The Weekly Round-up: Russian human rights abuses in Ukraine, climate litigation on the rise, Assange pleads guilty and goes free
1 July 2024
In UK news
Julian Assange has been released from HM Prison Belmarsh after accepting a plea deal with American prosecutors. Assange pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, for communicating with whistleblower Chelsea Manning and receiving and publishing classified information regarding Guantanamo Bay, the Afghan and Iraq war, and US diplomatic cables. After being released from Belmarsh, he travelled to the North Mariana Islands to enter his plea, before travelling on to Australia now a free man. NGOs and media figures have voiced concerns that Assange’s guilty plea will have a chilling effect on journalists.
The Grantham Research Institute based at LSE has published a report charting the rise of climate litigation. The report found that in 2023, 230 new cases were filed against governments and companies challenging their response to the climate crisis. The report describes how these cases are reaching new domestic jurisdictions and anticipates that more cases are likely to be filed after the success of KlimaSeniorinnen and ors v. Switzerland at the ECtHR. In the UK, the Supreme Court recently held that the grant of planning permission for oil production in Surrey was unlawful as it failed to assess the greenhouse gas emissions that would inevitably arise after the oil was burnt. The Supreme Court emphasised the importance of public participation in environmental decision-making, leading some to speculate that the judgment could spur on new legal challenges to climate policy. See Rosalind English’s post on this ruling in the UKHRB here.
In international news
This week saw multiple international courts react to Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine. International Criminal Court (ICC) judges have issued arrest warrants against Russian officials Sergei Kuzhugetovich Shoigu (former Minister of Defence) and Valery Vasilyevich Gerasimov (Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces and First Deputy Minister of Defence). The ICC judges found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that they bear individual criminal responsibility for crimes including directing attacks at civilian objectives, causing excessive incidental harm to civilians or damage to civilian objects and inhumane acts. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found that Russia is responsible for a wide variety of human rights abuses in Crimea, a Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia in 2014. The judgment deals with events that took place before the full scale invasion in 2022, and chronicles a systematic campaign of repression against Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar civil society. This includes the transfer of political prisoners to Russia and restrictions on Ukrainian language and culture. The ECtHR unanimously found breaches of articles 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, articles 1 and 2 of Protocol 1, articles 2 of Protocol 4, and articles 14 and 18.
The ICC has allowed the UK government to present legal arguments that it does not have jurisdiction over Israeli nationals, likely delaying the court’s decision whether or not to issue arrest warrants against PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant (Minister of Defence). The NGO Forbidden Stories has collaborated with Israeli +972 magazine to document the alleged targeting of journalists within Gaza, as over 100 journalists have been killed since October 2023. The UN has published another famine alert for Gaza stating that 96% of the population faces acute food insecurity at “crisis” level or higher.
In the courts
The Court of Appeal has held that the National Crime Agency (NCA) misdirected itself in law when deciding not to investigate whether imported cotton products from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) were the product of forced labour or other human rights abuses committed by China. The Uyghurs are a Turkic Muslim minority subject to intense repression in China, which some argue amounts to a genocide (this is disputed by the UK government). The court recognised that there is a consensus regarding widespread exploitation and abuse within China’s cotton production and that 85% of Chinese cotton comes from XUAR. The court held that the NCA was wrong to state that it could not start an investigation unless a specific consignment of cotton produced through human rights abuses was identified. Furthermore, the NCA was wrong to state that providing “adequate consideration” for goods could prevent goods imported into the UK from constituting criminal property.
The US Supreme Court has struck down the Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the most influential precedents in US administrative law. The “Chevron doctrine” was a rule of statutory interpretation; it stated that where Congress did not directly address the meaning of a statute, a court was required to defer to the administrative agencies’ interpretation as long as it was reasonable. In the leading judgment, Judge Roberts stated that it is the role of the courts to “decide legal questions by applying their own judgment” and “it thus remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether the law means what the agency says”. Therefore, this case represents a big shift in the balance of power from the executive to the judiciary.
