Category: Case comments
18 January 2011 by Rosalind English
IFAW Internationaler Tierschutz-Fonds gGmbH; read judgment
EU law is replete with the soaring rhetoric of rights and transparency. Indeed the very first Article of the Treaty on European Union states that ‘decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen’ . But not, it appears, when the decision concerns the balance between short-term economic interests and those of the environment – or, in the Commission’s own words, the “Community’s natural heritage”.
Key facts and figures relating to central policy remain firmly under lock and key in the EU, as NGOs find when they try to get the Commission to enforce the various Directives against national governments and the EU institutions themselves.
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17 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
Immigration and deportation decisions are regularly used to attack the Human Rights Act, and are raised as examples of why it must be amended or replaced. But a recent deportation case shows that such decisions are often poorly reported and articles ignore crucial details.
Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph reported on the case of a man who killed a Gurkha soldier’s son and cannot be deported because of human rights law. According to David Barrett, Home Affairs Correspondent, the controversial decision will “intensify pressure” on the prime minister “who has so far failed to deliver a Conservative promise to rip up the Human Rights Act.”
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14 January 2011 by Guest Contributor
The European Court of Human Rights has handed down judgment in Ali v United Kingdom (Application no. 40385/06, 11 January 2011). The decision is the final instalment of the litigation which culminated at the domestic level in the judgment of the House of Lords in Ali v Lord Grey School [2006] UKHL 14.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ECtHR has upheld the conclusion of the HoL (Baroness Hale dissenting in part) that no violation of the A2P1 right to education occurred. However, in certain significant respects the reasoning of the ECtHR diverges from that of the HoL. In particular, it provides important guidance on: (i) the circumstances in which school exclusions are compatible with A2P1 rights; and (ii) the content of the right to education.
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14 January 2011 by Rosalind English
Bank Mellat v HM Treasury [2011] EWCA Civ 1: read judgment.
Financial restrictions imposed in 2009 on an Iranian Bank which effectively excluded it from the UK financial market did not breach common law or ECHR principles of fairness, said the Court of Appeal on Thursday.
The Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 conferred powers on the Treasury to restrict persons operating in the financial sector from entering or participating in any transaction or business relationship with the appellant Bank Mellat (BM). The Order, which was subject to the affirmative resolution procedure and reviewable on limited grounds (Section 63(2) CTA) was justified by a Ministerial Statement which declared that the direction to cease business would
reduce the risk of the UK financial sector being used, unknowingly or otherwise, to facilitate Iran’s proliferation sensitive activities.
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13 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
Desmond v The Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire Police 2011] EWCA Civ 3 (12 January 2011)- Read judgment
The Court of Appeal has ruled that it is not possible to sue the police in negligence for not filling in an Enhanced Criminal Record Certificate (ECRC). The ruling shows that the courts are still reluctant to allow negligence claims against the police, and provides useful guidance as to the duty of care of public authorities towards the general public.
Vincent Desmond was arrested in 2001 for a late-night sexual assault in Nottingham. He denied the crime, and a week later the police decided to take no action against him. When closing the file, a detective constable wrote in his notebook “It is apparent Desmond is not responsible for the crime. The complainant visited and cannot state for certain if Desmond is responsible.”
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13 January 2011 by Matt Donmall
Gillberg v Sweden – 41723/06 [2010] ECHR 1676 (2 November 2010) – Read judgment
A Swedish professor has failed in his European Court of Human Rights challenge to his conviction for disobeying a court order to hand over sensitive information in medical research, despite having promised the participants that the information would be for his use alone.
As reported in a past blog, the fact of their confidentiality does not preclude the medical records of third party patients being disclosed in legal proceedings. So too in relation to sensitive information given confidentially in the context of medical research, in view of the recent Strasbourg case of Gillberg v Sweden (Application no. 41723/06).
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12 January 2011 by Rosalind English
C-115/09 Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland, Landesverband Nordrhein-Westfalen eVvBezirksregierung Arnsberg Trianel Kohlekraftwerk Lünen (intervening) – read judgment
The German system of judicial review involves a “careful and detailed” scrutiny of administrative decisions. However, admissibility criteria are such that few are able to access this system, particularly groups bringing actions alleging environmental harm.
At the centre of this case is the highly topical matter, relevant to one of the discussion threads on this site, of the trend towards a new system of environmental justice, heralded by Aarhus and the accompanying EU Directives, where national courts to are required to recognise claims brought by pressure groups alleging infringement of environmental provisions, even where there is no individual legal interest involved. The Trianel case puts into sharp focus the debate as to whether the environment should be protected not as an expression of an individual’s interest, but as a general public interest, enforceable in the courts.
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4 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
Quila & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department & Ors [2010] EWCA Civ 1482 – Read judgment
A key part of the government’s strategy to combat forced marriages, preventing people under the age of 21 from entering the country to marry, has been heavily criticised by the Court of Appeal.
The decision shows that even policies which pursue a legitimate and laudable aim must still be a proportionate to the problem they seek to address, or risk breaching the human rights of those affected. But it also highlights how difficult it is to set effective policies to combat hazardous arrangements which can involve rape, child abuse and domestic violence, and affect thousands of UK residents annually.
