Monthly News Archives: July 2011
11 July 2011 by Melina Padron
Welcome 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 Melinda Padron
In the news – it’s all about the Als
This week the long-awaited judgments of the Al-Skeini and Al-Jedda cases both against the UK before the European Court of Human Rights were finally released. These will undoubtedly be regarded as landmark judgments of the Court.
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9 July 2011 by David Hart KC
RWE Npower Renewables Ltd v. Welsh Ministers & Swansea Council [2011] EWHC 1778 (Admin) Read judgment
There are two things which public law fairness demands of a judge or a planning inspector before they rule against a party. The first is to make sure that any doubts about a party’s case is put to that party so he can respond. The second is that the judge or inspector explains his reasons for his conclusions in summary form. Unfortunately, in this case, the inspector did neither, and hence the decision was quashed by Beatson J. The judgment, at [37], contains a very good summary of the current cases on the adequacy of reasons in both planning and non-planning contexts.
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8 July 2011 by John Joliffe
Access to environmental justice is as topical as ever. Delegates at the recent conference of the United Kingdom Environmental Law Association (UKELA), held in late June at UEA in Norwich (yards from the Climatic Research Unit much in the news) argued that the current regime in this country is unsatisfactory – because of the cost, but also, and less predictably, because of a lack of basic fairness.
One QC who specialises in planning law pointed to the fact that a developer who is dissatisfied with a planning decision can appeal it, but an affected third party (often a disgruntled resident) cannot. He commented off the record that in his experience both as an advocate and as a decision-maker, decisions were affected by the knowledge that developers could readily challenge refusals, whereas third parties could not challenge grants other than by way of judicial review.
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8 July 2011 by Martin Downs
R (on the application of G) v The Governors of X School [2011] UKSC 30 – Read judgment
On 4 October 2007 the parents of a 15 year old boy complained that he had been kissed by his 22 year old school sessional music teaching assistant (G).
After an (inconclusive) Police investigation, the school held a disciplinary hearing and dismissed G. They also referred his case to the Secretary of State with a view to him being barred from working with children. The Claimant appealed to the school governors. He also sought to be represented by his solicitor. In this he was successful on judicial review and at the Court of Appeal.
The question for the Supreme Court was, did Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights (the right to a fair trial) mean that G was entitled to be legally represented at the hearing before the school governors?
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7 July 2011 by Adam Wagner
Updated | The legal blogs have been busy reporting on this morning’s important decisions of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in Al-Skeini and Al-Jedda – see my post.
There has been coverage already from PHD Studies in Human Rights, the Human Rights in Ireland Blog (update – see also EJIL: Talk: “Let me put this as strongly as I can: this is as close as we’ve ever come to the European Court overruling Bankovic. And good riddance – except, as we will see, the Court’s disavowal of Bankovic is only half-hearted at best.”). The Guardian has also published an article on the case in which Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers claims that the decisions will reopen the case for a wider public inquiry into alleged detainee mistreatment in Iraq; the firm recently failed in a judicial review of a decision not to hold a public inquiry on behalf of 127 Iraqis.
Many thanks to Antoine Buyse of the ECHR Blog for highlighting the lyrical and eminently quotable concurring opinion of Maltese Judge Giovanni Bonello, who since writing the judgment has retired from the court. Bonello said that he would have applied a slightly different “functional jurisdiction” test to decide whether the applicants fell within the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom.
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7 July 2011 by Adam Wagner
Al-Skeini v. United Kingdom, European Court of Human Rights Grand Chamber (Application no. 55721/07) – Read judgment / press release
Al-Jedda v. the UK (Application No. 27021/08)- Read judgment / press release
The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that from 1 May 2003 to 28 June 2004 the UK had jurisdiction under Article 1 (obligation to respect human rights) of the European Convention on Human Rights in respect of civilians killed during security operations carried out by UK soldiers in Basrah.
The court went on to find in Al-Skeini that there had been a failure to conduct an independent and effective investigation into the deaths of the relatives of five of the six applicants, in violation of Article 2 (right to life) of the Convention. The court awarded 17,000 euros to five of the six applicants, in addition to 50,000 euros in costs jointly.
In Al-Jedda, the court found a violation of Article 5 (1) (right to liberty and security) of the European Convention in relation to the internment of an Iraqi for more than three years (2004- 2007) in a detention centre in Basrah.
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6 July 2011 by Adam Wagner
The News of the World phone-hacking scandal has reignited over claims that phones belonging to the families of 7/7 bombing victims and murdered children such as Milly Dowler were hacked.
