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“It sometimes seems to me that it is not so much extremism as normalisation that we have to fear”, Hall observed.
It is indeed an important and nuanced reflection on the subject that is worth summarising again on the UKHRB for readers who are not subscribed to Rozenberg’s Substack or who have missed it for any other reason.
Jonathan Hall KC’s lecture articulates a compelling case that contemporary anti‑Jewish agitation cannot be treated as routine protest but must be recognised as a vector of risk for real-world violence and ultimately terrorism. His core insight is that what threatens liberal democracy is less spectacular “extremism” than the slow “normalisation” of sectarian calls to violence, particularly against Jews. For our lawyer readers, the speech matters because it shows how existing doctrines on precaution, public order and incitement must be read through the lens of this normalisation if law is to discharge its protective function without abandoning its commitment to free expression.
Join me and co-presenter and barrister Lucy McCann with public law specialist Jonathan Metzer as we take you on a journey over most significant cases that have been decided over the course of the year. This is Episode 232. Below are the citations of all the cases referred to in our discussion:
IA and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department EWCA Civ 1516
R (Al‑Haq) v Secretary of State for Business and Trade EWHC 173 (Admin); R (Al‑Haq) v Secretary of State for Business and Trade EWCA Civ 1433
R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department EWHC 1920 (Admin).
Epping Forest District Council v Somani Hotels Ltd EWHC 2183 (KB); Somani Hotels Ltd v Epping Forest District Council & Anor EWCA Civ 113
TG and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department EWHC 596 (Admin)
Getty Images (US), Inc and others v Stability AI Ltd EWHC 2863 (Ch)
R (Bhupinder Iffat Rizvi) v HM Assistant Coroner for South London [2025] EWHC 3014 (Admin)
Georgia Barter: Prevention of Future Deaths Report (Ref: 2025‑0491), Dr Shirley Radcliffe, East London Coroner’s Court, 2 October 2025
PMC (a child by his mother and litigation friend FLR) v A Local Health Board EWCA Civ 1126
Is law up to the problem of discrimination on grounds of (old) age? To discuss this question, Rosalind English is joined in today’s episode by regular Law Pod guest Alasdair Henderson of One Crown Office Row and Nina Georgantzi, a human rights lawyer and academic who serves as head of human rights advocacy at Age Platform Europe. We discuss the “soft law” Recommendation of the Council of Europe passed in 2024, and the proposed UN convention against ageism. Alasdair brings his considerable experience as Equality Commissioner to bear on the discussion, with his experience of litigation in this field under the Equality Act 2010 and other anti-discrimination laws.
Here are the full citations of the cases referred to in this episode:
Seldon (Appellant) v Clarkson Wright and Jakes (A Partnership) (Respondent) [2012] UKSC 16
Higgs v Farmor’s School [2025] EWCA Civ 109 (relevant paras are [171] – [172]
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust v Matar [2023] EAT 1
In the introduction, this Guidance note announces that “It updates and replaces the guidance document issued in April 2025”, which shows the speed at which AI is developing. It “sets out key risks and issues associated with using AI and some suggestions for minimising them”. And there have indeed been problems facing the judiciary lately arising particularly out of “AI hallucinations”. These are incorrect or misleading results that AI models generate.
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.
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 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]
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.
I recently came across this judgement by the South African Constitutional Court. As a “Saffa” myself, I rejoice in the case’s title, pairing the name of the penultimate prime minister of the old apartheid South Africa (Botha), and the name (Smuts) of a much earlier Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 to 1948.
But this case concerned two ordinary people, an insurance broker and an environmental activist, locking horns over their respective rights to privacy and freedom of expression under the South African Bill of Rights. The Constitutional Court judgment – running into nearly 100 pages in the Butterworths Human Rights Cases – is an interesting example of “salami slicing”, where the court takes apart a protected right and determines which bits of it can be upheld in the circumstances, and which can be set aside. It is also a fascinating insight into how information on social media platforms involves constant “re-publication”, and what that means for privacy and free speech rights. And finally, the judicial reflections on publication of someone’s personal address in the days of WFH show how far we have changed as a society since the pandemic.
The facts can be set out briefly.
Background facts and law
The applicant, Mr Botha, is an insurance broker who resides and conducts business in Gqeberha. He is also the owner of the farm Varsfontein situated in Alicedale in the Eastern Cape Province, a hundred kilometers away from his home.
