By: Guest Contributor

The Round-up: Cameron’s ‘bonanza benefits’ from the slave trade, and the HRA at 15

6 October 2015 by Guest Contributor

Image credit: Guardian

This week’s round-up is brought to you by Charlotte Bellamy

Instead of reparations and an apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, David Cameron is to bestow Jamaica with £25m (or 40%) towards the cost of a new prison – an offer which is “an insult to the people of Jamaica”, according to Jamaican MP Mike Henry, who had led the effort to force a vote on reparations which took place in the Jamaican Parliament in January and passed unanimously. The motion stated that Jamaica would be entitled to receive reparations equivalent to what former slave owners received after abolition.

Prior to Cameron’s visit, Sir Henry Beckles, the chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, called on the PM to acknowledge his responsibility for his share of the situation and to contribute to a “joint programme of rehabilitation and renewal”. He described the PM as “a grandson of the Jamaican soil who has been privileged and enriched by your forebears’ sins of the enslavement of our ancestors”. The Cameron family was said to have reaped “bonanza benefits”. During his visit, however, Cameron announced that financial reparations “were not the right approach”.

Is a UK-subsidised prison the right approach? BBC political correspondent Carole Walker suggested that some eyebrows may be raised by such an allocation of the Foreign Aid budget. Frances Crook, the CEO of the Howard League, has raised not just her eyebrows, but also concerns that building a prison in Jamaica is “not the answer to the UK’s prison problems”, not least because it is “wrong to spend British aid on building a prison” when “refugees in camps are facing winter and the budget is stretched”.  In addition, the Jamaican prison would only take 300 men by 2020, when prison numbers in this country are going up by more than 300 every month.

Other news

• In the week that saw the Human Rights Act turn 15, Sir Simon McDonald, the British Foreign Office Chief, inauspiciously commented that human rights are “no longer a top priority” for the Government. Resources will be funnelled into trade deals ahead of fighting injustice in other parts of the world, as part of the Conservatives’ “Prosperity Agenda”, the Independent reports. This perhaps explains George Osborne’s recent silence on human rights abuses during his “trade mission” to China, for which he has been praised by a grateful if somewhat surprised Chinese Government, and criticised by Amnesty International.

• More fuel was thrown on the fire of the UK’s tangled relationship with Saudi Arabia when it emerged last week via leaked Saudi Foreign Ministry files that the UK made a secret deal with the Saudis to bag themselves both countries seats on the UN Human Rights Council in 2013. Saudi Arabia – who has sanctioned more than 100 beheadings this year – now chairs a UNHRC panel that selects senior officials to draft international human rights standards and report violations. Allan Hogarth, Amnesty International UK’s Head of Policy and Government Affairs, described the revelation as “a slap in the face for those beleaguered Saudi activists who already struggle with endemic persecution in the kingdom”.

• The daughter of a man who committed suicide in 2013 after being declared fit to work by an Atos ‘heathcare professional’ is compiling a dossier of information on her father’s case  to assist the imminent UN investigation into whether Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms have led to “grave or systematic violations” of disabled people’s rights. This follows a coroner’s conclusion that Mr O’Sullivan’s suicide was a direct result of the outcome of the assessment. The coroner reported found that the Atos healthcare professional (an orthopaedic surgeon in this case) had failed to take into account the views of any of the deceased’s doctors, who had diagnosed him with recurrent depression, panic disorder and agoraphobia.

• The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has called for “firmer measures” against States ignoring judgments of the Strasbourg Court, urging Council of Europe ministers to make use of the 2010 “infringement procedure” (a tool “as yet untried”) which allows the Court to rule on whether a State has breached its obligation to abide by the Convention. This recommendation was based on a report focused primarily on nine countries responsible for 80 per cent of the 11,000 unimplemented cases (Turkey, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Romania, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Ukraine), though the UK received a special mention (Appendix 1, s10) for “unresolved issues” relating to “significant implementation problems” specifically in relation to prisoner voting rights, following Hirst v UK (No 2) and the pilot judgments Greens and MT v UK where the UK’s blanket ban on prisoner voting was found to be a violation of Article 3.

