Category: In the news
15 February 2011 by Adam Wagner
1 Chancery Lane chambers along with piCalculator has recently launched a new legal blog, piBlawg.
The blog:
is a collaboration between piCalculator and 1 Chancery Lane. It is intended to give you up to date commentary on all legal aspects of personal injury and clinical negligence case law, whilst adding in a little extra.
piBlawg isn’t of direct relevance to human rights, although they do have one post currently listed under that category. In any case, the blog looks very useful and at the moment very regularly updated. Welcome!
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15 February 2011 by Graeme Hall
Today we are reinvigorating our weekly human rights news and case law roundup. Look out for regular bulletins of all the law we haven’t quite managed to feature in full blog posts.
by Graeme Hall
Bringing Rights Back Home, with foreword by Lord Hoffmann – Policy Exchange: A report by political scientist Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, commissioned by the thinktank Policy Exchange, offers a strong academic criticism of the European Court of Human Rights’ current composition and powers, as well as the affects its judgments are having in Britain. Click here for our previous commentary on the report.
Ben Emmerson: The European Court of Human Rights enhances our democracy – The Independent: In a detailed article, Ben Emmerson QC examines the thinktank Exchange Policy’s recently published report ‘Bringing Rights Back Home’, which criticised the current practises of the European Court of Human Rights. In particular, the barrister pays attention to the comments of Lord Hoffman (a former law Lord) who authored the report’s foreward. See our previous post for a commentary on the report.
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15 February 2011 by Rosalind English
British Pregnancy Advisory Service v Secretary of State for Health [2011] EWHC 235 (Admin) – read judgment
The High Court has ruled that the law requiring that administration of the early medical abortion drugs take place at hospital cannot be read down to allow self-administration at home. The approval of the appropriate place for treatment must be made by the Secretary of State.
The current accepted treatment for a medical abortion up to 9 weeks’ gestation involves the prescription and two-phase administration of drugs at intervals of 24-48 hours. The claimant organisation argued that the requirement for women to return to the hospital or clinic for a second visit created unnecessary stress and hardship and therefore that the term “treatment” in the relevant legislation should be interpreted to mean that only the prescription and issuing of the drugs should take place in a hospital, allowing women to stay at home after the first visit.
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14 February 2011 by Adam Wagner
Controversial preacher Dr Zakir Naik has addressed the Oxford Union by satellite link, despite being banned from visiting the UK by the home secretary.
The Home Office has wide discretion to exclude radicals which it considers have displayed ‘unacceptable behaviours’ , and the preacher was excluded under this policy in June 2010. The exclusion is currently being challenged in the courts. The home office successfully defended the ban in the high court (see our post), but that judgment is being challenged by the preacher in the court of appeal.
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14 February 2011 by Guest Contributor
It’s no Magna Carta. Those of us who teach public law in British universities will certainly have to grapple with the Protection of Freedoms Bill. But will it, like the that earlier constitutional text, echo through the centuries into the classrooms of 2311? I doubt it.
Although the Bill’s 107 sections will give Messrs Cameron and Clegg a long list of reforms to rattle off at party conferences it does little to coherently explain the coalition’s view of the appropriate relationship between the state and the citizen. The Government does not know what freedom is, but it knows freedom isn’t having your car immobilised without lawful authority (see section 54). In many respects, the Protection of Freedoms Bill seems to fit exactly with the coalition government’s attitude towards ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’ or – perish the thought – ‘human rights’. It is broadly libertarian but with no real coherent vision for fundamental rights. As a result the Protection of Freedoms Bill is a list of legislative pet hates, many introduced by New Labour, that the coalition wants to do away with.
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11 February 2011 by Adam Wagner
Much has been made in the prisoner voting debate of the fact that out laws should not be made by, as The Sun puts it, “unelected dictators”.
Similarly, the Daily Mail says “the time has come for Britain to tell unelected Strasbourg judges that they have overstepped their authority“, and the Daily Express poses a dilemma between “democratically elected Commons or an unelected and alien tribunal in Strasbourg“.
Just to set the record straight, unlike our own judges, judges the European Court of Human Rights are elected.
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10 February 2011 by Adam Wagner
Former Labour MP Eric Illsley has been sentenced to 12 months in prison after pleading guilty to £14,000 of expenses fraud in regard of second home claims. The expenses cases have taken a fascinating route through the courts to reach this stage.
