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This interesting decision shows the intersection between the right to education and the right to freedom of religion under the ECHR. These are fast evolving rights, particularly Article 9, whose “freedom” stipulation is becoming more important than the “religion” right. Article 9 is more and more often taken to cover the right not to cleave to any religion at all.
In this case the arguments were focussed on the right to education under Article 2 Protocol 1 of the Convention, taken together with Article 9. The main issue before the Supreme Court can be briefly stated. Did religious education and collective worship provided in a school in Northern Ireland breach the rights of a child, and the child’s parents, under Article 2 of the First Protocol (“A2P1”) to the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”) read with Article 9 ECHR?
What is particularly interesting and unusual about this judgment is that it emerges from Northern Ireland with its own history of sectarianism and religious division. The very basis from which the case sprang goes back well over a hundred years; since Partition, the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, and the Methodist Church in Ireland are under the control of what is now the Education Authority, and that is where we start our story, details of which can be found in the Supreme Court’s press summary.
Before we get going on this story, let’s highlight this sharp obvservation about the NI education system in paragraph 88 :
there is no commitment in the core syllabus to objectivity or to the development of critical thought. To teach pupils to accept a set of beliefs without critical analysis amounts to evangelism, proselytising, and indoctrination.
According to Strasbourg Jurisprudence, the State is forbidden to pursue an aim of indoctrination that might be considered as not respecting parents’ religious and philosophical convictions. That is the limit that must not be exceeded [see Kjedsen v Denmark (A/23) (1979–80) 1 EHRR711 at [53]].
In this instance, the Supreme Court did not make a separate and distinct finding of indoctrination. It was unnecessary to do so because conveying information and knowledge in a manner which is not objective, critical, and pluralistic manner amounts to indoctrination.
As I observed in Part I of this article, no UK court has yet issued a judgment in a libel or defamation claim concerning AI-generated content, but several cases and legal actions are emerging and the issue is widely anticipated to reach the courts soon. Proceedings are emerging in other jurisdictions in the US (see Part I) and in Australia.
Belfast- based libel lawyer Paul Tweed is reportedly preparing a group action in the UK against technology providers (including OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Amazon) alleging that their AI chatbots and other AI-generated content breach defamation and privacy laws. The 2013 Defamation Act provides for certain protection for internet intermediaries —specifically the statutory defences found in Section 5. Under this section operators of websites hosting user-generated content may enjoy immunity from suit when they comply with regulations after being notified of defamatory material. Social media platforms or hosts are generally not liable under UK law unless they have knowledge, control, or refuse to act upon notice of defamatory content. Claims must typically be directed at the original author, and intermediary platform liability arises mainly if the author is unidentifiable or unreachable.
This proposed group action will argue that generative AI material produced by the likes of ChatGPT is new material that falls outside of this immunity. Tweed is looking at three alleged grounds to bring an action: defamation by AI chatbots; unauthorised use of works for training AI models; and the creation by AI of fake biographies that he says are being sold by the likes of Amazon. In his letter to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee (February 2025) Mr Tweed asserted that there have been several serious examples of false allegations and misinformation appearing on a number of the generative AI platforms and chatbots, including “particularly troubling instances” where leading figures from academia and the law have been wrongly accused of serious misconduct.
Put simply, intended parents should avoid embarking on a surrogacy arrangement where they do not meet, have any knowledge of or means of contacting the surrogate who carries their much wanted child. (Mrs Justice Theis DBE)
This case concerned an application by intended parents for a parental order in respect of an 18-month-old child following a surrogacy arrangement with a surrogate in Nigeria whom neither of the intended parents had met and about whom they had no information.
In this episode three environmental law experts gather to discuss how people without deep pockets can avail themselves of the Aarhus Convention to take legal action in respect of environmental harms like pollution and sewage. Environmental law, a subject that barely existed thirty years ago, is now an established part of English law and is where international law, government policy and public interest litigation often meet head-on. Rosalind English introduces the panel moderator, Richard Wald KC, who chairs ELF. Emma Montlake, an executive director of the charity, helps to ensure that environmental decision making is both robust and transparent. And Carol Day of Leigh Day solicitors is one of the most experienced lawyers in bringing environmental challenges through the courts. The full citations of the cases discussed in this episodes is set out below.