In the Courts

• Bouyid v Belgium: slapping by law enforcement officers of individuals under their control was degrading treatment under Article 3 ECHR. Two brothers had alleged that police officers in Belgium had slapped them in the face whilst at a police station in Brussels. The Court found that this had undermined their dignity. The Court emphasised that in a democratic society ill-treatment was never an appropriate response by the authorities, explaining that “a slap to the face affects the part of the person’s body which expresses his individuality, manifests his social identity and constitutes the centre of his senses”.

Recent Posts

• Limits of judicial review in international relations underlined 

• US court takes important step in resolving human/wildlife conflict at sea

If you have a human rights event you would like to publicise on the UK Human Rights Blog, please email Jim Duffy at jim.duffy@1cor.com

Strasbourg in the Age of Subsidiarity: Enough Reform to Accommodate Conservative Concerns? Brian Chang

21 September 2015 by Guest Contributor

On 7^th September 2015, Judge Robert Spano (of the European Court of Human Rights) spoke at a high-level international conference on “The Role of Parliaments in the Realisation and Protection of the Rule of Law and Human Rights”, organised by Murray Hunt, Legal Adviser to Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights. This was his second public intervention in the United Kingdom since his seminal speech on “Universality or Diversity of Human Rights: Strasbourg in the Age of Subsidiarity” delivered at Oxford in 2014, the first having been covered by UK Human Rights Blog here, and built upon his earlier speeches by elaborating on four post-Brighton Declaration cases in which the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (the European Court) applied the principle of subsidiarity to find no violation of human rights, considering that the cases fell within the national margin of appreciation, after having examined evidence demonstrating that the national Parliaments had considered the human rights issues. Taken collectively, the four cases demonstrate that Strasbourg is well and truly in the age of subsidiarity, deferring to the decisions of national Parliaments, provided those Parliaments had considered the human rights implications of legislation. Whether this will satisfy Conservative Party concerns that membership of the European Convention on Human Rights is incompatible with the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty will be explored at the end of this post.
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No one has the right to expect the State to make them better parents – Sarah Phillimore

18 September 2015 by Guest Contributor

Kent County Council v G & others [2005] UKHL 68 involved an appeal by a local authority on a matter of principle.

In the course of care proceedings, they had been compelled to pay about £200,000 to provide a therapeutic residential placement for a family pursuant to section 38(6) of the Children Act 1989. The case had a happy ending; the family stayed together. But the local authority wanted to make it clear for the future that this had been an improper use of section 38(6) of the Children Act 1989 and argued that the court could not compel a local authority to pay for therapy for parents under a statutory provision directed at assessments of the child.
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Drones, double speak and lethal drugs: the Round up – Charlotte Bellamy

13 September 2015 by Guest Contributor

In the news

Comparisons to Orwell’s dystopia have inevitably been drawn with the drone strikes recently carried out by the UK in Syria that killed two British IS fighters, Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin. Amnesty reacted with alarm at the news that remote control drones had been used as vehicles of execution – action they say “is difficult to conceive as being a feature of the present” – but particularly against a country with which we are not at war.

Controversy is certainly brewing over what Michael Fallon’s critics have termed a US-style “kill-list”  and the legality of the government’s action, which David Cameron initially justified as an act of UK self-defence in his address to the Commons last Monday, necessary to protect the UK from an “imminent threat”  – action which is permitted under Article 51 of the UN Charter.
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Passports at the junction of international and domestic law – Richard Alton

30 August 2015 by Guest Contributor

Western governments are increasingly concerned to establish that they have the power to prevent individuals from traveling to the Middle East to engage in terrorism-related activity (see Rosalind English’s recent post on Jihadi Brides). This has resulted in a spike in passport seizures, especially on the domestic level.  Under Chapter 1 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 the UK government has the authority to seize UK passports

where a person is suspected of intending to leave Great Britain or the United Kingdom in connection with terrorism-related activity.

