Monthly News Archives: July 2011
20 July 2011 by Alasdair Henderson
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 Human Rights being brought by Christians who claim their Article 9 rights are not being sufficiently protected in UK law.
The applicants are Nadia Eweida, Shirley Chaplin, Lillian Ladele and Gary McFarlane, each of whom has lost claims of workplace discrimination on the grounds of religion and belief in the UK courts over the past couple of years (see our general comment pieces here and here). The EHRC has now said that in its view “Judges have interpreted the law too narrowly in religion or belief discrimination claims” and that “the way existing human rights and equality law has been interpreted by judges is insufficient to protect freedom of religion or belief.”
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19 July 2011 by Rosalind English
Christopher Hutcheson (formerly known as KGM) v News Group Newspapers and others – read judgment
In these turbulent times for Rupert Murdoch (see our contempt post) it seems strange to see one of his newspapers being vindicated by the courts, but, for once, The Sun seems to be coming up smelling of roses.
These proceedings concerned Mr. Hutcheson’s application to restrain NGN from publishing certain information. In 1968 he married a lady with whom he had four children, who are now grown up. The marriage still subsists. In the meantime, from about 1976 he developed a relationship with another woman with whom, in 1979 and 1981 respectively, he had two children.
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19 July 2011 by Adam Wagner
Attorney General v Associated Newspapers Ltd & Anor [2011] EWHC 1894 (Admin) – Read judgment
The High Court has handed down fines of £15,000 each and to Associated Newspapers and News Group Newspapers (NGN), owners of The Daily Mail and The Sun, for contempt of court. The companies will also have to pay £28,117.23 to cover the Attorney General’s costs. This blog’s co-editor Angus McCullough QC appeared for the Attorney General in the case but is not the writer of this post.
The newspapers’ owners, particularly NGN, probably have other things on their minds at the moment. But the fines, which relate to contempt proceedings decided in March (read judgment / my post) represent something of a landmark, as they are the first relating to online publication. In this case, The Sun Online and Mail Online published pictures of Ryan Ward holding a gun whilst he was on trial for murder.
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19 July 2011 by Rosalind English
When the Welsh Assembly voted to ban the use of the electronic training collar, which works by emitting an electric stimulus when the dog goes near a forbidden object like a fence, the main opponents of the ban the Electronic Collar Manufacturers’ Association were quick to take judicial review proceedings against the Welsh lawmakers.
They alleged that the ban was in breach of Article 1 of the First Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to enjoyment of possessions and property) and the prohibitions in Articles 34 and 56 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which prohibit restrictions to free trade.
They were unsuccessful in their bid to disqualify the ban and we posted an analysis of the case and the issues it raised. Since this post has attracted over three thousand hits since its publication, we feel it only right to follow it up with this story of the first prosecution under the ban.
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18 July 2011 by Graeme Hall
In the week that saw the UK Human Rights Blog reach half a million hits, we welcome you back to the human rights roundup, a regular bulletin of all the law we haven’t quite managed to feature in full blog posts. The full list of links, updated each day, can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here.
by Graeme Hall
In the news:
Phone-hacking
With the resignation of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, and the arrest of the former Chief Executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, the phone-hacking scandal revelations continue to snowball. Adam Wagner considers what role human rights may have played in the News of the World’s demise, here.
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17 July 2011 by Rosalind English
1 Crown Office Row’s Peter Skelton appeared for The Security Services in this case. He is not the author of this post.
On Wednesday last week, the Supreme Court handed out two apparently contradictory judgments on what seemed to be the same issue – see our reports here and here. Had they taken leave of their senses? In one case, the court appeared to say, there was no illegality or human rights-incompatibility with a procedure that dispensed with the requirement that all the material must be shown to both parties in every case. In the other, it ruled that such a “closed procedure” was such an insult to “fundamental” common law principles of open justice and fairness that no court, however lofty, would have the jurisdiction to order it without statutory authority.
The key to this apparent inconsistency lies in the principles at the heart of these cases, which pull in opposite directions: the principle of fair and open justice, or, in Article 6 terms, “equality of arms,” versus the principle that gives weight to the interests of national security.
In Tariq v Home Office the Court considered the permissibility and compatibility with European Union law and the European Convention of a closed material procedure authorised by certain statutory provisions. The issues in that case centred on the lawfulness and effect of those provisions and their compatibility with, amongst others, Article 6 of the Convention, whereas in Al Rawi v Home Office the Court was concerned with the position at common law. This superficially small distinction made the world of difference to the outcome of both cases.
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15 July 2011 by David Hart KC
U & Partners (East Anglia) Ltd, R (on the application of) v. The Broads Authority [2011] EWHC 1824 (Admin) 13 July 2011. Read judgment
I posted recently about a case, Buglife, which affects the rule that judicial review must be commenced “promptly and in any event not later than 3 months.” Buglife decided that, contrary to a previous Court of Appeal case, Finn-Kelcey, a court could not bowl out certain claims if they were commenced within those 3 months, even if not “promptly”. And the Broads case of this week reached the same conclusion. The key to these cases is that they involve challenging the application of a Euro-directive.
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14 July 2011 by Adam Wagner
According to our statometer, the UK Human Rights Blog by 1 Crown Office Row chambers has just surpassed 500,000 hits.
This is a bit of a landmark for a site which launched at the end of March 2010. We had hoped that the blog would be useful for lawyers and the general public, and that it would in part compensate for some of the mischievous and misrepresentative reporting of human rights law. But we never expected it to take off in the way that it has.
It is a happy coincidence that we have reached this landmark in a week which has seen the two most important courts for UK human rights – the Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights – both releasing pairs of landmark judgments in Al Rawi / Tariq, on the use of secret evidence in civil proceedings, and Al-Skeini / Al-Jedda, on where in the world the European Convention applies.