River Action intervention in The National Farmers’ Union v Herefordshire Council & Ors [2025] EWHC 536 (Admin) (10 March 2025) (Admin)
The King (on the application of) The Badger Trust, Wild Justice v Natural England and Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [2025] EWHC 2761 (Admin)
Wildlife & Countryside Link intervention in C G Fry & Son Limited (Appellant) v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (formerly known as Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities) and another (Respondents) UKSC/2024/0108
Council for National Parks intervention in New Forest National Park Authority v (1) Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (2) Mr SimonLillington [2025] EWHC 726 (Admin)
HM Treasury v Global Feedback Ltd [2025] EWCA Civ 624 (Global Feedback Ltd has now changed its name to Foodrise Ltd and PTA to Supreme Court granted on 31 October 2025 (see here)
Wild Justice v Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority and Adventure Beyond Ltd (Interested Party) [2025] EWHC 2249 (Admin)
We all want to know about American libel law, now that President Trump has launched his pre-action missile at the BBC. If he pursues his claim it will be under Florida law, where his defamation action will not be statute barred. In the UK such claims must be commenced within one year of publication; Florida allows two. There are other significant differences between English and American defamation systems, which I will explore in this and the following post. Whatever the outcome of Trump v the BBC, the question that is occupying libel lawyers in the US at the moment is not a human run journalistic enterprise, whatever its flaws. It is the collision between antiquated libel laws the world over and the runaway publication machine called Artificial Intelligence.
No UK court has yet issued a judgment in a libel or defamation claim concerning AI-generated content, but several cases and legal actions are emerging and the issue is widely anticipated to reach the courts soon. I will discuss these later. There is rather more activity on this front across the pond. American defamation law is very different from ours, but we can see the enormous problems that arise when a technology provider is presented with a libel writ in respect of a statement that has been distributed by AI, if it has caused serious harm to a person’s reputation. A recent example is set out in an article in The New York Times byKen Bensinger, who reports that a solar contractor in Minnesota, called Wolf River Electric, noticed a dramatic fall off in sales.
“When they pressed their former customers for an explanation, the answers left them floored.
The clients said they had bailed after learning from Google searches that the company had settled a lawsuit with the state attorney general over deceptive sales practices. But the company had never been sued by the government, let alone settled a case involving such claims.
Confusion became concern when Wolf River executives checked for themselves. Search results that Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence technology, delivered at the top of the page included the falsehoods. And mentions of a legal settlement populated automatically when they typed “Wolf River Electric” in the search box.
Unsurprisingly, Wolf River executives decided they had no choice but to sue Google for defamation. This is just one instance of half a dozen libel claims filed in the US over the past two years over content produced by AI tools that generate text and images. Another case dating back to 2023 involved a talk radio host and a Second Amendment advocate (the right to carry a gun) who found out that AI had falsely accused him of embezzlement – this was discovered by a journalist looking up the radio presenter’s name on the internet.
The Court of Appeal in Re D has overturned final care and placement orders made at an Issues Resolution Hearing (“IRH”), stating that judges must give clear, reasoned findings on the threshold criteria under section 31(2) Children Act 1989 (“CA 1989”), even where proceedings are uncontested or parents are absent.
In delivering the judgment, Cobb LJ, with whom Baker LJ and Miles LJ agreed, criticised the short form reasoning used by the Family Court and stressed the need for transparent judicial decision-making when the State intervenes in family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”).
The legal dispute between Getty Images (and its associated companies) and Stability AI revolves around complex issues of copyright infringement, database rights, trademark infringement, and passing off. The arguments centred on the use of Getty Images’ visual content in the training and operation of Stability AI’s generative AI model, Stable Diffusion. Media firm Mischcon de Reya has acclaimed this as the “one of the most anticipated cases in recent years.” The case has significant implications for intellectual property law as it intersects with the development and deployment of AI technologies in the UK.
Background and Parties The claimants in the case are several related companies under the Getty Images brand. These entities collectively own or have exclusive licenses over millions of high-quality photographic and artistic images referred to as the “Visual Assets” or “Copyright Works.” Stability AI Limited, the defendant, is a UK-based company that developed the Stable Diffusion AI model, which is a deep learning image generation tool that creates images based on text or image prompts, including around 12.3 million visual assets, together with associated captions, from the Getty Images websites, as well as publicly accessible third-party websites.
According to Getty Images Stability AI scraped millions of their copyright-protected images from its websites without authorisation.
