Category: In the news
28 April 2011 by Isabel McArdle
A juror has found herself facing contempt of court charges, it being alleged that she communicated on Facebook with a defendant who had already been acquitted.
These types of proceedings can have human rights implications in two ways: Article 6, providing the right to a fair trial can be infringed upon by improper communicaton by jurors, and to a lesser extent, Article 10, which provides the right to freedom of expression may be engaged. As Article 10 includes a large number of circumstances where freedom of expression may be lawfully restricted, raising freedom of expression arguments to challenge the bringing of contempt proceedings would be very unlikely to succeed in these circumstances.
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28 April 2011 by Rosalind English
[Updated] When blogging about the Great Strasbourg Debate, Adam Wagner recently reflected that he and I are”good cop, bad cop”. No prizes for guessing who plays which role.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, here are a few pensées on the recent news that the Daily Telegraph is backing a reform campaign (see Adam’s post on this). Or rather, let’s start with Charles Darwin, who observed that the human animal is capable of continual extension in the objects of his “social instincts and sympathies” from the time when he had regard only for himself and his kin:
… later, he came to regard more and more ‘not only the welfare, but the happiness of all his fellowmen’, [then] ‘his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, extending to men of all races, to the imbecile, maimed, and other useless members of society, and finally to the lower animals.
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27 April 2011 by David Hart KC
Biowatch Trust v Registrar Genetic Resources and Others (CCT 80/08) [2009] ZACC 14 – read judgment
Costs again, I am afraid, and how to make sure that ordinary people can litigate important cases without being stifled by a huge costs bill if they lose.
I have a certain amount of “form” for it on this blog, but it is important stuff. It is worth seeing where we have got to, and measuring that progress against the response to the same problem from an avowedly constitutional court, that of South Africa.
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26 April 2011 by Adam Wagner
Human rights and discrimination law are often criticised in the press. Sometimes the criticisms are justified, but the level of anger which a system of universal rights can generate is sometimes surprising. Unfortunately, some of that anger is caused by inaccurate reporting of judgments.
In yesterday’s Telegraph online, Cristina Odone blogged on a recent “scandal” relating to Mr Justice Mostyn’s request to carry out his responsibilities as a duty judge in Tenerife. I will leave comment on the main story to Charon QC, save to say that Odone uses the story as a means of judge-bashing, a sport which is currently popular in the press and even with politicians. “Who”, asks Odone channeling public anger, “do these judges think they are?” Moreover,
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25 April 2011 by Adam Wagner
The Telegraph has launched a campaign to “Stop foreign criminals using ‘family rights’ to dodge justice“. The perceived inability of judges to deport foreign criminals as a result of the European Convention on Human Rights, and in particular the right to family life, is one of the most commonly heard criticisms of human rights law.
In an editorial yesterday, the Telegraph argued that the Human Rights Act has become “a means of undermining public safety, not of helping to protect it.” The newspaper claims that last year 200 foreign convicts avoided deportation by citing the right to family life”, which is “an absurd state of affairs”.
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25 April 2011 by Guest Contributor
OPQ v BJM [2011] EWHC 1059 (QB – Read judgment
The case of OPQ v BJM addresses one of the most difficult practical issues in privacy law and adopts a novel solution. Eady J granted a “contra mundum” injunction – that is, one binding on the whole world – in an ordinary “blackmail” privacy case. This means that, although a “final judgment” will be entered, the injunction continues to bind the press and other third parties.
The case has attracted considerable media criticism, for example in the “Daily Mail” which, in a front page story tells its readers: “TV Star’s Shame Hushed up for Ever” (incidentally, the reference to a “TV Star” seems, at first sight, to breach terms of the instruction across the top and bottom of the judgment which is, presumably, part of the court’s order: “Publication of any report as to the subject-matter of these proceedings or the identity of the Claimant is limited to what is contained in this judgment“).
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24 April 2011 by Adam Wagner
Someone pointed out to me yesterday that our blog roll, that is our list of links to other sites, had disappeared. To my horror, they were right, and to my double horror, it turned out that the list of links was woefully inadequate.
So, the much-improved list is back, a bit lower down on the right. And below is a list with some short descriptions of the links. I have tried to limit the list to sites relevant to legal blogging and (to a lesser extent, because there are so many) human rights: for a much better roundup of the state of legal blogging in the UK, please read the almost impossibly comprehensive UK Blawg Roundup #6 by Brian Inkster.
Also, if you think you or someone else should be on this list, please let me know via the contact tab above. And the next #Lawblogs event is on 19 May at 6:30pm at the Law Society – details this week on how to reserve your place.
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22 April 2011 by Adam Wagner
When the prime minister criticises judges, he tends to speak from his gut. The prospect of prisoners being given the vote by European judges makes him feel “physically sick”. And now, he is “a little uneasy” about the rise of “a sort of privacy law without Parliament saying so“.
