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Monday night’s fascinating seminar on Article 9, “Outlawing God”, saw Dinah Rose QC, John Bowers QC, Dr Evan Harris (Liberal Democrat former MP) and Rabbi Michael Laitner (solicitor and Orthodox rabbi) square off over the relationship of the courts to religious belief and believers, refereed (and sometimes stoked) by Joshua Rozenberg in the chair. The seminar, which raised almost £2,000 for legal advice clinics at the Hebrew University, can be listened to here.
There was a clear division in the room: between the lawyers, who felt that the courts in both the UK and Strasbourg afforded less robust protection to Article 9 rights than to the other rights in the Convention; and Dr Harris, who could not accept that a religious belief was any more worthy of protection than any political belief.
Coedbach Action Team Ltd v Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change [2010] EWHC 2312 (Admin) – Read judgment
A recent decision of the High Court, relating to a challenge to planning permission for a power station, could significantly limit access to environmental justice for local community groups.
The Aarhus Convention requires that access to justice and effective remedies be provided to members of the public in environmental matters, and that the procedures be “fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive.”
Both the UK and the EU are signatories to the Convention; the access to justice provisions are given effect in EU law in the Directive 85/377 EEC, which requires that such access be given to “members of the public concerned” who have a sufficient interest or are maintaining the impairment of a right.
OM (ALGERIA) v SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT [2010] EWHC 65 (Admin) – Read judgment
The claimant’s detention pending deportation was unlawful where (1) the Secretary of State had failed to take account of the guidance on immigration detention, which indicated that the mentally ill were usually unsuitable for detention and (2) the Secretary of State had failed to notify the Claimant of his right of appeal once a Court of Appeal had, in a similar case, determined such a right to exist.
Summary
The Claimant, having entered the UK illegally in 1996, had a string of criminal convictions and a Class A drug habit. Although he had claimed asylum in 1999 the whole of his claim was found by the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (“AIT”) to be a fabrication. He had married and had two young children in the UK. The most significant issue, however, was his diagnosis in 2003 as suffering from schizophrenia.
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