Category: In the news
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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2 February 2011 by Adam Wagner
Updated | The Human Rights Lawyers’ Association, of which I am a committee member, is recruiting a part-time administrator.
Full details of the post, which is for up to 10 hours per week and offers remuneration of £10,000 inclusive of VAT, can be found after the page break.
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2 February 2011 by Rosalind English
ZH (Tanzania) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] UKSC 4 (1 February 2011) – Read judgment
This case (see yesterday’s summary) is illustrative of two misconceptions about rights that we are all in thrall to from time to time.
One is that there is a fundamental hierarchy of human rights which allows certain interests to prevail over others in all situations; the other is that this hierarchy is determined by considerations that are morally and politically neutral. A prime example of this kind of principle is the idea of the “overriding rights of the child”, a consideration with a perfectly orthodox role in family law, but one whose application to human rights as a whole is questionable.
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1 February 2011 by Alasdair Henderson
Police and local councils gained new powers yesterday to deal with gang-related violence and crime.
The new ‘gang injunctions’, or “gangbos”, which can be sought in the county courts against adults suspected of gang involvement, function in a similar way to ASBOs (anti-social behaviour orders), although they aim to target people involved in shootings, knife crime and other serious violence rather than low-level anti-social behaviour. But will they be a helpful measure to curb gang violence, or an unnecessary restriction on liberty?
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1 February 2011 by Rosalind English
R on the application of Hope and Glory Public House v City of Westminster Magistrates Court [2011] EWCA Civ 31 Read judgement
It was not unfair in terms of Article 6 to require of a party aggrieved by a licensing decision to bear the responsibility of persuading the court hearing the appeal that the original decision was wrong.
This appeal raises a question about how a magistrates’ court hearing an appeal from a decision of a licensing authority under the Licensing Act 2003 (“the Act”) should approach the decision.
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30 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
In an entertaining post which also raises the serious issue of journalistic responsibility, the Nearly Legal blog has put a Daily Mail “family law expert” on the naughty step in relation an article on a recent Supreme Court decision on the meaning of domestic violence in housing cases.
According to the respected housing law blog, the Mail article, entitled Shout at your spouse and risk losing your home: It’s just the same as domestic violence, warns woman judge, demonstrates“why the Mail is not a paper of record for case reports”. And
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26 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
The Home Office has published its long-awaited review of counter-terrorism and security powers. The review findings and recommendations are here.
Other key documents can be found via the following links:
The Home Office’s summary of the key recommendations is reproduced below:
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26 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
Of particular interest are the answers to two questions. The first is probably the most important question the public ever asks about the court, namely whether, once a case has wound its way through the expensive and long-winded English court system, the final decision of the court can overrule the UK Parliament. Appropriately, the question is the first on the list. The answer is no:
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26 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
Ex-Tory peer Lord Taylor of Warwick has become the first parliamentarian to be found guilty by a jury of making false parliamentary expenses claims. He now faces sentencing. Given the recent case of former MP David Chaytor, it seems unlikely that he will escape jail.
A jury at Southwark Crown Court found Taylor guilty of six counts of false accounting under section 17 of the Theft Act 1968, by a majority of 11 to 1. The expense at issue totalled £11,277. Mr Justice Saunders, who also sentenced Chaytor, presided over the trial.
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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.
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