Monthly News Archives: November 2010
22 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
The Department for Communities and Local Government has published its plans for “the most radical reform of social housing in a generation”.
The reforms which have generated most publicity are those which allow local authorities to offer council homes on short-term lets rather than for life. The ‘council house for life’ scheme was introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government 30 years ago.
The general theme of the proposed reforms is giving local authorities more power to set the terms of council tenancies, manage housing waiting lists and allowing them to charge more for council housing. Current tenants will be protected from the changes. For an expert view, see the Nearly Legal blog’s excellent coverage of the reforms, as well as Local Government Lawyer’s post.
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22 November 2010 by Guest Contributor
There are now over 400 posts on the UK Human Rights Blog. This landmark provides a good opportunity to remind readers how to search the site.
The most basic search function is by entering a word into the “search” box which is always available at the top right of the screen.
You can also search by category via the blog archive or the drop down menu which is on the sidebar to the right. Each post is ‘tagged’ with:
- A blog category (for example ‘case summary‘ or ‘in the news‘)
- A legal category (for example, family law) and
- An article of the European Convention on Human Rights (for example, Article 2, the right to life).
You can read more about the individual rights on our ECHR page, which is also in a tab above. The full list of categories is reproduced below:
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22 November 2010 by Henry Witcomb
The government’s proposed reforms to legal aid will have a catastrophic effect on those who have suffered as a result of negligent medical treatment.
When Kenneth Clarke informed Parliament on Monday that
Legal aid will still routinely be available in civil and family cases where people’s life or liberty is at stake, or where there is risk of serious physical harm or the immediate loss of their home.
he clearly did not mean that the destruction of a person’s life or the suffering of seriously physical harm through the mismanagement of their medical treatment was to be included within this. If he had meant that he would have proposed at the same time that clinical negligence would continue to be funded by legal aid.
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19 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
The Council of Europe, which monitors compliance with European Court of Human Rights judgments, has warned the United Kingdom to stop dragging its feet over the implementation of judgments on politically sensitive issues.
In a draft resolution, the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, which was unanimously adopted on 17 November 2010, said:
The United Kingdom must put to an end the practice of delaying full implementation of Strasbourg Court judgments with respect to politically sensitive issues, such as prisoners’ voting rights.
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19 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
The best of the rest of the human rights news from the web in the past week. You can read our full list of external links here.
Legal aid cuts – some early thoughts on implications – Lawyer Watch More thoughts on the principles underlying the legal aid cuts (see our post) by Professor Richard Moorhead. Also see The cuts to legal aid are closing the law to all but those with money by Jonathan Freedland, who argues that Labour should fight the cuts “root and branch” as “These £350m of savings will come at a much greater cost, either to other public services – including the NHS, forced to pay the higher costs that come with defeat in “no win, no fee” cases – or to society as a whole.”
News of the World phone hacking investigator must give court names of clients – Inforrm: This is the latest decision relating to the long-running News of the World phone-hacking investigation.
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19 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
RT (Zimbabwe) & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2010] EWCA Civ 1285 (18 November 2010) – Read judgment
The Court of Appeal has ruled that asylum seekers cannot be forced to lie about not holding political beliefs when returning to their home country. The potentially wide-ranging decision extends the protection arising from a recent Supreme Court decision which found that homosexuals could not be sent back to their home country if they would have to lie about their sexuality.
The case concerned four Zimbabwean asylum seekers. In previous asylum cases involving Zimbabwe, it had been assumed that it is legitimate to require applicants, in order to avoid persecution, to demonstrate loyalty to Zanu-PF, itself a persecutory regime. The men in this case did not hold strong political views, but did not support the Zanu-PF either. The question was whether it would breach their human rights to send them back if they would be forced to join the ruling party.
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18 November 2010 by Isabel McArdle
Adakini Ntuli v Howard Donald [2010] EWCA Civ 1276 – Read judgment
Take That’s Howard Donald has failed to maintain an injunction against the press reporting details of his relationship with a former girlfriend. He had originally sought the injunction after receiving a text from the woman saying: “Why shud I continue 2 suffer financially 4 the sake of loyalty when selling my story will sort my life out?”
‘Superinjunctions’ have received a great deal of press coverage recently, not least because they are usually granted in cases involving celebrities’ private lives. They are injunctions, usually in privacy or breach of confidence cases, which prevent not only the publication of certain matters, but even the publication of the existence of legal proceedings. These cases are of particular interest because of the competing ECHR rights in play: Article 8, the right to respect for private and family life, and Article 10, the right to freedom of expression.
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18 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
By all accounts, it has been a gloomy year for access to justice. The legal aid budget is to be reduced by £350m and state assistance has effectively disappeared in non-criminal cases. The overall justice budget, which is already low by international standards, is to be cut by a further 23%. But believe it or not, there may be reasons to be cheerful.
In the virtual world, legal blogs are becoming an established voice in the UK legal community and the flourishing blogosphere has given the public a lively, accessible and most importantly free new way of engaging with the law. With legal aid becoming scarcer and Citizens Advice Bureaus losing their funding, free information services such can be the last resort for those who seek legal help without having to pay for a lawyer.
