Human rights news and case-law roundup

17 August 2010 by Adam Wagner

Hoovering up the latest human rights news

We recently started adding links to interesting new articles and case-law on the right the sidebar under the heading “Selected news sources”.

As of last week, these articles now appear on our Twitter feed (@ukhumanrightsb) and Facebook fan page too. Below is a quick rundown of some of the most recent stories. The full list of links can be found here.

17 Aug | Privacy law to stop rise in gagging orders by judges – Telegraph: We have posted on the coming libel reform and super-injunctions; Lord Neuberger is leading a review which may, according to the Telegraph, lead to a statutory law of privacy. The Head of Legal Blog queries whether this would be any different from Article 8 of the ECHR in any case.

16 Aug | Angels in America – NYTimes.com: The invariably excellent Frank Rich of the New York Times charts the quick progress of gay rights in America over the past decades, leading to the recent ‘Prop 8’ ruling in California that a ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional (see our post as to whether it could happen here).

16 Aug | BBC News – Can community sentences replace jail? An important question in light of the coming £2bn cuts which the Ministry of Justice is going to make (see our post on the cuts); the money will have to come from somewhere. With prisons accounting for £2bn of expenditure, community sentences could save a lot of money.  Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has already said this is the way he sees things going.

16 May | How EU integration bars the persecuted from finding refuge in Europe | guardian.co.uk: An interesting debate which is part of the Guardian’s new ‘Europe on Trial‘ feature; see our recent posts on the always vexed issue of immigration and asylum. See also Consensus is the right approach for the European court of human rights, which we blogged on here.

14 Aug | Letters: Pernicious dilemma of unpaid internships | The Guardian: Are thousands of the young (and not young) unemployed being hoodwinked into working for free, on the basis of vague promises of future paid work? More importantly, is this a sneaky way around the minimum wage, and is it fair to interns?

13 Aug | Time to stop legal aid tendering process? | New Law Journal: The hugely controversial (in legal circles, at least) recent family legal aid tendering process, which has put many small firms out of business. The Law Society is calling for the tender to be suspended and reevaluated.

13 Aug | Was it right to scrap the ContactPoint child database? |guardian.co.uk: We posted recently on the switching off of the ContactPoint database, and the concerns which remain for child protection (see here). In this article, the director of the Children’s Society argues that the right to privacy should be trumped by child protection in this case, and the database should have remained. A representative of Liberty, the Human Rights organisation, disagrees.

14 Aug | Terror laws overused by police, research suggests | The Law Gazette: The fact that many more people were arrested than convicted do not necessarily mean that the laws were overused. This only makes sense in the context of conviction rates in general, but it could also be argued that anti-terrorism law protects against the most devastating possible outcomes, and therefore it may be necessary to lower the threshold slightly for how many are arrested.

12 Aug | ECHR BLOG: Less Than 1 Euro Not a Significant Disadvantage: Antoine Buyse blogs on the continuing impact of the new Protocol 14 which, amongst other things (see our post), allows the European Court of Human Rights  to declare cases inadmissible if there is a ‘lack of significant advantage’. In this case,the claimant wanted to recover 22,50 Russian Roubles (less than 1 Euro) in court fees. The Court thought this was too little and declared the case inadmissible.

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