By: Guest Contributor
18 November 2013 by Guest Contributor
Five Royal Marines have lodged a challenge against a ruling that they can be named following the conviction of one of them for the murder of an injured insurgent in Afghanistan.
Identification of ‘Marine A’ and two other Marines was prohibited by order of the court-martial which convicted Marine A of murder. At the time of the trial this order was explained in the press as necessary to protect the three defendants from physical attacks. On 8 November 2013, Judge Advocate General Jeff Blackett ruled that the names of the defendants and those of Marines D and E, should be identified publicly. The order was not lifted after Marine A’s conviction, and it is now reported that he will oppose any lifting of the order to protect the human right to life of him and his family. A hearing before the Court Martial Appeal Court in London is expected to be held next week. Will he succeed?
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6 November 2013 by Guest Contributor
R (on the application of Ingenious Media Holdings plc and Patrick McKenna v Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs [2013] EWHC 3258 (Admin) – read judgment
Sales J has rejected an application for judicial review by Ingenious Media Holdings plc and Patrick McKenna, who complained that senior officials in HMRC had identified them in “off the record” briefings.
Ingenious Media is an investment and advisory group which promotes film investment schemes which allow participators to take advantage of certain tax reliefs and exemptions. HMRC has long been fighting to close down these “film schemes”, with some success (see the Eclipse 35 appeal).
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5 November 2013 by Guest Contributor
Re J (A Child) ([2013] EWHC 2694 (Fam) – read judgment
In this case the President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby, considered an application for a contra mundum injunction by Staffordshire County Council. He emphasised that the only proper purpose of such an injunction was to protect the child and refused to make an order in the wide terms sought by the Council. As a result, he allowed the publication of video footage and photographs of a baby being removed from its parents.
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20 October 2013 by Guest Contributor
At first glance, prisoner voting proponents may interpret the Supreme Court’s R (Chester) v Justice Secretary decision (see Adam Wagner’s previous post) as a defeat for advancing prisoner voting rights in the UK. This blog post offers a different perspective. By comparing Chester to the seminal US Supreme Court case of Marbury v. Madison, we summarise that such proponents should take a step back and see the wood, rather than merely the trees. This is because Lord Mance’s Chester judgment offers human rights advocates, and therefore supporters of prisoner voting rights, an unequivocal foundation from which to defend future human rights claims.
Chester does not achieve the same ends as Marbury. Marbury established the institution of judicial review in the United States, against Congressional legislation. Chester does not disturb the supremacy of the UK Parliament. Comparison arises within the strategies of the leading judgments in each case. Chief Justice Marshall’s judgment in Marbury is celebrated not only for its conclusion, that the Constitution of the United States is the highest form of law and therefore “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is”, but also for how it reached that conclusion.
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18 October 2013 by Guest Contributor
People are going hungry in England because England, to the detriment of the poor, has forgotten its legal history.
Nearly eight hundred years ago, in 1216 English law first recognized a right to food. Yet between April and September this year over 350,000 people received three days’ emergency food from the Trussell Trust food banks, triple the numbers helped in the same period last year.
Although justifiable outrage has been expressed at this increasing hunger in 21st century England, such hunger has not been regarded as an issue of human rights law, but only of charity. The United Nations, however, has made clear that the right to adequate food is indivisibly linked to the inherent dignity of the human person and is indispensable for the fulfilment of other human rights.
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17 October 2013 by Guest Contributor
On October 2 at 10am, the United Kingdom Supreme Court held an hour long pre-term press-briefing to mark the opening of the Court’s fifth year. This blog looks not only at what was said by the Court, and asked by the journalists on the day, but also what was then reported.
The Supreme Court’s relationship with the media is marked by the same combination of common interests and tensions which mark the media’s relationship with any other public body. Yes the Court wants media coverage; and a function of the media is to cover the Court. The media though will always want more than its subjects are looking to give up, and not only that, will often frame how the subject is presented according to each outlet’s particular agendas. Further, the Court, and its justices, will also have their own goals about what messages should be highlighted.
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13 October 2013 by Guest Contributor
Osborn v The Parole Board [2013] UKSC 61 – Read judgment / Press summary
1 Crown Office Row’s David Manknell acted as junior counsel to the Parole Board in this case. He had no involvement in the writing of this post.
Writing in his magisterial new work, Human Rights and the UK Supreme Court, Professor Brice Dickson noted that the Human Rights Act had created ‘an internationalized system of human rights protection rather than a constitutional one.’ Indeed, there had been a marked resistance on the part of the Supreme Court to use the common law to achieve the same goal of human rights protection. In Osborn v The Parole Board the Supreme Court seemed to resile from this position.
Osborn, and the co-joined appeals, concerned the circumstances in which the Parole Board is required to hold oral hearings. Osborn had been recalled to prison after an immediate breach of his licence conditions. Booth and Reilly had been sentenced to life imprisonment, and in both cases the minimum term had expired. The appellants sought early release and had been denied an oral hearing by the Parole Board under the operation of the statutory regime (detailed in paras 3-17). Instead their cases had been decided on paper by a single anonymous member of the Board.
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26 September 2013 by Guest Contributor
Robert Kellar appeared for D in these proceedings
D, R (on the application of) v The General Medical Council [2013] EWHC 2839 (Admin) – Read judgment
The High Court has strongly affirmed the prohibition against the pursuit of long delayed complaints against doctors in regulatory proceedings. The prohibition arose from the General Medical Council’s own procedural rules. It applied even where the allegations were of the most serious kind, including sexual misconduct, and could only be waived in exceptional circumstances and where the public interest demanded. The burden was upon the GMC to establish a sufficiently compelling public interest where allegations had already been thoroughly investigated by the competent authorities such as the police and social services.
