By: Rosalind English
16 April 2015 by Rosalind English
Fish Legal v Information Commissioner and others (Information rights practice and procedure) [2015] UKUT 52 (AAC) Charles J – read judgment
Water and sewage utility companies are “public authorities” for the purposes of the environmental information regulations, and are bound by them accordingly, the Administrative Appeals Chamber of the Upper Tribunal has ruled.
Fish Legal is the legal arm of the Angling Trust. In 2009 it asked United Utilities Water plc and Yorkshire Water Services Ltd for information relating to discharges, clean-up operations, and emergency overflow. Emily Shirley is a private individual. Again, she asked Southern Water Services Ltd for information relating to sewerage capacity for a planning proposal in her village. All three companies denied that they were under a duty to provide the information under Environmental Information Regulations. Both Fish Legal and Mrs Shirley complained to the Commissioner. In 2010 the Commissioner replied, explaining that as the companies were not public authorities for the purposes of EIR, he had no power to adjudicate the complaints.
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31 March 2015 by Rosalind English
Google Inc v Vidal-Hall and others [2015] EWCA Civ 311 (27 March 2015) – read judgment
This case concerned the misuse of private information by an internet provider based in the United States. Google had secretly tracked private information about users’ internet browsing without their knowledge or consent, and then handed the information on to third parties (a practice known as supplying Browser-Generated Information, or ‘BGI’).
The issue before the Court of Appeal was twofold:
- Was the cause of action for misuse of private information a tort, specifically for the purposes of the rules providing for service of proceedings out of the jurisdiction?
- What was the meaning of ‘damage’ in section 13 of the Data Protection Act 1998 (the DPA) and in particular, did it give rise to a claim for compensation without pecuniary loss?
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25 March 2015 by Rosalind English
The Bussey Law Firm PC & Anor v Page [2015] EWHC 563 (QB) – read judgment
The facts of this case are simple. A defamatory comment was posted on the claimant’s Google maps directional page, implying that he was a “loser” as a lawyer and that his firm lost “80%” of cases brought to them. The defendant claimed that someone must have hacked in to his own Google account to put up the post.
There were jurisdictional complications in that the firm is situated in Colarado but these need not concern us here as Sir David Eady, sitting as a High Court judge, allowed the trial to go ahead in England. The real question was why any third party would have gone to the trouble of hacking into the defendant’s Google account in order to post the offending review; if the objective were merely to hide the hacker’s identity from the claimants, there would be the simpler option of setting up an anonymous Google account. This would in itself render the would-be publisher untraceable, and especially if it were done from a public computer.
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19 March 2015 by Rosalind English
A healthcare NHS Trust v P & Q [2015] EWCOP (13 March 2015) – read judgment
The Court of Protection has clarified the position on revealing the identity of an incapacitated adult where reporting restrictions apply.
This case concerned a man, P, who as a result of a major cardiac arrest in 2014, has been on life support for the past four months. Medical opinion suggests that he is unlikely ever to recover any level of consciousness, but his family disagrees strongly with this position. The Trust therefore applied to the Court for a declaration in P’s best interests firstly, not to escalate his care and secondly to discontinue some care, inevitably leading to his demise. The trust also applied for a reporting restrictions order. When it sought to serve that application on the Press Association through the Injunctions Alert Service, the family (represented by the second
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16 March 2015 by Rosalind English
Let’s apply some hard history to the 13th century charter governing the obligations flowing between King John and his barons, or at least read the thing (translation here). So says Lord Sumption in a fascinating address to Friends of the British Library on 9 March.
All sides jockey for position at the Magna Carta shrine, but its significance is entirely due to the myth-making tendencies of the seventeenth century politician and judge Edward Coke. Since he plucked the charter quite clean of its historical context, the claims made in its name are extraordinary and downright self-serving:
In his column in the Daily Telegraph, Peter Oborne recently described the European Convention on Human Rights as a “document which entrenches the principles of Magna Carta in international law.” Others have come forward to suggest that the partial abrogation in 2014 of a legal aid system which was first created in 1949 was contrary to Magna Carta. Recently, a Global Law Summit in London, which was essentially an international marketing opportunity for British lawyers, described itself on its website as “grounding the legacy and values of Magna Carta in a firmly 21st Century context.
Sumption is not against liberty of the subject, nor motherhood and apple pie, nor even international marketing opportunities for lawyers, but he does have a problem with “the distortion of history to serve an essentially modern political agenda.”
