The Weekly Round Up: Chemical castration, historic deportations, and excommunication
28 May 2025
In the news
The Ministry of Justice’s plan to roll out the chemical castration of convicted sex offenders has met with academic criticism, legal warnings, and comparisons to controversial schemes in other jurisdictions. The programme, announced this week by justice secretary Shabana Mahmood, is set to be piloted in twenty prisons in England and Wales as one of a number of “radical” reforms proposed in former Lord Chancellor David Gauke’s Independent Sentencing Review. Professor David Grubin of Newcastle University joined other forensic psychiatry experts expressing scepticism of the measure, saying that, although it was likely to reduce reoffending rates significantly, its “mandatory element” was “very unethical and… most doctors I know would be resistant to it.” Similar ‘Anti-Libidinal Intervention’ (ALI) schemes have been been introduced on a voluntary basis in Denmark and Germany, and mandatorily in Poland and Moldova – in the latter case, lasting for barely one year, before the country’s constitutional court quashed the measure for what it ruled as its fundamental human rights infringements. ALI programmes elsewhere have seen widespread condemnation from human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, citing in particular their violation of European Convention Articles 3 (prohibition of degrading punishment), 8 and 12 (right to private life and to found a family). Marcus Johnstone of PCD Solicitors has said that the current proposals for ALIs in the UK would lead to challenges in the courts.
On 22 May the UK Government finalised a treaty restoring the Chagos Islands (pictured) to Mauritius, following years of negotiations and a last-minute High Court challenge from two former residents of Diego Garcia – the largest of the islands, still exempted from resettlement on account of it housing a UK-US military base. The Indian Ocean archipelago was purchased by the UK in 1968. Its entire population was then forcibly displaced, with British Indian Ocean Territory Immigration Ordinance 1971 making it a criminal offence for any Chagossian to remain or return. This week’s development follows twenty-five years of the Islanders’ right to return being fought through the High Court (2000), House of Lords (2008), European Court of Human Rights (2012), Supreme Court (2016) and International Court of Justice (2019). Human Rights Watch have called the episode an “appalling colonial crime”, holding that the UK may be liable for the crimes against humanity of “deportation or forcible transfer of a population”, and “persecution on the grounds of racial, ethnic or other grounds” (Articles 7(d) and 7(h) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court). The latest announcement has met with a mixed response from Chagossian campaign groups, with Chagossian Voices denouncing the continued military occupation of Diego Garcia, as well as the wide discretion given to Mauritius in the implementation of the Islanders’ resettlement.
In the courts
The Court of Appeal has held that an appellant’s Article 10 (freedom of expression) right to speak out against the church from which he was excommunicated did not extend to his breach of an undertaking not to make offensive comments about his family members. In Lance Jamieson Christie v Weavabel Group Ltd ([2025] EWCA Civ 644), Mr Christie appealed against a suspended two-week prison sentence for contempt of court, following his breach of an undertaking made in November 2023 not to “make any derogatory comments” about his estranged wife and children – from whom he was cut-off by his excommunication from the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church in 2017 – through 59 alleged contempts widely communicated by email and on YouTube. Mr Christie had submitted that the findings of contempt would have a “chilling effect” upon his freedom to wage an online campaign against the beliefs and practices of the Plymouth Brethren, of which his ex-wife and sons incidentally remained members. Coulson LJ held that a plea of Article 10 was untenable as a defence to contempt of court; that the rights of Mr Christie’s sons and their mother outweighed his under Article 10; and that the two-week sentence was “generous”. “There is a world of difference between, on the one hand, writing articles and expressing trenchant views about the [Plymouth Brethren], and, on the other, making derogatory remarks about your ex-wife and children.”