These events encouraged me to revisit a 2010 publication I co-authored with my colleague Jason Reed Struble, entitled ‘The Nature of a Passport at the Intersection of Customary International Law and American Judicial Practice’ (16 Ann. Surv. Int’l & Comp. L. 9 (2010)). In that piece we discussed the very nature of a passport and its role in both international and United States domestic law. This article focussed on the seizure of foreign passports by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the subsequent tribulations that follow. Thus, the work focused on a different spectrum of passport seizures, i.e. a government seizing another government’s passport, as opposed to a government seizing passports of its own nationals.
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Emily Thornberry MP – Human rights conventions: when some are more equal than others?

24 August 2015 by Guest Contributor

When a legal challenge to one of the coalition Government’s flagship welfare reforms – an overall cap of £26,000 per year on the amount any family could receive in benefits – was reviewed by the Supreme Court earlier this year, the resulting judgment left many observers scratching their heads. Had the Court declared the cap unlawful or not? The answer seemed to be a mixture of yes and no.
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On fairness and principle: the legacy of ZZ re-examined – Michael Rhimes

6 August 2015 by Guest Contributor

Kiani v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] EWCA Civ 776 (21 July 2015) – read judgment

In my last post on UKHRB I commented on developments in UK, ECHR and EU jurisprudence relating to procedural fairness in the context of national security.

The developments in this recent case offer some further interesting thoughts on the topic. To explain the case, and put its ramifications in a broader context, this post will be divided into three parts.  In the first I outline my original argument as set out in the earlier post. The second will explain the case itself. The third will offer five brief comments on the broader issues the cases touches upon.

In brief, the court in Kiani followed Tariq and held that AF-type disclosure (see below) was not a universal requirement of fairness; the interests of justice could require a lower standard of disclosure without violating the absolute right to a fair hearing.
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Sport, public/private law, and a judge waxing lyrical – Diarmuid Laffan

31 July 2015 by Guest Contributor

O’Connell & anor v the Turf Club [2015] IESC 57 – read judgment

This recent judgment of the Irish Supreme Court addressed the issue of whether the decisions of a sport’s organising body should be amenable to judicial review. This is an issue of some vintage and vexation in this jurisdiction’s legal debate, that provides a useful backdrop against which to ask what exactly it is that makes a decision-making duty or power ‘public’.

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Don’t Say ‘Snooper’s Charter’: Dutch Dairy-Rooms and British Political Language – Dr Cian Murphy

24 June 2015 by Guest Contributor

Much has been said about our surveillance law and much more will be said in Parliament’s debate on Thursday. And yet, how we talk about surveillance law merits at least as much concern as what we say about it. Over-intrusive government surveillance is a problem. But so too is loose language in opposition to it.

The Oxford English Dictionary (Online) describes a ‘snooper’ as ‘one who pries or peeps; spec. one who makes an intrusive official investigation. orig. U.S.’ So it is, at best, an American term for an officious busy-body and at worst someone prying or peeping. This is hardly an administrative accolade or term of endearment – unless one has rather curious definitions of government and/or courtship.

Further etymological investigation reveals that the term ‘to snoop’ is Dutch in origin, and one use would be to describe a servant “slyly going into a dairy room and drinking milk from a pan.” It seems a Dutch Downton Abbey would have even more intrigue than the English one does. For none of these definitions or descriptions would we want Parliament to legislate. No-one is on the side of the ‘snooper’.
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Strasbourg Court opens door to complaints by refugees displaced during conflict – Aarif Abraham

22 June 2015 by Guest Contributor

Chiragov and Others v. Armenia (App No 13216/05) – read judgment

In two important decisions, the Grand Chamber of the Strasbourg Court has held that the forced displacement of peoples from the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh during the armed conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia constituted a violation of Article 1 of Protocol 1 (right to the peaceful enjoyment of property) and Article 8 (right to a private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The case of Chiragov which concerned the forced displacement of Azerbaijani nationals was decided in parallel with the Grand Chamber judgment in Sargsyan v Azerbaijan (found here). Sargsyan was delivered on the same day and reached the same conclusions in respect of Armenian nationals forced to flee from Azerbaijani territory.
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UK courts are bound by UK rulings, not Strasbourg decisions, says Admin Court – Leanne Woods

19 June 2015 by Guest Contributor

R (Victor Nealon) v Secretary of State for Justice : R (Sam Hallam) v Secretary of State for Justice [2015] EWHC 1565 (Admin), 8 June 2015 –  read judgment 

As Michael Gove contemplates the future of the Human Rights Act 1998, the High Court has considered how far the presumption of innocence in Article 6(2) ECHR spreads into decisions on payment of compensation for a miscarriage of justice. In doing so, Burnett LJ also managed to find some less than complimentary sentiments about the Strasbourg court’s decision-making.