The first respondent, Mr Smuts, is a wildlife conservationist, farmer, researcher and activist. The second respondent (amicus) is the Landmark Leopard and Predator Project – South Africa, a conservation non-governmental organisation focusing on human wildlife conflict management and leopard and carnivore conservation. It was founded by Mr Smuts who is its executive director.
A member of a group of cyclists who participated in an organised adventure ride that traversed Mr Botha’s farm (legally) encountered a dead baboon and porcupine in cage traps. The animals appeared to him to have been exposed to suffering and distress. Outraged by what he saw, the cyclist photographed the dead animals in the cages with the intention of sharing the photographs with an organisation capable of taking action. He shared them with Mr Smuts on 1 October 2019.
He also sent Mr Smuts a detailed map depicting the location of Mr Botha’s farm on which he indicated the place on the farm where the photographs were taken.
Mr Smuts published a post on the second respondent’s Facebook page which included, amongst others,
(a) a photograph of a baboon trapped in a cage; (b) a photograph of a porcupine trapped in a cage; (c ) a Google search location of Mr Botha’s insurance brokerage address (which turned out also to be Mr Botha’s residential address) and telephone number.
It will come to the surprise of many that the common law offence of blasphemy in the UK was only abolished in 2008. It has no place in a secular society such as ours. However attempts have been made to use the Public Order Act 1986 to introduce blasphemy by the back door, by criminalising religious hatred offences.
This legislation excludes “antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religiions’ from its religious hatred provisions.
Update (10 October 2025): Kemi Badenoch has confirmed that Conservative Party policy will be to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and to repeal the Human Rights Act if they win the next general election. This was made clear in both her statements ahead of and during the annual Conservative Party Conference in October 2025, following a detailed legal review led by the Shadow Attorney General, Lord Wolfson, which found that remaining in the ECHR would fundamentally obstruct key party policies on immigration, veterans’ rights, prioritising citizens for public services, and reforming sentencing and protest laws.The Conservative Party leader explicitly stated in her conference speech: “We must leave the ECHR and repeal the Human Rights Act. The next Conservative manifesto will contain our commitment to leave. Leaving the Convention is a necessary step.”
Lord Wolfson’s advice was commissioned by the Conservative Party and is known as the Wolfson Report. It is important to note at the outset that, despite its title on the Party website, Lord Wolfson emphasises that this is “neither a policy paper nor a report. It is a legal analysis”, in other words, advice to the leader of the Conservative party. For reasons of economy in the following paragraphs I will refer to this 185 page document as a “report”.
David Wolfson KC is Shadow Attorney General Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, a prominent commercial lawyer and former justice minister. We have heard his views on the role of international law and his differences with government AG Richard Hermer domestic on Law Pod UK earlier this year.
In this paper he sets out an exhaustive examination of the relationship between the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and UK law, specifically focusing on areas where the ECHR constrains the government’s ability to enact domestic policies. This report could be pivotal in shaping the party’s commitment to leave the ECHR, as it concludes that such a move is necessary to fulfil a range of key policy priorities.
For balance, here is the late Conor Gearty’s column in the London Review of Books Unwelcome Remnant – the threat to the Human Rights Act , lamenting judicial avoidance of ECHR solutions to problems and relying on common law or UK legislative measures instead. Gearty cites many examples of this, most notably the Supreme Court’s ruling in the For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers which he says “completely ignores the impact of human rights law.”
Back to Wolfson.
Overview
The report scrutinises the effect of the ECHR in five core public policy areas: immigration control, prosecution of military veterans, prioritisation of British citizens in social policy, sentencing and protest laws, and economic growth impediments (particularly linked to climate-based challenges to infrastructure projects). Wolfson sets out a detailed legal analysis and a set of evaluative “tests” for national sovereignty, arguing that only by exiting the ECHR and repealing the Human Rights Act can the UK achieve these policy goals unimpeded.
Episode 227: It’s been an interesting year in the law, with Richard Hermer KC and the Shadow Attorney General Lord Wolfson of Tredegar joining battle on what constitutes the “thin” or “thick” concept of the rule of law. We interview Lady Hale on her long career in the law, the Law Commission and the Supreme Court. Lord Sumption speaks out on the need to withdraw from the European Convention of Human Rights and Freedoms. We have speculations on the Assisted Dying Bill which has yet to make its way through the House of Lords, and an interview with a former barrister of 1 Crown Office Row and now MP on the potential implications of the Employee Rights Bill, also in the Lords.
Of course there are many more episodes to come as summer descends into autumn, but sit back and enjoy a leisurely review of the wide range of topics we have covered since 2025 was in its infancy.
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