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25 February 2015 by Rosalind English
CG v Facebook Ireland & Another [2015] NIQB 11 (20 February 2015) – read judgment
The plaintiff was a former sex offender who had been identified on a Facebook page run by the second defendant called “Keep Our Kids Safe From Predators 2”. He had been released on licence and he was apprehensive about his safety upon his return to the community.
He resides with his father, who is disabled, and with his adult children one of whom is also disabled. He was particularly fearful of the reactions of others to his conduct in the light of the fact that his name had been published on the internet. I have posted on an earlier case where another former sex offender won an injunction against Facebook Ireland Limited in respect of the original KOKSFP, which was subsequently taken down (XY v Facebook Ireland Ltd [2012] NIQB 96).
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15 February 2015 by Rosalind English
Geller and another, R (on the application of) v The Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] EWCA Civ – read judgment
This short case involves the old dilemma of public order law: whether it is right to shut down speech when the speaker himself does not intend to incite violence, but whose presence it is said may lead third parties to commit violence. Indeed the facts of this particular case go further than that , because the applicants had no plans to make any public address during their proposed visit to Britain. It was their presence alone which was feared would inflame “community tensions”.
The applicants were two well-known US writers whose critical views of Islam led to them being prevented from entering the country in May 2013, to speak at a rally in the aftermath of the terrorist murder of Drummer Lee Rigby. An exclusion order was issued against them on grounds of public order, of which they sought judicial review. This was their appeal against the Immigration Tribunal’s refusal to allow them to proceed with the judicial review claim.
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9 February 2015 by Rosalind English
Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5 (CanLII) 6 February 2015 – read judgment
The Supreme Court of Canada has upheld a challenge to the constitutionality of the prohibition on assisted dying, saying that since they last ruled on this issue in the 1993 case of Rodriguez (where a “slim majority” upheld the prohibition), there had been a change in the circumstances which “fundamentally shifted the parameters” of this debate.
The Court issued a declaration of invalidity relating to those provisions in the Canadian criminal code that prohibit physician assisted dying for competent adults who seek such assistance as a result of a “grievous and irremediable” medical condition that causes “endurable and intolerable” suffering. These laws should be struck down as depriving those adults of their right to life, liberty and security of the person under Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights (The Constitution Act 1982)
Importantly, the court recognised what has long been proposed by campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic, that the prohibition deprives some individuals of life, as it has the effect of forcing people to take their own lives prematurely, for fear that they would be incapable of doing so when they reached the point where suffering was intolerable.
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2 February 2015 by Rosalind English
BB, PP, U and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] EWCA Civ 9 (23 January 2015) – read judgment
This was an appeal by Algerian nationals who had been found by the Special Immigration and Appeals Commission (SIAC) to constitute a threat to UK national security, against deportation to Algeria.
The appellants had resisted attempts by various home secretaries to deport them via protracted litigation over several years. Despite several findings by the SIAC that their human rights would not be infringed in Algeria, doubts remained, particularly with regard to the period of up to twelve days of initial detention in Algeria, known as “garde a vue” detention, in a barracks run by the Algerian security services (DRS). The purpose of such detention was to interrogate prisoners to obtain evidence for future proceedings. SIAC had wholly accepted the evidence of an innocent British citizen (AB) detained there in a case of mistaken identity as “punitive in the extreme”, but determined that his treatment showed a lack of care over the detainee’s welfare rather than a breach of his human rights. It had conceded that the treatment of the appellants might well be no better, not least because DRS officers considered such treatment to be consistent with respect for human dignity.
The appellants submitted that, in the light of this, SIAC’s conclusion that their treatment would not violate Article 3 of the Convention was legally unsustainable; that SIAC had erred in law in its findings that the Algerian government’s assurances were capable of independent verification; and that the SIAC had also erred in law in maintaining, without any open evidence in support, that the DRS had been present during discussions about those assurances and had subscribed to them.
The Court of Appeal upheld the appeals.
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29 January 2015 by Rosalind English
Most law undergraduates are familiar with Jeremy Bentham’s dismissal of natural rights as “nonsense on stilts”. This is a slight misrepresentation of what he said, which was that “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts“. But let’s take the stilts away and consider rights in their ordinary sense. They furnish not only arguments before courts, but reasons for going to war and toppling whole regimes. As Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari points out in his recent book:
No one was lying when, in 2011, the UN demanded that the Libyan government respect the human rights of its citizens, even though the UN, Libya, and human rights are all figments of our fertile imaginations.