The Core Claims Getty Images initially brought a broad claim including allegations of primary and secondary copyright infringement, database right infringement, trademark infringement, and passing off. They argued that: • Stability AI unlawfully used Getty’s copyrighted works without permission to train the AI model. • The AI model outputs sometimes reproduced Getty’s images or bore their trademarks (watermarks), infringing Getty’s rights. • Stability AI’s making of the model weights available for download constituted secondary copyright infringement. (Model weights are the values that determine how inputs are transformed into outputs in a neural network, reflecting the strength and direction of connections between artificial neurons after training. During training, optimisation procedures adjust these weights so the model improves at a task; the final set of weights effectively encodes the model’s learned “knowledge” from data. These “weights” are machine-readable parameters, distinct from source code text; they are large arrays of numbers that operationalise the model’s behaviour rather than human-authored narrative code. • Use of Getty’s trademarked watermarks within generated images constituted trademark infringement.
As the judge observed,
Both sides emphasise the significance of this case to the different industries they represent: the creative industry on one side and the AI industry and innovators on the other. Where the balance should be struck between the interests of these opposing factions is of very real societal importance. Getty Images deny that their claim represents a threat to the AI industry or an attempt to curtail the development and use of AI models such as Stable Diffusion. However, their case remains that if creative industries are exploited by innovators such as Stability without regard to the efforts and intellectual property rights of creators, then such exploitation will pose an existential threat to those creative industries for generations to come.” [para 12]
Do advocates retain an absolute immunity for things and said and done in court, or must the invocation of the immunity be scrutinised on a case-by-case basis? A heavyweight panel of the Court of Appeal – including the Lady Chief Justice and the President of the King’s Bench Division – in Chief Constable of Sussex Police and the Crown Prosecution Service v XGY(Bar Council intervening) [2025] EWCA Civ 1230 (“XGY”) has come down decisively in favour of the former proposition, offering some much-needed clarity on this area of law.
Readers of this Blog may think that I’m going through a bit of a simian crisis. And that would be understandable; perhaps I am. But close on the news about baboon trapping (my previous post on these animals) comes a different story, one that reflects our very complicated and hypocritical approach to wild animals and what we perceive to be appropriate protections for them under the law.
Who doesn’t love a goldfinch, or a hedgehog? Or a cheetah, bounding through the African dust? We all do!
Who loves a baboon? Nobody! Apart from South Africa’s equivalent of our RSPCA, or the Wildlife Animal Protection Forum South Africa (WAPFSA), which is at the centre of the following story, recently highlighted by the Daily Maverick, South Africa’s only independent newspaper.
I would urge readers to read the DM article first. The author, investigative environental journalist Adam Cruise, urges us to attend to the wider story.
This isn’t just about baboons in the Stormberg region. It’s a mirror on our relationship with our wildlife heritage. South Africa is home to a unique biodiversity. If indigenous primates are abandoned, sanctuaries collapse and killing is proposed as a solution, how can we claim to be custodians of our wildlife?
In this post I will attempt to disentangle some legal themes from the story which powerfully illustrates the inconsistency in legal protections afforded to different wild animal species, and exposes the structural problems within that country’s animal welfare and environmental law regimes.
Before reading on, be aware that there are 39 chacma baboons abandoned on a farm near Burgersdorp in the Eastern Cape, stranded after their sanctuary was dissolved by government fiat. The farm owner, whose property the animals occupy, requested their removal because the permit had lapsed. The provincial authority reportedly suggested that the animals be killed within 72 hours, and offered the “cost-effective” option that the landowner “open the cages, chase the animals out and have a competent hunter dispatch the animals as humanely as possible”. I put up a picture of a cute baby baboon because people tend to recoil from the adult version.
Readers of this blog as well as listeners to Law Pod UK may remember the European Court of Human Rights’ controversial ruling in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland. We have written about it on the UKHRB here, and it has come up in Law Pod UK epsiodes discussing the ECHR, both in our interview with Lord Sumption here and our discussion with Marina Wheeler KC and David Wolfson KC here.
In it, the authors criticise the Committee of Ministers’ conclusion that Switzerland has effectively complied with the Strasbourg’s judgment in the Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz case. It will be recalled that the ECtHR found that Switzerland had failed to meet its obligations under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to respect for private and family life) by not taking adequate and timely measures to mitigate climate change. The ruling emphasised the role of national authorities, especially courts, in ensuring compliance with Convention obligations, clearly placing the onus on Switzerland to enhance its climate policy and implementation.
This ruling was reached despite the fact that Switzerland had held not one but two national referenda on what it its citizens expected the government to do in discharging the country’s obligations under the Paris agreement. The second referendum, in June 2021, rejected certain measures that would align national targets with the Paris Agreement.
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