The Weekly Round Up: Facial recognition, Sudan censorship, FIFA concerns, and compulsory divestment under A1P1
8 December 2025
In the news
The UK Home Office has begun a ten-week public consultation into the use of facial recognition and biometrics technologies by the police, with the view to expanding the rollout of live facial recognition policing (currently limited to ten forces) across the entire UK. Among the Government’s proposals is the creation of a regulator overseeing police implementation of the technology; any new legislation arising from the consultation is unlikely to be in force for at least another two years. The Government has invested over £15 million into facial recognition policing since 2024. Its currently unregulated use has drawn sharp criticism from human rights and civil liberties groups, and in August the Equality and Human Rights Commission warned that its present implementation was disproportionate in its infringement of human rights. Liberty director Akiko Hart responded positively to this week’s announcement of a consultation, but stressed that the Government “must halt the rapid rollout” of facial recognition and ensure that rights-prioritising safeguards are in place. Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo called the “consultation necessary but long overdue”, adding that police facial recognition should be paused immediately, pending the consultation’s outcome. Strong tendencies towards racial discrimination in the use of the technology have raised particular concerns, as the Home Office conceded this week: whereas white people are only wrongly identified by the technology at a rate of 0.04%, this occurs at a rate of 5.5% for black people and 4% for Asian people. Earlier this year the Metropolitan Police declined to adopt live facial recognition at September’s far-right ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, despite deploying it weeks earlier at the Notting Hill Carnival.
The UK Foreign Office is alleged to have censored warnings of genocide from its risk assessments of the ongoing conflict in Sudan, according to a whistleblower reported in the Guardian. Per the anonymous source, references to the risk of genocide were deliberately expunged by Foreign Office officials from assessments compiled at the outbreak of the conflict in April 2023, purportedly in order to protect the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a close UK ally, from scrutiny. It is frequently held that the UAE backs and arms the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group in Sudan, something which the UAE denies. The RSF are understood to have been responsible for a vast record of crimes against humanity since the beginning of the war, including the massacre of 15,000 civilians at the West Darfuri capital of Geneina in 2023, 1,500 refugees and internally displaced persons at the Zamzam camp this April, and potentially many more thousands at the city of El-Fasher since October. Much of the killing has been ethnically targeted, with the US, France and Germany (but not the UK) among a number of states declaring the situation a genocide. The UK is the “Penholder” for Sudan at the UN Security Council, taking primary responsibility for resolutions concerning the country.
FIFA has come under renewed pressure from a coalition of human rights groups, trade unions and fans groups to “match its lofty rhetoric on rights with concrete action” ahead of the 2026 FIFA Men’s Football World Cup. The tournament is set to take place next June and July across Canada, Mexico and the US. The Sports & Rights Alliance, partnered with other groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, had previously flagged areas of “critical” concern in the host countries – especially the US – specifically, immigration policies; protest and press freedoms; labour rights; LGBTI rights; corruption; and child safety. The Alliance identified these as “requiring urgent and transparent intervention” by FIFA, which it urged to “exert its leverage and demand concrete, legally binding guarantees that human rights won’t be further sacrificed for the sake of the game.” Those calls have been renewed this week, upon fears that FIFA’s growing closeness to the Trump administration (it awarded the President a unique “peace prize” on 5 December, while FIFA chief Gianni Infantino unusually accompanied the President on a major diplomatic visit to the Middle East in October) will jeopardise any push for greater rights protections. The global governing body for football was subjected to intense criticism for its hosting of the 2022 Men’s World Cup in Qatar against a backdrop of “serious migrant labour and human rights abuses.”
In the courts
The Court of Appeal has held that a UK Government order that an investment group compulsorily divest itself from a broadband company, based on national security concerns about that group’s apparent links to the Russian state, did not amount to a disproportionate interference in its rights under Article 1 Protocol 1 of the European Convention (right to private property).
In R (L1TM FM Holdings Ltd) v Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the Cabinet Office [2025] EWCA Civ 1528, Singh LJ (with whom Males LJ and Popplewell LJ agreed) dismissed the investment group’s application for judicial review of an order made by the Business Secretary in December 2022, which had required 100% divestment from the broadband provider FibreMe/Upp under section 26(3) of the National Security and Investment Act 2021 (NSIA). The order followed the Investment Security Unit’s finding that the Appellant group’s ultimate beneficial ownership by sanctioned Russian nationals with “vulnerability to leverage by the Russian state” posed a national security threat, in the specific circumstances of FibreMe/Upp controlling a network of domestic internet services. Pursuant to the order, the Appellants sold 100% of their shares to a UK company, at what the former considered a less than “fair market value.” The Appellants submitted that this forced sale entitled them to compensation under Article 1 Protocol 1 of the Convention and section 8 of the Human Rights Act.
The Court of Appeal noted that, while no Strasbourg authority provided direct guidance on the instant problem, three basic principles were established on the compensation payable following compulsory sale in the context of company nationalisation: (1) fair balance between public interest and private rights; (2) proportionality; and (3) the margin of appreciation. The Court found that, in this matter of national security, a “wide margin of judgment” had to be afforded by the courts to the legislature and executive, including in its decision not to provide a scheme of compensation. The Appellants’ being forced to sell their shares “at a time that was not of their choosing” was not held to lead to disproportionate losses requiring compensation, since they had been “able to conduct a sale on the open market… retain the proceeds of sale… [and] chose who the buyer should be.” Any further exercise of calculating precise “fair market value” and compensating accordingly would “likely be a complicated and lengthy process… [which] would have the potential to impede the process by which the Respondent is able to achieve the important public interest purposes behind the scheme of the NSIA.”