Although the Court’s robust approach is to be welcomed, an opportunity to clarify the relevance of Article 6 ECHR in this context was not taken. The author suggests that Article 6 ECHR has an important part to play in protecting the rights of practitioners facing long delayed complaints.
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4 September 2013 by Guest Contributor
Cross-government coordination on an issue that affects trade, international development, foreign affairs, business activity and human rights is remarkable, especially at such a difficult economic time. So the UK’s Action Plan on Business and Human Rights, which is the government’s long-awaited strategy for implementing the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, is to be applauded for this achievement. Yet, while the Plan establishes clear expectations that UK companies should respect human rights, there are no effective legal requirements placed on them to do so.
In issuing this Plan, the Foreign Secretary and the Business Secretary reinforce the business case for respecting human rights, which includes reputational, legal and investment risk issues, and consumer expectation reasons. They also note that protection of human rights is good for business and communities, as “the thread of safeguards running through society that are good for human rights – democratic freedoms, good governance, the rule of law, property rights, civil society – also create fertile conditions for private sector led growth”. Adam Smith thought that this was required over two and a half centuries ago.
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4 September 2013 by Guest Contributor
Yesterday Sir Nicolas Bratza spoke candidly about the responsibility of certain UK politicians and media outlets in tarnishing this countries human rights legacy. He called on lawyers and NGOs to help rekindle the fire for human rights at home.
At an event hosted by the British Institute of Human Rights (BIHR) and the Law Society – “Sixty years of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR): What does the future hold?” – politicians, legal practitioners, civil servants, academics and activists debated the impact of six decades of the UK’s membership of the ECHR.
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14 August 2013 by Guest Contributor
The House of Commons Health Committee has published a report (PDF) following its inquiries into the Mental Health Act 2007. The MHA 2007 introduced several amendments to the Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA, as amended), some of which were very controversial at the time and continue to be so now. The Health Committee’s report follows post-legislative scrutiny of the legislation by its parent department.
The Committee’s report was very focussed on the rights of mental health patients guaranteed by Article 5 ECHR and the MHA itself. Those with an interest in mental health human rights will, however, notice that the radical challenge to detention and involuntary treatment under the MHA from the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was absent from their discussion.
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2 August 2013 by Guest Contributor
Fenty & Ors v Arcadia Group Brands Ltd (t/a Topshop) & Anor [2013] EWHC 2310 (Ch) – Read judgment
The ruling in the Rihanna/Topshop case marks a significant trend, both in case law and society, towards equating image with commodity. Increasingly, celebrities and sports personalities earn large sums of money from sponsorship and advertising deals because companies recognise that their image sells products. So how can so-called image rights be protected?
The legal regime around image rights has arisen out of common law concepts of property, trespass and tort (civil wrong). The common law system means that precedents for the protection of an individual’s likeness have arisen from judges’ decisions in cases involving unauthorised exploitation of a likeness where an individual has suffered damage as a result. Some US states have enacted specific legislation equating celebrities’ personality rights with property rights, where expiration of the rights occurs 70 years following the death of the celebrity.
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30 July 2013 by Guest Contributor
According to reports in yesterday’s Times (£) and Telegraph, the government is planning a further set of reforms to judicial review. (I have written before about why the original proposals, published in December 2012, were objectionable—and about the fact that the government pressed ahead with many, but not all, of them, excoriating criticism notwithstanding.) Today, it is said that the Ministry of Justice is drastically to restrict the test for standing in judicial review cases. A “government source” told the Times that:
We’re looking at making some changes so that the system isn’t open to abuse by groups who may not have a direct interest in the issue at hand but simply want to cause delay or disruption to plans or generate publicity for themselves.
This fits with the overarching narrative emerging from (certain parts of) government, according to which accountability to law—whether domestic or European—is increasingly characterised as a brake on economic progress, a challenge to democracy by unelected judges, or little more than a public-relations tool that is strategically deployed so as to “play the system”.
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17 July 2013 by Guest Contributor
In a previous blog post on these pages, the case of Lindsay Sandiford was examined. Sandiford – a British citizen facing the death penalty in Indonesia – had asked the UK Government for funding to help her appeal, but was refused financial help. The Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the Government, stating that the decision to provide legal aid to a British citizen abroad is a discretionary matter for the executive.
Regardless of whether one agrees with the decisions of the Government and the Court, the case raises interesting questions about the obligations that are imposed on states that have abolished the death penalty. The primary duty on states is to simply refrain from imposing the death penalty, but it is possible to detect an emerging secondary obligation to refrain from facilitating the use of the death penalty elsewhere. This issue is particularly relevant to the UK, because although the UK takes a leading role internationally in campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty, there is evidence that the UK has on occasion aided the use of capital punishment elsewhere.
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12 July 2013 by Guest Contributor
While MPs were dreaming of the imminent long summer break and a possible pay hike, in mid-June the Government produced the draft amendments to the Civil Procedure Rules (“CPR”) necessary to bring Part 2 of the Justice and Security Act 2013 (“JSA”) into force. Many – including JUSTICE – consider the Act’s introduction of closed material procedures (“CMP”) into civil proceedings unfair, unnecessary and unjustified.
That one party will present their case unchallenged to the judge in the absence of the other party and their lawyers is inconsistent with the common law tradition of civil justice where proceedings are open, adversarial and equal. This blog has spent many pages dissecting the constitutional implications of the expansion of CMP in the JSA and its controversial passage through both Houses of Parliament.
Perhaps in a bid to avoid similar controversy, the draft Rules were dropped quietly into the libraries at the Houses of Parliament without fanfare. Less than two weeks later and without significant change, the Rules were tabled.
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Five Royal Marines have lodged a challenge against a ruling that they can be named following the conviction of one of them for the murder of an injured insurgent in Afghanistan.
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