Category: In the news
13 April 2011 by Adam Wagner
The clock is ticking again on prisoner votes. The European Court of Human Rights has rejected the UK government’s latest appeal in the long-running saga.
The UK had attempted to appeal the recent decision in Greens and M.T. v. the United Kingdom. The full background can be found in my previous post, in which I predicted that the European court would find the UK’s appeal unappealing. It has, and the result is that the UK has just under six months to remove the blanket ban on prisoners voting.
Incidentally, Rosalind’s post from earlier today relates to a separate but also interesting Scottish court judgment on prisoner votes.
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13 April 2011 by Adam Wagner
Condliff, R (On the Application Of) v North Staffordshire Primary Care Trust [2011] EWHC B8 (Admin) (07 April 2011) – Read judgment
What happens when the money for medical treatment runs out? The National Health Service has a limited budget. It also is obliged by law to provide necessary medical services to the public. Inevitably, some treatments will be considered unaffordable, and this sometimes leads to court challenges.
Two such challenges have arisen recently. One is interesting because it has been rejected (unless it is appealed) by the High Court, and the reasoning behind that rejection highlights how difficult it is to succeed in such claims, especially on human rights grounds. The other, because of the way it, and in particular its human rights aspects, has been reported. Not quite bad enough to merit placing on the legal naughty step, but not far off.
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13 April 2011 by David Hart KC
On 6 April 2011, the European Commission announced that it has decided to refer the UK Government to the Court of Justice of the European Communities under Article 258 TFEU, for failing to provide affordable access to justice in environmental cases.
This blog has previously charted some of the twists and turns in the process of showing that environmental challenges are currently “prohibitively expensive” within the meaning of Article 9(4) of the Aarhus Convention – not the least of which was a complaint to the Aarhus Compliance Committee which was upheld by that Committee in October 2010. And the underlying concern is the state of the costs rules under which a claimant may be ordered to pay tens of thousands of pounds of costs if he loses, despite the developing case law on Protective Costs Orders designed to mitigate this.
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13 April 2011 by Rosalind English
George McGeogh for Judicial Review of the Compatibility with the Petitioner’s EU law rights of the Decision of the Electoral Registration Officer , Outer House, Court of Session [2011] CSOH 65, 08 April 2011 (Lord Tyre) – Read opinion
This was an attempt by a prisoner to argue that his disenfranchisement under Section 3 of the Representation of the People Act breached his human rights, not under the ECHR, but his rights under EU law. The case illustrates the widespread (and probably correct) perception that if you can bring your claim under European law by persuading the court that one or other of its principles and freedoms are involved, you have a better chance of getting home on the rights argument than if you are restricted to the weaker authority of the Council of Europe and its Convention.
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12 April 2011 by Guest Contributor
Against the backdrop of much fanfare and polemic, France’s controversial prohibition on face-veiling came into force yesterday. The law has met with derision and scepticism internationally, and internally, from a surprising source, in the guise of a police union which “denounced” the law as “unenforceable”.
The law, which was passed by the Senate in September, was motivated by a number of political concerns.
First, it was rationalised with reference to the value of gender equality, and the concern that the republican state should take a stand against the symbols of value in the public square.
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11 April 2011 by Melina Padron
It’s time for the human rights roundup, a regular bulletin of all the law we haven’t quite managed to feature in full blog posts.
by Melinda Padron
In the news last week:
At a time when the sustainability of the principle of Parliamentary sovereignty in modern British society is being called into question, Lord Neuberger gave a speech entitled “Who are the masters now?”, where he made a case for Parliamentary supremacy.
He suggested the principle remains absolute for five main reasons:
(1) Parliamentary sovereignty is the cornerstone of our constitutional settlement;
(2) Parliament does not want judges to have the power to overrule statutes (and he added that neither do judges);
(3) arguments to the contrary are far removed from reality that they undermine the main proposition they seek to support;
(4) even the strongest advocates of limiting Parliamentary sovereignty accept that such could only be done in the most exceptional of circumstances;
(5) we live in a world where democratic accountability is of the essence, and as such it would be undesirable for unelected judges to exercise powers to limit Parliament.
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11 April 2011 by Adam Wagner
The US State department has released its 35th annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices relating to over 190 countries. This includes a report on the United Kingdom, which can be access here and here (pdf).
The reports are mandated by US statute and require that the Secretary of State shall transmit to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate, “a full and complete report regarding the status of internationally recognized human rights”, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UK Foreign Office has also recently published its own report into human rights around the world, which only deals with “countries of concern”, and as such doesn’t mention the US once in 355 pages .
Secretary of State Clinton introduced the US reports, saying:
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8 April 2011 by Adam Wagner
The Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger is either the busiest judge in England or relies heavily upon his assistant John Sorabji for his consistently thoughtful and excellent speeches. Either way, he has given another fascinating speech. Who are the masters now?
The question posed in the title is paraphrased from one asked in Parliament in 1946, which itself paraphrased Humpty Dumpty (see para 3). Neuberger used the second annual Lord Alexander of Weedon lecture (Lord Philips gave the first) to speak about the topical but, as I have posted, slippery issue of Parliamentary sovereignty. So, who is the master: the unelected judge or the elected politician?