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29 December 2010 by Adam Wagner
Al Hassan-Daniel & Anor v HM Revenue and Customs & Anor [2010] EWCA Civ 1443 (15 December 2010) – Read judgment
The Court of Appeal has ruled that the family of a drug smuggler who died after being poisoned by 116 swallowed cocaine packages can bring a human rights claim against the state, despite his criminal behaviour.
The decision will anger those who say that the Human Rights Act is no more than a villains’ charter, doing more to protect the rights of “asylum seeker death drivers” and the murderers of headmasters. However, the court has done no more than confirm the basic principle that human rights are for all, not just for people we like.
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24 December 2010 by Guest Contributor
Don't step on them
Last year I blogged about Mrs Clift winning a claim for defamation against Slough Borough Council. The facts are in the earlier post. Slough’s appeal was rejected by the Court of Appeal in Clift v Slough Borough Council [2010] EWCA Civ 1171.
While the point in issue was whether Slough could rely on a defence of qualified privilege against Mrs Clift’s claim, I think the decision has wider implications and is therefore relevant to housing practice. The court’s reasoning on Article 8 of the ECHR should be familiar to housing lawyers. In the court’s view, the publication of damaging allegations about Mrs Clift interfered with her rights under Article 8(1) and the council was therefore bound not to pass those allegations on unless in doing so Article 8(2) was satisfied – which it manifestly was not in Mrs Clift’s case. Via some relatively complex reasoning related to the ways in which qualified privilege has been analysed by the courts, this meant the council could not raise the defence and so their appeal was lost.
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23 December 2010 by Adam Wagner
Legal Services Commission v Humberstone, R.( On the application of) [2010] EWCA Civ 1479 (21 December 2010) – Read judgment
The high court was right to quash the decision of the Legal Services Commission not to recommend public funding for a mother to be represented at the inquest into the death of her 10-year-old son. However, the court of appeal has ruled that the judge’s conclusions on when the state was obliged to conduct an expanded inquest into a death were confused.
The court of appeal has upheld the decision of Mr Justice Hickinbottom in the high court, although Lady Justice Smith came to her decision by a different route and criticised his reasoning. The case is important as it lays down guidelines for when legal representation for relatives of the dead should be funded at inquests, an often controversial issue, and how this fits with the state’s duties to investigate deaths under the European Convention on Human Rights. These duties have, partly as a result of Mr Justice Hickinbottom in this case, fallen into confusion, and the court of appeal has given a welcome clarification.
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21 December 2010 by David Hart KC
Smartsource v Information Commissioner + 19 other parties [2010] UKUT 415 (AAC) 23rd November 2010 – read judgment
Ibsen’s Enemy of the People has Dr Stockmann complaining to his Norwegian municipality about contamination of its water supply. We think that these sorts of disputes are part of a modern problem, so it is striking to find Ibsen being invoked, judicially, in this far from 19th century fight about environmental information.
The question was the less than dramatic one as to whether information about water and wastewater billing etc was environmental information, and that in turn involved deciding whether water companies and sewage undertakers were “public authorities”. Ibsen might not have found that answer too difficult to provide: what local authorities used to do in the 19th century and much of the 20th century, here, in Norway, and elsewhere, included supplying you with clean water and taking away your foul water.
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20 December 2010 by Rosalind English
R (on the application of Edwards and another) (Appellant) v Environment Agency & others(Respondents) [2010] UKSC 57 – Read judgment
The development of the principles of access to justice in environmental cases moves on apace.
This case arose out of a failed attempt to seek judicial review of the Environment Agency’s decision to issue a permit for the operation of a cement works. The application was made under the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive 85/337/EC and the Intergrated Pollution Prevention and control Directive 96/61/EC, both of which incorporate Article 9 of the Aarhus Convention, which requires that costs for environmental proceedings should not be prohibitively expensive.
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16 December 2010 by Rosalind English
O’Donoghue and Others v. the United Kingdom(application no. 34848/07):
The government’s system for preventing sham marriages as an entry ploy for immigrants breached the right to marry and was discriminatory – read judgment.
By the time this case was lodged the Certificate of Approval Scheme had been much diluted by a series of amendments, but even so the Court found itself to be “gravely concerned” with the policy. This, along with the surprisingly lenient approach to the applicants’ failure to exhaust local remedies, suggests that the Court was anxious to address what it sees as endemic problems in the UK’s border control policy. If states want to use impediments to marriage as an entry deterrent, it says, then they must face being rapped with the Article 12 stick.
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15 December 2010 by Caroline Cross
PF and EF v UK (Application No. 28326/09) – Read judgment
The European Court of Human Rights has dismissed an application brought against the police in Northern Ireland by a mother and her daughter who argued the police had failed to take sufficient action to protect them from loyalist riots on their route to primary school.
The court held that the police must be afforded a degree of discretion in taking operational decisions, and that in this case the police took all “reasonable steps” to protect the applicants.
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IFAW Internationaler Tierschutz-Fonds gGmbH; read judgment 
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