I recently posted on the case of David Chaytor, who was sentenced to 18 months after pleading guilty to similar, and the case of Lord Taylor, who has been convicted by a jury but is yet to be sentenced. He will now be looking to the sentencing remarks of Mr Justice Saunders in Illsley’s case for clues as to his fate. The judge has been taking a tough line due on the men due to the breach of public trust aspect of the cases:
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10 February 2011 by Adam Wagner
Updated | Parliament is currently debating on whether prisoners should be given the vote. The motion can be found here and you can watch the debate on Parliament TV.
A Washington Post correspondent recently said US President Barack Obama had been “bounding around like a ping-pong ball in a wind tunnel” on to the situation in Egypt. In many ways, the UK government has been doing the same on the 5-year-old judgment in Hirst v UK, in which, as has been endlessly repeated in the media, the European Court of Human Rights’ grand chamber ruled that the indiscriminate ban on prisoners voting breached Article 1 of Protocol 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
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10 February 2011 by Guest Contributor
1 Crown Office Row barristers’ chambers is presenting a seminar on the public sector equality duty on 3 March 2011 at 5:30pm. The new and wide-ranging duty comes into force on 6 April 2011.
There are a limited number of free tickets available to readers of this blog who are also lawyers or work in the public sector. All details are below.
Update – we have had a fantastic response since this morning and as a result the places available to readers of the blog have now been filled. We will, however, be producing a podcast of the seminar. You can download our previous seminar podcasts from iTunes by clicking here.
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9 February 2011 by Adam Wagner
Two of the UK’s top judges have given fascinating speeches this week on justice in the age of insecurity. One by the head of the supreme court warns that budget cuts will imperil the independence of the judiciary. The other, by the head of the court of appeal, argues that despite not being able to tell the government what to do, UK courts can provide effective protection of fundamental rights.
The speeches offer fascinating and sometimes controversial perspectives on our odd but in many ways admirable constitutional system, as well as warnings that strained budgets and political meddling could do it damage.
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9 February 2011 by Rosalind English
Bringing Rights Back Home is the latest policy document to address the tension between judges and politicians over public policy with human rights implications.
Within hours of publication of the report, a hard-hitting academic paper put together by the political scientist Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, criticism started pouring in, and there will be no doubt more huffing and puffing to come.
But before these lofty admonitions stifle them, it is worth considering some of the paper’s objections and proposals. These are legitimate points made in a political debate which has been masquerading for years as a legal one. The document is essentially uncontroversial, in legal terms.
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8 February 2011 by Adam Wagner
I posted last week on the interesting and morally complex case in which a judge in the Court of Protection ruled that a 41-year-old man with a mild learning disability did not have the mental capacity to consent to sex and should be prevented by a local council from doing so.
The
Daily Telegraph and
Daily Mail have picked up on this story. The Mail’s Richard Hartley-Parkinson appears to have based his article solely on the Telegraph’s, in light of this paragraph:
Mr Justice Mostyn said the case threw up issues ‘legally, intellectually and morally’ because sex is ‘one of the most basic human functions’ according to the Daily Telegraph.
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7 February 2011 by Adam Wagner
Updated | Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, is in court today for the beginning of a two-day extradition hearing. Sweden have issued a European Arrest Warrant against Assange on suspicion of sexual assault.
Journalist tweeters at Assange’s bail hearings prompted a flurry of new court guidance on tweeting in court, culminating last week with the Supreme Court.
Unsurprisingly, a number of people are tweeting from the hearing, including the Times’ Alexi Mostrous, Joshua Rozenberg, the Guardian’s Esther Addley and Channel 4’s Marcus Edwards (click on their names to see their Twitter feeds). Guardian.co.uk is also publishing live updates.
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6 February 2011 by Guest Contributor
We have finished experimenting with the new look for now. Thank you for all of your comments, which will be taken on board for the future. Keep posted for exciting changes as we reach our first anniversary.
One change which we will keep on is the more advanced menu system at the top of the page. If you hover over the first two menus, a series of sub menus will appear, hopefully making the site a little bit easier to navigate.
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3 February 2011 by Adam Wagner
Updated | The UK Supreme Court has released guidance on the use of “live text-based communications” from the court. Put simply, tweeting will be allowed in most cases.
The UK’s highest court of appeal has sensibly said that since its cases do not involve interaction with witnesses or jurors, subject to limited exceptions “any member of a legal team or member of the public is free to use text-based communications from court, providing (i) these are silent; and (ii) there is no disruption to the proceedings in court“.
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