The scandal has been rumbling on since 2007, but is again the main story in the news. The affair has been the subject of a number of court hearings, mostly surrounding disclosure by News International in the ongoing private compensation claims by alleged victims. There are important issues of privacy and freedom of the press surrounding some of the allegations, but primarily this is a criminal investigation into the illegal hacking of mobile phones.
For those who are coming to the issue for the first time, or need a little revision, there is no better starting point than the International Forum for Responsible Media (INFORRM) Blog, which has been covering the scandal in meticulous detail since its launch around 18 months ago. In particular, see:
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5 July 2011 by Adam Wagner
Sir Nicolas Bratza, the only UK judge at the European Court of Human Rights, has been elected as its new President. The start of his presidency will coincide with the UK’s 6-month chairmanship of the Council of Europe which begins in November 2011.
Bratza will succeed Frenchman John Paul Costa on 4 November 2011 after being elected in a secret ballot by the court’s 47 judges, and has been elected for a term of 3 years. He may use the opportunity to improve relations with the UK government which are tense following the Council’s warning that the UK must comply with a 2005 ruling against the UK’s indiscriminate ban on prisoners voting. The Prime Minister said in November that the thought of giving prisoners the vote makes him feel “physically ill“. The deadline for UK compliance is 11 October 2011.
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4 July 2011 by Graeme Hall
Welcome 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.
by Graeme Hall
In the news:
Having had its second reading in the House of Commons, one of this week’s legal hot potatoes is the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill. A detailed analysis of the Bill can be found on the Law Society Gazette’s website. Of interest, the government’s proposal to provide up to £20million extra for the provision of social welfare legal advice received a cautious welcome from Steve Hyne, director of Legal Action Group. Nonetheless Hyne, writing for the Guardian.co.uk, concludes that the extra funding is no replacement for the continued provision of legal aid, particularly if the money is a one-off. Adam Wagner summarizes early responses to the Bill from the legal-world here.
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3 July 2011 by David Hart KC
Many will remember the batch of e-mails hacked in 2009 that caused delight in climate change sceptic circles (see this example from James Delingpole), and considerable embarrassment to UEA; some of it concerned the famous or infamous hockeystick graph (see below) showing temperature change over the last 1000 years.
This environmental information case is the sequel. And, as we shall see, strange is the territory into which the right to information leads us: so far I have posted on pearls and badgers and oilseed rape, bees, lettuces and mobile phone masts. Now we are into global weather data going back to 1850.
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1 July 2011 by Adam Wagner
Smith & Ors v Ministry of Defence [2011] EWHC 1676 (QB) – Read judgment
Update, 20 June 2013: This decision has been reversed by the Supreme Court: Supreme Court gives the go ahead for negligence and human rights claims for British servicemen deaths in Iraq
The Human Rights Act applies in the UK. That much is clear. Whether it applies outside of UK territory is a whole other question, and one for which we may have a new answer when the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights gives judgment in the case of Al-Skeini and others v. the United Kingdom & Al-Jedda v. the United Kingdom next week.
The court is to give its long-awaited ruling at 10am (Strasbourg time) on Thursday 7 July. In short, the 7 applicants in the case were killed, allegedly killed or detained (Al-Jedda) by British forces in Iraq between 2003 and 2007. Both of the claims reached the House of Lords in the UK (now the Supreme Court), and in all but one case, which involved a death in a military detention centre, the court found that the Human Rights Act did not apply in Basra at the time, and therefore the UK military had no obligation to observe the requirements under the European Convention on Human Rights, and in particular article 2 (the right to life) and article 5 (right to liberty).
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1 July 2011 by Matthew Flinn
IR (Sri Lanka) & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] EWCA Civ 704 – Read Judgment
The Court of Appeal has rejected an argument that Article 8 of the European Convention of Rights (ECHR), the right to private and family life, requires that those challenging deportation and exclusion decisions on grounds of national security in proceedings before the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) have to be given sufficient disclosure of the case against them to enable them to effectively instruct the special advocate representing their interests.
In his book “The Rule of Law”, the late Lord Tom Bingham enumerated a number of sub-rules to give content to that cardinal, oft-cited but rather vague constitutional principle. Unsurprisingly, one such sub-rule was that adjudicative procedures provided by the state should be fair, an idea which found expression in documents as old Magna Carta. In turn, this entails that, as Lord Mustill stated in In re D (Minors) (Adoption Reports: Confidentiality) [1996] AC 593, “each party to a judicial process should have an opportunity to answer by evidence and argument any adverse material which the tribunal make take into account when forming its opinion”.
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