Law Pod UK New Episode: The Judge Over Your Shoulder
28 October 2024
Over 30 years ago, the Pergau Dam affair, linking aid to trade with Malaysia burst into the papers as one of Britain’s biggest aid scandals. The government promised to supply aid to build a hydroelectric plant at Pergau in exchange for a major arms deal with Malaysia. The trouble was that the Pergau Dam project was deemed hopelessly uneconomic by officials in both Britain and Malaysia. In late 1994, the deal was declared unlawful in a landmark case in the High Court. In Episode 206 Liz Fisher, Professor of Environmental Law at Oxford University joins Sir Tim Lancaster, who was Permanent Secretary to the aid department at the time the Pergau Dam story broke. The case that followed – R v Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs ex parte The World Development Movement Ltd [1995] marked a change in judges’ approach to government policy, and we’ll be discussing the much more interventionist role of judges as they participate in lawmaking today, including the recent climate change judgements in R (on the application of Finch on behalf of the Weald Action Group) (Appellant) v Surrey County Council and others (Respondents) – see my post on that case here – and more recently in Friends of the Earth v Secretary of State for Levelling Up.
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