We now have 1,558 subscribers by email (you too can subscribe for free), 1,065 on Facebook, and 2,991 via my account on Twitter. We also have recently updated our introduction to the European Convention on Human Rights and introduced a human rights case table. As always, your comments are gratefully received.
This is our 853rd post. In the tradition of such posts, here are our top 20 all time greatest hits:
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14 July 2011 by Alasdair Henderson
The decisions by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in Al-Skeini and Al-Jedda, handed down last Thursday, have generally been hailed as leap forward for human rights protection. We have already provided a summary of the decisions and pointed to some of the commentary here.
However, it is worth considering the core parts of these rulings a little more carefully. Without wishing to put too much of a dampener on the initial excitement from human rights campaigners about the outcome, the Court’s reasoning is perhaps not quite the radical breakthrough it first appeared to be. In fact, as Judge Bonello pointed out in his concurring opinion (which has drawn a lot of attention for his comments about ‘human rights imperialism’), the principles governing jurisdiction under Article 1 of the ECHR are not that much clearer following these decisions.
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14 July 2011 by Rosalind English
Farouk Sabeh el Leil v France (29 June 2011) – read judgment
When a diplomatic employee takes action for compensation for unfair dismissal, the host country’s courts cannot simply rule out the possibility of a claim on the basis that the employer has state immunity. This would impair the very essence of his right of access to a court under Article 6 of the Convention.
The applicant, a French national, had been employed as an accountant in the Kuwaiti embassy in Paris since August 1980. He was promoted to head accountant in 1985. In March 2000, the Embassy terminated his contract as part of a cost-cutting exercise. His application to the local employment tribunal was initially successful but ultimately failed before the Paris Court of Appeals which found that the State of Kuwait enjoyed jurisdictional immunity on the basis of which it was not subject to court actions against it in France.
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13 July 2011 by Guest Contributor
R (NM) Secretary v of State for Justice [2011] EWHC 1816 – Read judgment
This case concerned whether the prison authorities were in breach of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the Equality Act 2010 when they failed to conduct a form investigation into a sexual assault against a prisoner with learning disabilities, NM.
It was further considered whether the failure to conduct a formal investigation was in breach of NM’s Article 3 rights. The claimant was assisted in bringing his case by the Howard League for Penal Reform. The court found in relation to all points that the defendant had acted lawfully.
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13 July 2011 by Rosalind English
1 Crown Office Row’s Peter Skelton appeared for The Security Services in this case. He is not the author of this post.
Al Rawi and others (Respondents) (Respondents) v The Security Service and others (Appellants) [2011] UKSC 34 – read judgment; read press summary
At the centre of this appeal was the court’s power to order a “closed material procedure” for the whole or part of the trial of a civil claim for damages. The question arose as a “preliminary issue” – a point to be determined on its own – in the appellants’ compensation claim for their alleged detention, rendition and mistreatment by foreign authorities in various locations, including Guantanamo Bay.
In countering the respondents’ claim for compensation, the appellant security services claimed that they had security sensitive material within their possession which they wished the court to consider in their defence but which could not be disclosed to the respondents. They therefore sought a “closed material procedure” for this part of their defence – a procedure whereby a party can withhold certain material from the other side where its disclosure would be contrary to the public interest.
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13 July 2011 by Rosalind English
Home Office (Appellant) v Tariq (Respondent); Home Office (Respondent) v Tariq (Appellant) – read judgment; read press release
In these appeals the question was whether a claimant in employment tribunal proceedings may be excluded from certain aspects of those proceedings on grounds of national security, without breaching the right to fair trail under Article 6 of the Convention. Mr Tariq had been suspended from his job as immigration officer following the arrest of his brother and cousin for involvement in the suspected transatlantic airline terrorist plot. There was no suggestion that Mr Tariq himself had been involved.
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12 July 2011 by Adam Wagner
2011 may be remembered as the year of Article 8. The public may not realise it, but the two major news stories of this year have had at their core the 8th article of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to privacy and family life. And without this controversial law, the phone-hacking scandal may never have been exposed.
First came the super-injunctions scandal, in which the public, egged on by the popular press, became enraged at sportsmen using expensive privacy injunctions to keep details of their alleged bad behaviour out of the news. That scandal has now been replaced by a much bigger one, relating to illegal phone hacking. The affair has already led to the demise of the News of the World.
As the human rights organisation Liberty have pointed out, the newspaper was never a fan of New Labour’s Human Rights Act. Amongst other things, it fought an expensive and partially successful privacy battle against Max Mosley over claims that he slept with prostitutes in a “sick Nazi orgy“. It has always been suspected that the tabloid press’s almost universal antipathy towards the 1998 Act, which in theory at least should be popular as it protects citizens against nasty state intrusion, was inspired by the fear that the privacy rights it bolstered, despite the competing right to freedom of expression, would prevent them doing their jobs. And now, with some irony, it is a tabloid newspaper and not a public authority which may represent the 1998 Act’s most high-profile scalp.
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12 July 2011 by Graeme Hall
Updated | In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that a mechanism should be put in place to review whether convicted sex offenders should remain liable after their release from prison to notify the police of where they live or plans to travel abroad. In June 2011, the government published draft legislation to “ensure that strict rules are put in place for considering whether individuals should ever be removed from the register.” However, it is possible that the “strict rules” leave the government vulnerable to further legal challenges.
To recap (see also Adam Wagner’s post), section 82 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 places those convicted of a sexual offence and imprisoned for at least 30 months under a life-long obligation once released from prison to notify the police when changing address and travelling abroad (“the notification requirements”). The Supreme Court ruled that the notification requirements violated sex offenders’ Article 8 rights to a private life and issued a declaration of incompatibility.
by Graeme Hall
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