The Weekly Round Up: New UK asylum bill, judicial roles in assisted dying, ICC suspect freed in Italy, and Reporting Restrictions Orders under HRA
3 February 2025
In UK news
The UK Government introduced its Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill to Parliament on 30 January. The Law Society welcomed the Bill’s repeal of the controversial Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 – described by Society president Richard Atkinson as ‘one of the most damaging pieces of legislation in recent history’ – and certain provisions of the Illegal Migration Act 2023. However, a number of charities have expressed concern that the Bill’s proposed anti-people-smuggling measures – including the creation of what Home Secretary Yvette Cooper calls ‘counter-terror-style powers’ – will adversely affect legitimate asylum seekers. ‘We are very concerned that by creating new offences, many refugees themselves could also be prosecuted’, wrote the Refugee Council. ‘This would be a gross miscarriage of justice… The most effective way to break the smuggling gangs’ grip is to stop refugees from getting into the boats in the first place, which means giving them a legal way to apply for asylum in the UK.’
This week also saw the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill undergo the scrutiny of the Commons General Committee. Lord Sumption, former Justice of the Supreme Court, told the Committee that the Bill’s requirement that those applying for assisted dying would need the approval of a High Court judge as well as two doctors was ‘unnecessary and in some respects undesirable… It is not entirely clear what the judge is supposed to do … Is he there to ensure that the two doctors have done their job… or is he there to form his own view on these matters, completely independently of all those who have given certificates? If the latter, one is talking about quite a time-consuming process, involving a lot of additional evidence. It seems to me this is a protection which no other country, so far that I am aware of among those who have authorised assisted dying, have included.’ The Committee sits again on 11 February.
In international news
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is under investigation by her country’s prosecutors for releasing and repatriating Osama al-Masri, a Libyan warlord wanted by the International Criminal Court. The Court issued its arrest warrant for Al-Masri on 18 January, citing his alleged command over a network of prisons in Tripoli, and ‘crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, torture, rape and sexual violence, allegedly committed in Libya from February 2015 onwards.’ Al-Masri was arrested by the Italian authorities at a football game in Turin only a day after the warrant’s issue, before his release on 21 January ‘without prior notice or consultation of the Court.’ Meloni’s Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, who is now also under investigation, had told the Italian Senate that al-Masri’s deportation was ‘for urgent security reasons, with my expulsion order, in view of the danger posed by the subject.’ It has since been claimed that al-Masri was released on a technicality, following bureaucratic errors made in the course of the suspect’s arrest. These are said to have compelled the Italian court of appeal to refuse to validate his further detention. Al-Masri was then boarded onto a military plane and safely returned to Libya.
In the courts
The Court of Appeal has allowed an appeal brought by two freelance journalists, permitting the disclosure of the names of two family court judges behind historic care proceedings relating to the murdered schoolgirl Sara Sharif. In Louise Tickle & Anor v The BBC & Ors [2025] EWCA Civ 42, Sir Geoffrey Vos MR ruled that Mr Justice Williams had ‘no jurisdiction’ to make a Reporting Restrictions Order anonymising the judges in December last year – save a possible obligation to do so under section 6(1) of the Human Rights Act (HRA) 1998, had it been necessary to avoid an infringement of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR).
Sir Geoffrey found that there was ‘no evidential basis’ on which to believe that the threshold for the application of ECHR Articles 2 (right to life), 3 (freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment) or 8 (respect for family and private life) was reached. ‘For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying that judges are obliged to tolerate any form of abuse or threats… Nor am I saying that it would never be possible for section 6 of the HRA to allow, or even require, a court to consider… an anonymisation order in relation to judges. In my judgment, however, it is very hard to imagine how such a situation could occur.’ It would require: (1) ‘compelling evidence… as to the risks’; (2) the court to be ‘satisfied that those risks could not be adequately addressed by other security measures’; and (3) the court ‘to conclude that the risks were so grave that, exceptionally, they provided a justification for overriding the fundamental principle of open justice.’