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6 April 2011 by Rosalind English
Le Roux and others v Dey (South African Constitutional Court) – read judgment
With the new libel reform proposals doing the consultation rounds it is enlightening to see how other jurisdictions strike the balance privacy and dignity on the one hand, and freedom of expression on the other.
A recent case before the South African Constitutional Court raised two interesting issues: the extent to which liability for defamation should be reduced where children are concerned, and the question whether it should be actionable at all to refer to someone in terms of the condition protected by the Constitution – sexual orientation, for example.
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5 April 2011 by Adam Wagner
Are you a current or recent law student looking for funding to undertake a human rights project in the UK or abroad? The Human Rights Lawyers Association, of which I am a committee member, has £6,000 to give away for its 2011 bursary scheme.
The closing date for applications is 8 May 2011. For full details, click here or continue reading.
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4 April 2011 by Melina Padron
It’s time for the human rights roundup, a regular bulletin of all the law we haven’t quite managed to feature in full blog posts.
by Melinda Padron
Last week the UKHRB celebrated its 1st birthday! Rosalind English wrote a commemorative piece revealing which posts of the past year have pleased our readers the most.
In the news last week we saw the government’s response to the 26 March cuts protests. The Law and Lawyers blog discussed Theresa May’s announcement that the Home Office is looking into increasing police powers in relation to police protests. Measures could include banning the wearing of masks or balaclavas, and banning known hooligans from participating in rallies and marches – a practice already adopted to combat football hooliganism. The article also highlighted how the massive protest of 26 March did not seem to be calling for a general election, despite the prospect of the Fixed Term Parliament Bill becoming law in the near future. The Bill would fix the date of the next general election at 7 May 2015, as well as make it very difficult for a general election to be called prior to this designated date.
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4 April 2011 by Matthew Flinn
The proposition that burglars have rights incites debate, and sometimes anger, which is often directed towards the Human Rights Act 1998 and the European Convention of Human Rights. However, on closer examination, the idea of “burglars’ rights” is not a new phenomenon in English law, and nor has it been imposed upon us by Strasbourg. The rights that burglars enjoy have long been part of the fabric of English common law.
There is nothing new about the idea that criminals in general, and burglars in particular, have forfeited their human rights by virtue of their criminality.
As Michael Cholbi of the University of New York has described in his article discussing felon disenfranchisement in the United States, “A Felon’s Right to Vote”, the strong conviction held by some that criminals should not enjoy the benefit of human rights is founded upon a basic intuition that “criminal acts alter the moral status of wrongdoers, permitting us to do to them what is otherwise unjust”. Essentially, having demonstrated an unwillingness to regulate their own conduct, criminals cease to be an object of moral concern.
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4 April 2011 by Graeme Hall
In an interesting post, Aidan O’Neill QC concludes that the European Court of Human Rights is “in danger of imminent collapse” due to its backlog of 140,000 applications with around 1,600 arriving every month; a conclusion compounded by inherent delays. He suggests that the way to draw back Strasbourg from the brink of judicial Armageddon is to abolish the individual right to petition Strasbourg and to introduce a referral system whereby national courts request Strasbourg’s opinion on human rights issues, akin to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
by Graeme Hall
I must disagree. Strasbourg’s jurisdiction spreads across 47 contracting States, ranging from diverse populations such as Liechtenstein and Malta to Russia and Turkey. In turn, the Court is the guardian of the European Convention on Human Rights for over 800,000,000 individuals. The 61,300 valid applications which Strasbourg received in 2010 represent applications from 0.0077 per cent of the population to which the Convention applies. Given the importance of the Convention to the protection of fundamental human rights and freedoms, I find it surprising that Strasbourg does not receive more applications.
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31 March 2011 by Rosalind English
On 31st March a year ago our blog was launched and to celebrate our entry into a second glorious year we thought we’d take a look at what we’ve done that pleased you most.
As with all internet sites, there are no prizes for guessing why Should people with low IQs be banned from sex? comes out with almost the highest number of hits, and no doubt some of the visitors to that page would have gone away disappointed, but we promise it is a fine piece on a very interesting issue. And the high score achieved by our post Brititsh airways strike and human rights – the union strikes back has less to do with law than travellers’ anxieties about their scheduled flights.
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30 March 2011 by Rosalind English
Jones v Kaney – read judgment/press summary. The Supreme Court has ruled that the an expert giving advice in the course of litigation is no longer immune from being sued in negligence.
This case, which had been granted a “leap-frog certificate” to go straight from the Divisional Court to the Supreme Court, overturns a long-established principle that expert witnesses should be protected from legal action on the basis of public policy. The majority hold that the immunity from suit for breach of duty (whether in contract or in negligence) contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights. The right to a fair trial under Article 6 impliedly entitles an individual, whose position in civil proceedings has been compromised by negligent advice, to take action against that expert to compensate for the damage caused.
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