wedding cake for a same-sex marriage ceremony between two of his potential customers, Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins. He did, however, say that he would be prepared to make birthday cakes or other products. His stated reason for refusing to make a wedding cake was that to do so would have been a personal endorsement and participation in a ceremony and relationship which contravened his deep and sincerely held religious beliefs.
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5 June 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
Coman and others, Case C‑673/16, 5 June 2018 – read judgment
Can the term “spouse” in Article 2(2)(a) of the Citizenship Directive (Directive) refer to a spouse of the same sex as the other party to the marriage (same-sex spouse)?
This (fairly dry) question was at the heart of the Coman case. Of course, as the Advocate General recognised in his Opinion, para. 2 it touched on other (more juicy) questions of dignity and the diverging understandings of marriage in the 28 Member States.
In this post I will present the facts and reasoning in the judgment. My following post will offer three comments on it.
Background Facts
Mr Coman, a dual national of Romania and the US, met Mr Clabourn Hamilton, a US national, in New York in 2002. They married in Brussels (Belgium) in 2010. In 2012, Mr Clabourn Hamilton asked the Romanian authorities to provide him with the documents to allow him to stay in Romania, with Mr Coman, as his spouse, for longer than three months.
The request was denied.
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1 June 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
The second part of this guest contribution argues that it is time to consider seriously the case for granting legal personhood to certain classes of sentient animals. Part I can be found here.
Introduction
On December 26, 2017, the Connecticut Superior Court dismissed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus filed by the Non-Human Rights Project (NhRP) – which I introduced in an earlier post – on behalf of three elephants that the NhRP argued are illegally confined in Goshen, Connecticut. The issue, similarly to previous cases involving four chimpanzees, was whether the court should grant the petition for a writ of habeas corpus because the elephants are ‘persons’ entitled to liberty and equality. The court dismissed the argument and held that the ‘petition is wholly frivolous on its face.’
Discussion
One of the things that is implied in the refusal to grant personhood to non-human animals, in my view, is the strong aversion to the notion that one day a human being may find his or rights trumped by those of a non-human animal.
In my earlier post, I argued that we are also animals, but different – and by this I further elaborated that we are different insofar as we have disavowed our animal nature in order to properly construct and enter the socio-symbolic order and human culture – through what, for example, Freud called a process of ‘organic repression’ in Civilization and Its Discontents, or what Joanne Faulkner has described as ‘an abandonment of the animal within.’
By no means is this meant to be construed as a bad thing – it is who we are – but being different does not necessarily always mean better. To argue that human beings are better would be to ignore the ways in which other animals are unique in their own way.
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31 May 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
You would have to be a monk or, at any rate, in an entirely internet-free zone, not to have had your recent days troubled by endless GDPR traffic. The tiniest charity holding your name and email address up to the data behemoths have asked, in different ways, for your consent for them to hold your personal data. You may have observed the frankness and simplicity of the former’s requests and the weaseliness of the latter’s, who try to make it rather difficult for you to say no, indeed to understand what precisely they are asking you to do.
Just in case you have not looked at it, here is the Regulation. It is actually a good deal easier to understand than a lot of the summaries of it.
This lack of transparency in these consent forms/privacy statements had not gone unnoticed by one of Europe’s more indefatigable privacy sleuths. Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer, who, at 30 years of age, has already been to the EU top court twice (see here and here), moved fast. By the end of GDPR day last Friday, 25 May, he sued global platforms with multibillion-euro complaints. 3 complaints said to be valued at €3.9 billion were filed in the early hours against Facebook and two subsidiaries, WhatsApp, and Instagram, via data regulators in Austria, Belgium and Germany. Another complaint valued at €3.7 billion was lodged with France’s CNIL in the case of Google’s Android operating system.
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31 May 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
Jones v Birmingham City Council [2018] EWCA Civ 1189 (23 May 2018)
The Court of Appeal has upheld a ‘gang injunction’ restricting the actions and movement of 18 members of a Birmingham gang. One of the men affected, Jerome Jones, unsuccessfully challenged the injunction, arguing that the proceedings by which it was made properly required proof to the criminal standard, and that the application of the civil standard violated his right to a fair trial under Article 6 ECHR.
Background
The appellant was said to be a member of the Guns and Money Gang (GMG), affiliated with Birmingham’s notorious Johnson Crew. Named after Johnson’s café, the gang’s erstwhile fast-food hangout, the Johnson Crew have been engaged in often violent turf war with the rival Burger Bar Boys since the 1980s. They both attempt to lay claim to various areas of the city, particularly between Handsworth and Aston.
The violent climate was brought to the nation’s attention with the tragic murder of Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare, two innocent teenage students gunned down in Aston while leaving a party in the early hours of 2 January 2003. Four associates of the Burgers, imprisoned for the murders, had apparently intended to target a Johnson member as revenge for the earlier execution-style killing of Burger Bar Boy Yohanne Martin. While this particularly bloody period gained attention for claiming the lives of a number of gang members and mere bystanders, the violence has not abated. A Birmingham police officer in the proceedings gave evidence of ongoing gang violence, with innocent members of the public at risk of being caught up in crossfire [7].
Gang injunctions
For many years, Birmingham City Council (‘the City’) has sought to use various powers to disrupt and discourage gang-related behaviour, including injunctions against named people said to be involved in violence. By injunction, individuals can be prevented from entering certain areas, or from doing things associated with gang violence.
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29 May 2018 by Emma-Louise Fenelon
On 24th May 2018 a new scheme to process citizenship applications for the Windrush generation was announced, after the Government’s apologies last month. The Windrush Scheme guidance explains how this will work in detail.
It is notable that applicants who are refused will have no right of appeal against this decision. The chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Yvette Cooper MP, has tweeted to express her concern about this.
This author suggests that it is arguable that the denial of a right of appeal is open to legal challenge.
How the scheme works
Citizens of Commonwealth countries who were living in the UK before 1 January 1973, plus their children and certain non-Commonwealth citizens will be assessed and issued with proof of British citizenship if they already are British in law, or will be considered for naturalisation if they are not. Those who do not qualify for British citizenship will be assessed to see if they have the right of abode and those who do not qualify for that will be considered for a permit confirming their right to be in the UK under the no time limit biometric residence permit scheme.
This is all explained in detail in this article on Free Movement.
But what about if the Home Office is not satisfied that an applicant meets the scheme?
The guidance states on p. 13 as follows:
Where a person is determined not to be issued with a document under the Windrush Scheme in accordance with this guidance, the decision will not attract a right of appeal or an administrative review.
So a person who is refused will not be able to appeal to the First-tier Tribunal. They will only be able to challenge the decision by way of judicial review.
The difference between an appeal and a judicial review
Why does this matter? The basic answer is that it is much harder for a claimant to succeed in a judicial review than in an appeal. In an appeal, the judge will make the decision afresh following oral and written evidence. Statistics in March showed that about half of all immigration appeals are successful.
In judicial review, on the other hand, the judge does not step into the shoes of the decision-maker and is tasked instead with evaluating whether the decision was lawful and rational. There is always the possibility that the judge will conclude that whilst the decision is tough, it is still legally watertight. In addition, an applicant must apply for permission before they can get a substantive hearing and an unsuccessful applicant usually pays the Secretary of State’s costs.
So, there is a fair amount riding on the issue of whether a claimant gets an appeal or not.
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