David Cameron’s use of visceral language may reflect what many in the general public (as well as PR man Max Clifford) are feeling about the issue of wide-ranging injunctions granted by courts, seemingly all the time, to prevent salacious details of celebrities’ private lives being revealed. The latest involves a former big brother contestant’s alleged affair with a married Premier League footballer.
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22 April 2011 by Matthew Flinn
R (Moos and Anor) v The Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis [2011] EWHC 957 (Admin) – Read Judgment
The High Court has decided that the actions of police in “kettling” climate change protestors during the G20 summit were unlawful.
In the aftermath of the global credit crunch, the second G20 Summit, which was to commence on 2 April 2009, was an obvious target of public frustration and anger in respect of a range of economic and social issues. Thus on 1 April, two large demonstrations took place in the City of London. One was staged near the Bank of England, directed primarily at the (mis)management of the world’s financial markets by banks such as the Royal Bank of Scotland. The other was set up as a “Climate Camp” outside the Carbon Exchange Building in Bishopsgate, and was directed at environmental concerns.
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21 April 2011 by Adam Wagner
This has been an interesting week for the continuing “debate” over the future of the European Court of Human Rights. Stay tuned for an explanation of the quotation marks.
First, Dominic Raab MP has released a pamphlet with the think-tank CIVITAS entitled Strasbourg in the Dock. Raab, a former lawyer, has been a vocal opponent of the European Court of Human Right as well as the Human Rights Act. The pamphlet can be read here and the press release and summary can be found here. He finds some of the European judges are “woefully lacking in experience” and, as a consequence, “are undermining the credibility and value of the Court“.
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21 April 2011 by Shaheen Rahman
Rahman, R (on the application of Birmingham City Council) [2011] EWHC 944 (Admin) (31st March 2011) – read judgment
The Prime Minister recently called upon immigrant communities to integrate more fully in British Society, criticising in particular those who fail to learn English.
But three longstanding residents of Birmingham who communicate poorly in English and rely upon legal entitlement advice centres to provide services in their mother tongue, have successfully argued that the Defendant Council unlawfully failed to discharge its Public Sector Equality Duty in ceasing to fund the centres. Two further Claimants, with disabilities, also succeeded in their challenge to the Council’s decision to cease funding another centre that was providing free assistance in welfare benefit appeals.
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20 April 2011 by Rosalind English
R (on the application of K and AC Jackson and Son) v DEFRA – read judgment.
An interesting ruling in the Administrative Court this week touches on some issues fundamental to public law – the extent to which “macro” policy (such as EC law) should trump principles of good administration; the role of factual evidence in judicial review proceedings, and the connection between public law wrongs and liability in tort.
It all started with Boxster the pedigree bull and notices issued by DEFRA which sealed his fate, or at least appeared to do so when his owners received them in April and July 2010. They were directed to arrange the slaughter of the animal as a result of a positive bovine tuberculosis (bTB) test that had been carried out by DEFRA technicians earlier in the year. The notices of intended slaughter were issued under paragraph 4 of the Tuberculosis (England) Order 2007, an Order made under powers contained in the Animal Health Act 1981.
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19 April 2011 by Rosalind English
Followers of the fall-out of the Ratcliffe on Soar affair will remember our post on the collapse on one of the prosecutions after the revelation of activities by an undercover police officer.
We speculated then whether we would ever know whether PC Kennedy’s conduct may have rendered the evidence obtained unfair. Now it seems we have the answer: the DPP has written to the representatives of the twenty protestors who were actually convicted of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass to lodge an appeal against their conviction in December last year.
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19 April 2011 by Isabel McArdle
H and L v A City Council [2011] EWCA Civ 403 – Read judgment
In a decision bound to stir up strong feelings, the Court of Appeal has found that disclosures made by a local authority to other organisations of a person’s conviction for a sex offence against a child and future disclosures proposed by the authority were unlawful. The Court considered that the “blanket” approach to disclosure, even though the person with the conviction and his partner did not work directly with children, was not proportionate to the risk posed. Further, making disclosures without first giving the persons concerned the opportunity to make representations on the matter was unfair.
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19 April 2011 by Adam Wagner
There is a scene in the film Milk in which Harvey Milk, a gay rights leader and politician, counsels his young protegé Cleve Jones on how to rally an angry crowd. Cleve has been reading a convoluted speech to little effect, when Milk steps in to show him how it’s done.”Lose the note cards next time”, he tells Cleve, “your job is to say into that bullhorn what they’re all feeling”.
Geoffrey Robertson QC has taken Harvey Milk’s advice in a recent article in the Daily Mail in support of a British Bill of Rights. We can be angry about European human rights judges and the European Convention, says Robertson, because “human rights can be delivered without Europe infringing the sovereignty of the British Parliament” through a British Bill of Rights. He feels the pain of the Euro-sceptic case.
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