Sam Hallam was convicted of murder in 2011. Victor Nealon was convicted of rape in 1997. Both successfully appealed against their convictions and then applied to the Secretary of State (‘SoS’) for compensation under s133 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 (the ‘1988 Act’’), as amended by the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 (the ‘2014 Act’). Both men were refused compensation on the basis that their circumstances did not meet the s133 statutory test (as amended).
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Britain Can Lead the World In Online Privacy – Dr Cian Murphy

13 June 2015 by Guest Contributor

British legal history has long inspired the common law world. The Magna Carta, an 800-year-old agreement between a King and his barons, remains an icon of liberty, seen around the world as the foundation stone of the rule of law. In contrast, British law on online surveillance and privacy has been arcane and obscure – a field that is for reluctant experts if it is for anyone at all.

The law has largely been developed in reaction to external pressure. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 was the result of a series of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. The Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 was rushed into law after an EU Court of Justice ruling. This piecemeal approach provides a poor basis for investigatory powers and a worse one for privacy rights.

Momentum towards change has been building. The Edward Snowden revelations brought to an end the public’s ignorance – or quiet endurance – of state surveillance operations. So, although last year’s emergency law permits ongoing data surveillance, it also put in motion a review of the powers of intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
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Assessment of domestic violence should not be culture sensitive – Jacqueline Roach

13 June 2015 by Guest Contributor

Re A (A Child; Wardship; Fact : Finding : Domestic Violence [2015] EWHC 1598 (Fam) – read judgment

This recent domestic violence case involving a child and the comments made by Mrs Justice Pauffley have been exciting the interest of both the media those agencies involved in child protection, such as the NSPCC.

Background facts

The parents met in 2004 and were married in India in January 2005.   They travelled to England in 2006 on six month visas.   They became ‘over stayers’ when those visas expired and they decided not to return.   They lived in a series of addresses with other families.

In June 2007 their only child, A, was born.

It was the mother’s case that after about three months the marriage became unhappy – a situation which continued until the final separation in 2013.   The father, by contrast, maintained they were very happy until about 2011.
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No call for revolution – Marina Wheeler

4 June 2015 by Guest Contributor

Last week the Queen revealed that the newly-elected government had delayed its promised proposals to repeal the Human Rights Act. If this signals a willingness to listen and reflect, rather than an opportunity to bring potential rebels into line, then so much the better. Let us keep talking.

In this post, I want to talk about the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

The government’s key concern – judging by the Grayling paper published last October – is that the Strasbourg Court has got too big for its boots and won’t stop telling us what to do. Hence the manifesto commitment to introduce a British Bill of Rights. The Prime Minister’s personal gripe – with some justification – is the Court’s 2005 ruling on prisoner voting: Hirst v UK (No.2) (2005) 42 EHRR 849.
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The Conservative Party’s Proposals for human rights – John Wadham

2 June 2015 by Guest Contributor

The October 2014 Conservative Party proposals promised to: 

End the ability of the European Court of Human Rights to force the UK to change the law. Every judgement that UK law is incompatible with the Convention will be treated as advisory and we will introduce a new Parliamentary procedure to formally consider the judgement.

In the event that we are unable to reach that agreement, the UK would be left with no alternative but to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, at the point
at which our Bill comes into effect.” (see proposals here )

The Conservative Party’s manifesto included a much shorter summary of the proposals without the specific details about the relationship with the ECtHR of the Council of Europe and the Queen’s Speech on 27^th May promised that there would be a consultation exercise (see summary here)
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