So, might the author have added, are “citizens”, since in a reality without cities and states, it is a non-sequitur to talk of citizens.
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23 January 2015 by Rosalind English
Thursday 5 February 2015 marks the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta as well as the 50th anniversary of the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London. To commemorate both of these milestones, the Human Rights Collegium at Queen Mary University of London will be hosting this special event.
Paul Mahoney has been the UK judge on the European Court of Human Rights (Strasbourg) since November 2012. Before this, he spent the greater part of his career in the Registry of the Strasbourg Court, beginning as a case-lawyer in 1974 working on the case of Golder v. United Kingdom and ending as Registrar of the Court from 2001-05, with a three-year break in the 1990s as Head of Personnel of the Council of Europe (Strasbourg).
This event will be chaired by Professor Geraldine Van Bueren QC, and Lady Justice Arden will deliver the response.
The lecture will take place between 18.30 – 20.30 on Thursday 5 February at the Arts 2 Lecture Theatre, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS.
Book your tickets here.
HRC-ECtHR flyer
22 January 2015 by Rosalind English
Essex County Council v RF and Others (deprivation of liberty and damages) [2015] EWCOP 1 – read judgment
The Court of Protection has castigated the actions of a County Council in depriving an old person of his liberty and dignity in their overreaction to reports that he might be subjected to financial exploitation. This, said the judge, amounted to punishing the victim for the acts of the perpetrators.
Factual background
The facts of this case can be summarised very shortly. P, a 91 year old gentleman, is a retired civil servant and WWII veteran, and until February 2013, has lived in his own home for fifty years. He has been alone with his companion cat since the death of his sister in 1998. He is described as being a very generous man ready to help others financially if he believed they needed it, as well as making donations to various charities.
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18 January 2015 by Rosalind English
B and G (Children) (No.2) [2015] EWFC 3 – read judgment
Contemplating the details of different forms of female genital mutilation is not for the faint hearted. But that is what the courts and the relevant experts have to do, not only to protected alleged victims but to defend the interests of those suspected of perpetuating the procedure, whether it is a question of criminal liability under the FGM Act 2003, or determining that a threshold of harm has been passed so as to initiate care proceedings if the victim is a child.
This case concerned the latter; although in the end the court was not satisfied that the evidence was sufficient to satisfy the “significant harm” requirement under the Children Act 1989, Sir James Munby P considered the case sufficiently important to explore the inclusion of FGM, and, more controversially, male circumcision, in the array of cultural and religious rituals that can trigger the state’s intervention in family life.
These were “deep waters” which the judge was “hesitant to enter”, yet, enter them he did, all the better for the clarification of this difficult issue in care proceedings.
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7 January 2015 by Rosalind English
M, R (on the application of) v Hampshire Constabulary and another (18 December 2014) [2014] EWCA Civ 1651 – read judgment
The law governing the monitoring of sex offenders, allowing police officers to visit the homes of registered offenders, did not constitute an unlawful interference with the offenders’ privacy rights under Article 8 of the ECHR.
This was an appeal against a decision by the appellant (M) against a decision by Hallett LJ and Collins J in the Administrative Court that the practice of police officers making visits to the homes of registered sex offenders for the purpose of monitoring their behaviour did not violate the Convention.
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31 December 2014 by Rosalind English
The multiple sclerosis sufferer Debbie Purdy died in the Marie Curie hospice in Bradford on December 23 2014. Having been denied her right to travel to Dignitas in Switzerland, which would have exposed her husband to the risk of prosecution under the 1961 Suicide Act, she took the only option available to her – refusing food. Death by starvation is not pleasant. The relevant Wikipedia entry describes some of the symptoms:
The body breaks down its own muscles and other tissues in order to keep vital systems such as the nervous system and the heart muscle functioning.
… Early symptoms include impulsivity, irritability, hyperactivity, and other symptoms. Atrophy (wasting away) of the stomach weakens the perception of hunger, since the perception is controlled by the percentage of the stomach that is empty. Victims of starvation are often too weak to sense thirst, and therefore become dehydrated.
All movements become painful due to muscle atrophy and dry, cracked skin that is caused by severe dehydration. With a weakened body, diseases are commonplace. Fungi, for example, often grow under the esophagus, making swallowing painful.
I apologise for introducing such a gloomy subject into the dying embers of 2014, but it is too important to pass by.
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Fish Legal v Information Commissioner and others (Information rights practice and procedure) [2015] UKUT 52 (AAC) Charles J – read judgment
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