Category: In the news
17 June 2014 by Adam Wagner
Yesterday was Magna Carta Day. It is now only 364 days until the 800th anniversary of the sealing of England’s oldest charter of rights, and one of the world’s most influential legal documents.
There will be much celebration in the coming year, and rightly so. Despite its age, Magna Carta is still partly on our statute books. It represents the first legal constraints imposed on the English king by his subjects. It has influenced every major rights law since – notably, the United States Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights, both of which are very much still in force.
According to the Magna Carta Trust, there will be eight century beer, festivities, new books, an opera, a calypso tribute and even a new roundabout on the A308 at Runnymede. And if a new roundabout isn’t “English” enough for you, there will of course be lots of dressing up in silly costumes.
But along with celebration, there will be disagreement. It has already started.
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17 June 2014 by Celia Rooney
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular summer festival of human rights news and views. The full list of links can be found here. You can find previous roundups here. Links compiled by Adam Wagner, post by Celia Rooney
This week, secret trials and Labour’s stance on the Human Rights Act 1998 have generated discussion. In other news, the Supreme Court reconsiders whether religious doctrine is a justiciable question for the courts.
In the News
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12 June 2014 by Guest Contributor
Guardian News and Media Ltd -v- AB CD – Read preliminary judgment
The Court of Appeal has published its decision in Guardian News Media v AB and CD. It is not a judgment, the Court says. Judgments – plural – will be given “in due course.” Still, the 24 paragraph decision contains the order and explanation of the order, and gives an indication of some of the reasons that will follow.
Is this a good decision? It is better than it might have been, but there are still deeply worrying problems.
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11 June 2014 by David Hart KC
Khaira v. Shergill [2014] UKSC 33, 11 June 2014 read judgment
Adam Wagner assisted two of the respondents in this case on behalf of Bindmans, solicitors, but was not involved in the writing of this post.
The Supreme Court has just reversed a decision of the Court of Appeal (see my previous post here) that a dispute about the trust deeds of two Sikh religious charities was non-justiciable and so could not and should not be decided by the Courts. By contrast, the SC said that two initial issues concerning the meaning of trust deeds were justiciable, and, because of this, further issues which did raise religious issues had to be determined by the courts.
The wider interest of the case is its tackling of this tricky concept of non-justiciability.
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10 June 2014 by Rosalind English
Q v Q [2014] EWFC 7 (21 May 2014) – read judgment
The President of the Family Division has adjourned contact proceedings by an unrepresented father pending the Ministry of Justice or any other responsible body to come up with the solution to the problem of one parent suffering an injustice due to the withdrawal of legal aid.
This was an application by the father, a convicted sex offender who spoke hardly, “if any” English, for contact with his son under the 1989 Children Act. When it transpired that the second of his offences had been committed during the currency of these proceedings legal aid was withdrawn. As a consequence there was no funding either for the court attendance of the experts opining as to the father’s unsuitability, or for an interpreter enabling him to challenge their evidence.
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9 June 2014 by David Hart KC
Harb v. HRH Prince Abdul Aziz Bin Fahd Abdul Aziz, Rose J, [2014] EWHC 1807 (Ch), 9 June 2014 – read judgment
Rosalind English posted in January 2014 (here) on Jones v. the United Kingdom ((judgment here), in which the Strasbourg Court decided that the inability of four men to bring torture compensation claims against Saudi Arabia in UK courts did not breach Article 6(1) of the Convention (access to court). The Court held that a grant of state immunity reflected generally recognised rules of public international law and so there had been no violation.
The current claim involves a Saudi Prince, and his late father, King Fahd, but its subject matter is very different. Mrs Harb, the claimant, says she married King Fahd secretly in 1969: see the photo of them in happier times. The King agreed to provide for her after their separation, Mrs Harb says, and the Prince was involved in agreeing the details of this. Mrs Harb then brought matrimonial proceedings against the King, whilst alive, which were dismissed on grounds of state immunity. On appeal, the CA (judgment here) decided that these proceedings had come to an end by virtue of the King’s intervening death in 2005.
The present proceedings consisted of a claim for breach of contract in respect of the agreement concluded by the Prince on behalf of his father – said to involve £12m and two large Central London properties. The Prince pleaded state immunity, but this plea was dismissed by Rose J in today’s judgement.