But none of these services would exist without their hidden backbone: BAILII. To that end, when Legal Week published its excellent review of legal blogging last month, the failure to mention BAILII caused a min-revolution from a gaggle of legal bloggers in the comments section.
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17 November 2010 by Guest Contributor
We are delighted to announce that the UK Human Rights Blog by 1 Crown Office Row chambers has been shortlisted for the JUSTICE Human Rights Award 2010.
Also shortlisted are Reprieve and Bail for Immigration Detainees. The Human Rights Awards have been held each December since 2001 to commemorate Human Rights Day. As described by JUSTICE, the awards aim to recognise and encourage individuals and organisations whose work is dedicated to protecting and promoting the rights of others. Last year’s winner was the Gurkhas Justice Campaign. A full list of previous winners can be found here.
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17 November 2010 by Alasdair Henderson
As we reported recently, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission has ruled that Abu Hamza, the extremist Muslim cleric, cannot be stripped of his British citizenship since this would have the effect of making him stateless.
This is the latest in a string of decisions by various courts in a long-running legal saga surrounding the British government’s attempts to remove Abu Hamza from the UK. Hamza is also facing extradition to the United States, but this has been stayed pending the substantive decision of the European Court of Human Rights as to whether the prospect of serving a life sentence in a ‘supermax’ US prison would breach his Article 3 rights (our analysis of the admissibility decision can be found here).
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16 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated | One of the many points of interest from yesterday’s announcement that legal aid is to be cut by £350m per year was the underlying justification, put by Ken Clarke in his announcement, that England and Wales spend more on legal aid than other countries.
The Justice Secretary said that “we currently have one of the most expensive legal aid systems in the world“. But where does this often-quoted statistic arise from?
In its consultation document, the MoJ quotes (at para 3.43) a report commissioned from the University of York into comparative international legal aid systems. The report, Efficiency and quality of justice European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ); International comparison of publicly funded legal services and justice systems, was produced in October 2009 by Roger Bowles and Amanda Perry. It investigated the legal aid systems in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand and Sweden and compared these to the system in England and Wales.
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16 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
Binyam Mohamed
Updated | It is being widely reported that around 12 men, who accused the government of complicity in their mistreatment in various places including the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, have reached a financial settlement worth millions of pounds with the government.
Update, 16:30: Ken Clarke has announced the settlements to Parliament. The terms are confidential, no admission of culpability has been made and the claimants have not withdrawn their allegations. The alternative to any payments would have been “protracted and extremely expensive” litigation. This could have cost between £30m and £50m. There could have been no inquiry while those cases were under way. However, the Gibson inquiry cannot run in parallel with a criminal inquiry. The criminal investigations have to conclude first.
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16 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated | The legal community has been digesting yesterday’s announcement of government plans for legal aid to be reduced by around £350 per year from 2014-15.
Most commentators and legal professionals are worried that less money for legal representation will lead to less access to justice for the poorer members of society. But some have also expressed relief that the criminal legal aid scheme has been left largely untouched, as have funding for inquests, judicial reviews and asylum cases.
For those who have a view on the reforms, the Ministry of Justice has an online questionnaire which can be filled in here.
Nicholas Green QC (Chairman of the Bar of England and Wales: “A permanent contraction of justice cannot be justified by the “big society” or by any sort of philosophical mantra. Ultimately an efficient justice system is fundamental to the wellbeing of the country. We only have to look at our television screen at events unfolding in Burma and elsewhere to see the undeniable truth of that proposition.”
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15 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated x 2 | The lord chancellor Ken Clarke has announced plans for significant cuts to the legal aid system, which provides funding for legal representation to those who otherwise cannot afford it. The plans were largely as expected and will be open to consultation.
Update: The MoJ has published full details of the plans:
- The main documents, including impact assessments are here
- The proposals can be downloaded here
- Views on the consultation can be submitted online here
- A summary of the plans can be found here.
- The consultation on proposals for reform for civl litigation funding (the Jackson review) is here.
The scale of the cuts is expected to be around £350m out of the £2.2bm budget, which is just over 15%. Some of the plans had been leaked with partial accuracy by the Sunday Telegraph.
Update x 2: Read a summary of the reaction to the cuts here and an analysis of the underlying rational here.
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15 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
Pink Tape, a family law blog written by barrister Lucy Reed, has published the latest Blawg (legal blog) review.
For more about legal blogging, see here. If you have never come across the Blawg review, which has reached its 290th edition, here is the explanation from the blog carnival’s headquarters:
Blawg Review is the blog carnival for everyone interested in law. A peer-reviewed blog carnival, the host of each Blawg Review decides which of the submissions and recommended posts are suitable for inclusion in the presentation. And the host is encouraged to source another dozen or so interesting posts to fit with any special theme of that issue of Blawg Review. The host’s personal selections usually include several that reflect the character and subject interests of the host blawg, recognizing that the regular readership of the blog should find some of the usual content, and new readers of the blog via Blawg Review ought to get some sense of the unique perspective and subject specialties of the host. Thanks to all the law bloggers who collaborate to make Blawg Review one of the very best blog carnivals of any genre.
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The Department for Communities and Local Government has published its plans for “the most radical reform of social housing in a generation”. 
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