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7 June 2014 by David Hart KC
Delaney v. Secretary of State for Transport, Jay J, 3 June 2014 – read judgment
Many readers may be wondering how it comes about that a drug-dealer is entitled to compensation against Her Majesty’s Government in circumstances where he was injured during the course of a criminal joint enterprise. The understandable reaction might be: there must be some rule of public policy, reflecting public revulsion, which bars such a claim. The short answer is that there is not.
Well put by the judge. Because as well as being the innocent victim of bad driving, the Claimant happened to have 240g of cannabis on him, and the negligent driver was found to have a smaller quantity. We are back in the familiar territory of ascertaining and applying a rule of law designed to compensate the injured without letting any free-floating moral disapproval get in the way of deciding what that law is. If, by contrast, you feel like a good dose of outrage, just click here for a link to a certain tabloid well-versed in all that.
The problem for the Secretary of State for Transport was, as the judge found, European Law required victims to be compensated in the circumstances, even if the driver’s insurance did not cover the claim. And there was no warrant for a domestic rule preventing such liabilities being paid by the Motor Insurers Bureau (MIB) or insurers whose job it was to provide compensation in accordance with European law.The judge therefore awarded Francovich damages (see below) against the UK for its breach in not conforming to EU law.
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7 June 2014 by Rosalind English
McDonald v United Kingdom [2014] ECHR 942 (20 May 2014) – read judgment
The Strasbourg Court has ruled that local authorities are within their margin of discretion to balance individuals’ personal interests against the more general interest of the competent public authority in carrying out their social responsibility of provision of care to the community at large.
Background
The applicant, who suffered from an incapacitating stroke in 1999, required assistance with all transfers and mobilisation. Disabled persons have an individual right to certain services under section 2(1) of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970, and under the 1990 National Health Services and Care Act to require an assessment of needs from their local authority.
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5 June 2014 by Adam Wagner
Sadiq Khan, Labour’s shadow Justice Secretary, has given us a glimpse of what the Human Rights Act would look like under a future Labour government in a Telegraph article. Labour will “shift power back to British courts”, says the former solicitor.
The article presents a strong case for human rights as an “ancient British tradition” and ties future reforms in with the 800th anniversary of
Magna Carta. But the only real proposal here is publishing ‘guidance’ to judges in order to
make sure it is clear to the judges what Parliament intended by Section 2 – that they’re free to disagree with Strasbourg, that it’s sometimes healthy to do so, and that they should feel confident in their judgments based on Britain’s expertise and strong human rights standing.
Section 2 of the Human Rights Act says that any judge deciding a question involving human rights “must take into account“, amongst other things, any judgment of the European Court of Human Rights. This has been a controversial provision as on its face it only requires judges to pay attention to, not follow, Strasbourg’s judgments. But the judiciary have often gone further than they a required to – see Rosalind English’s summary of the recent public spat between the judges.
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28 May 2014 by David Hart KC
The Plantagenet Alliance Ltd (R o.t.a) v. Secretary of State for Justice and others [2014] EWHC 1662 (QB) 23 May 2014 – read judgment
Some 527 years after his death, Richard III’s skeleton was found beneath a car park in Leicester. The Plantagenet Alliance, a campaigning organisation representing a group of collateral descendants, sought judicial review of the decision taken by the Secretary of State to exhume and re-inter the monarch in Leicester Cathedral without consulting them and a wide audience.
The case had become a bit of a stalking horse for Lord Chancellor Grayling’s plans to reform judicial review: see my post here. Grayling may have backed off for the moment from his specific plans to reform standing rules, though he still has it in for campaigning bodies participating in judicial reviews. As we will see, counsel for MoJ had a go at saying that the Alliance had no standing, but to no avail.
But MoJ had better points, and was successful overall. And this is the moral of the story. You cannot sensibly justify the bringing of entirely meritless judicial review. But it is wrong to seek to defeat a meritorious claim by relying on standing points, without considering the public interest of the underlying case. As I pointed out in my post, the irony of the cases chosen by MoJ last year to make its case that the standing rules were all very awful were ones where government had been behaving unlawfully.
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26 May 2014 by David Hart KC
Bancoult v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs [2014] EWCA Civ 708 – read judgment
Rosalind English (here) has summarised this unsuccessful appeal against the rejection of the Chagossians’ claims by the Divisional Court, and I have posted on this litigation arising out of the removal and subsequent exclusion of the population from the Chagos Archipelago in the British Indian Ocean Territory: see here, here, here and here. The photograph is from 1971 – the last coconut harvest for the Chagossians.
There were three remaining grounds alleged against the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in this judicial review
(i) its decision in favour of a Marine Protected Area was actuated by an improper motive, namely an intention to prevent Chagossians and their descendants from resettling in the BIOT;
(ii) the consultation paper which preceded the decision failed to disclose that the MPA proposal, in so far as it prohibited all fishing, would adversely affect the traditional and historical rights of Chagossians to fish in the waters of their homeland, as both Mauritian citizens and as the native population of the Chagos Islands; and
(iii) it was in breach of the obligations imposed on the United Kingdom under article 4(3) of the Treaty of the European Union.
I want to look at (i), the improper purpose grounds, and (iii) the TEU/TFEU grounds, because in both respects the CA took a different course than the Divisional Court, even though the outcome was the same.
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23 May 2014 by Rosalind English
The Plantagenet Alliance Ltd (R o.t.a) v. Secretary of State for Justice and others [2014] EWHC 1662 (QB) 23 May 2014 – read judgment
The facts of this application for judicial review were set out in David Hart QC’s post on the original permission hearing. To recap briefly, the Plantagenet Alliance, a campaigning organisation representing a group of collateral descendants of Richard III were given the go ahead to seek judicial review of the decision taken by the respondents – the Secretary of State, Leicester Council and Leicester University, regarding his re-interment at Leicester Cathedral without consulting them. More specifically, the claimant’s main case was that there was an obligation, principally on the part of the Ministry of Justice, to revisit or reconsider the licence once the remains had been conclusively identified as those of Richard III.
The Divisional Court (of three judges) unanimously rejected this argument on all grounds. It could not be said in public law terms that the Secretary of State failed to act as a reasonable or rational decision-maker when deciding not to revisit the exhumation licence in the light of the information which he already had. The Court hammered the final nail on the consultation coffin by declaring that there was
no sensible basis for imposing a requirement for a general public consultation, with leaflets, on-line petitions, publicity campaigns, nor for advertisements trying to ascertain who is a relative and then weighing their views against the general public, when there are, in reality, only two possible contenders (Leicester and York)
A short summary of the decision in Bancoult follows.
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22 May 2014 by Celia Rooney
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular lightening rod of human rights news and views. The full list of links can be found here. You can find previous roundups here. Links compiled by Adam Wagner, post by Celia Rooney.
In recent human rights news, the ECJ finds against Internet giant Google, strengthening the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’. In other news, the UK awaits to see if it will be prosecuted before the ICC in relation to allegations of war crimes in Iraq, while the Court of Appeal confronts the issue of legal aid cuts in serious fraud cases as the Operation Cotton scandal continues.
In the News
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22 May 2014 by Rosalind English
Case C-131/12 Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) and Mario Costeja González – read judgment
The CJEU has declined to follow Opinion of AG Jääskinen in this case involving a challenge under the 1995 Data Protection Directive by a lawyer who objected to a newspaper reference referring to old bankruptcy proceedings against him in a Google search. See my earlier post on the opinion. Lorna Woods’ excellent report on the CJEU’s reasoning can be found on Inforrm’s blog so I won’t replicate her effort here. Suffice it to say that the outpouring of indignation in the press, the references to “hundreds” of requests from celebrities and other people who want to stop harmful information about them appearing, suggests that this ruling has opened a can of worms, not to mention the byzantine difficulties of enforcing the ruling by requiring search companies to become their own data control regulators.
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20 May 2014 by Rosalind English
Paulet v United Kingdom Paulet (application no. 6219/08) – read judgment
The Strasbourg Court has declared, by five votes to one, that the UK authorities had acted unlawfully by seizing the wages of an Ivorian worker who used a false passport to gain employment. The majority ruled that the UK courts should have balanced individual property rights against interests of the general public.
This case on the confiscation of the proceeds of crime raises many difficult legal questions such as the nature of the link between the crime and the proceeds and the distribution of the burden of proof in establishing this link. Mr Paulet complained that the confiscation order against him had been disproportionate as it amounted to the confiscation of his entire savings over nearly four years of genuine work, without any distinction being made between his case and those involving more serious criminal offences such as drug trafficking or organised crime. The Court found that the UK courts’ scope of review of Mr Paulet’s case had been too narrow. The majority objected to the fact that the domestic courts had simply found that the confiscation order against Mr Paulet had been in the public interest, without balancing that conclusion against his right to peaceful enjoyment of his possessions as required under the European Convention.
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Yesterday was Magna Carta Day. It is now only 364 days until the 800th anniversary of the sealing of England’s oldest charter of rights, and one of the world’s most influential legal documents.
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