Category: In the news
21 January 2011 by Rosalind English
Morge (FC) (Appellant) v Hampshire County Council (Respondent) on appeal from [2010] EWCA Civ 608- Read judgment
We cannot drive a coach-and-horses through natural habitats without a bit of soul-searching, says the Supreme Court .
The UK has conservation obligations under EU law to avoid the deterioration of natural habitats and this goes beyond holding back only those developments that threaten significant disturbance to species. Detailed consideration must be given to the specific risks to the species in question. But this consideration can be left to the quangos; planning committees are not obliged to make their own enquiries.
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20 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
The government has reportedly revised its plan to allow prisoners serving less than 4 years to vote in elections. Ministers now seek to limit the right to those sentenced to a year or less.
A looming presence in the debate has been the much-touted figure of £160m compensation which the prime minister has warned Parliament that the UK will have to pay if it does not comply with a 6-year-old judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (see my last post on the issue for the full background). But where did this figure arise from? And is it right?
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20 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
Terry Jones, an American pastor who threatened to burn Korans on the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, has been banned from entering the UK “for the public good”.
He has told BBC Radio 5 live that he would challenge the “unfair” decision as his visit could have been “beneficial”. But, as I posted last month, the recent case of an Indian preacher who challenged his exclusion from the UK suggests that the courts would be unlikely to quash the Home Secretary’s decision. The following is taken from my previous post on the topic.
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20 January 2011 by Maria Roche
TTM (By his Litigation Friend TM) v London Borough of Hackney, East London NHS Foundation Trust; Secretary of State for Health – Read judgment
The Court of Appeal has ruled that the local authority, but not the detaining hospital, was liable to pay compensation to a person who had been unlawfully detained under Section 3 of the Mental Health Act 1983. The case provides important guidance on the liability of mental health and medical professionals in the difficult area of detaining patients, as well as the ability to recover damages where a claimant is unlawfully detained.
The Court held that the patient’s detention had been unlawful from the start when the approved mental health professional [‘AMHP’] erred in whether the patient’s relative objected to admission. The local authority responsible for the AMHP could not rely on the Section 139(1)of the Mental Health Act 1983 [‘the Act’] statutory protection from civil liability, which had to be read down by virtue of Section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998 to give effect to the patient’s right to liberty under Article 5 of the ECHR.
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19 January 2011 by Rosalind English
MGN Limited v The United Kingdom – (Application no. 39401/04) Read judgment
The details of the Court’s ruling are set out in our previous post on this case. The following analysis focusses on the success of the newspapers’ core complaint concerning the recoverability against it of 100% success fees.
This judgment has serious practical implications not just for publication cases but for any civil case not covered by legal aid, and although the ruling is only binding on the government, not on the courts, the potential for its immediate domestic impact cannot be ignored. Defendants challenging costs orders will have this judgment at the head of their arsenal from today; the practical resonances of the case are imminent.
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18 January 2011 by Rosalind English
IFAW Internationaler Tierschutz-Fonds gGmbH; read judgment
EU law is replete with the soaring rhetoric of rights and transparency. Indeed the very first Article of the Treaty on European Union states that ‘decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen’ . But not, it appears, when the decision concerns the balance between short-term economic interests and those of the environment – or, in the Commission’s own words, the “Community’s natural heritage”.
Key facts and figures relating to central policy remain firmly under lock and key in the EU, as NGOs find when they try to get the Commission to enforce the various Directives against national governments and the EU institutions themselves.
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17 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
Immigration and deportation decisions are regularly used to attack the Human Rights Act, and are raised as examples of why it must be amended or replaced. But a recent deportation case shows that such decisions are often poorly reported and articles ignore crucial details.
Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph reported on the case of a man who killed a Gurkha soldier’s son and cannot be deported because of human rights law. According to David Barrett, Home Affairs Correspondent, the controversial decision will “intensify pressure” on the prime minister “who has so far failed to deliver a Conservative promise to rip up the Human Rights Act.”
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14 January 2011 by Rosalind English
Bank Mellat v HM Treasury [2011] EWCA Civ 1: read judgment.
Financial restrictions imposed in 2009 on an Iranian Bank which effectively excluded it from the UK financial market did not breach common law or ECHR principles of fairness, said the Court of Appeal on Thursday.
The Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 conferred powers on the Treasury to restrict persons operating in the financial sector from entering or participating in any transaction or business relationship with the appellant Bank Mellat (BM). The Order, which was subject to the affirmative resolution procedure and reviewable on limited grounds (Section 63(2) CTA) was justified by a Ministerial Statement which declared that the direction to cease business would
reduce the risk of the UK financial sector being used, unknowingly or otherwise, to facilitate Iran’s proliferation sensitive activities.
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13 January 2011 by Rosalind English
R (on the application of) Reetha Suppiah and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department and Interveners [2011] EWHC 2 (Admin) – Read judgment
A high court judge has ruled that two asylum seekers and their children were unlawfully detained at Yarl’s Wood immigration centre last year.
This ruling will add fuel to the flames of the debate over whether the government is truly committed to ending the detention of children in immigration centres, or whether they intend merely to “minimise” it.
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12 January 2011 by Rosalind English
C-115/09 Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland, Landesverband Nordrhein-Westfalen eVvBezirksregierung Arnsberg Trianel Kohlekraftwerk Lünen (intervening) – read judgment
The German system of judicial review involves a “careful and detailed” scrutiny of administrative decisions. However, admissibility criteria are such that few are able to access this system, particularly groups bringing actions alleging environmental harm.
At the centre of this case is the highly topical matter, relevant to one of the discussion threads on this site, of the trend towards a new system of environmental justice, heralded by Aarhus and the accompanying EU Directives, where national courts to are required to recognise claims brought by pressure groups alleging infringement of environmental provisions, even where there is no individual legal interest involved. The Trianel case puts into sharp focus the debate as to whether the environment should be protected not as an expression of an individual’s interest, but as a general public interest, enforceable in the courts.
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10 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
In a plot worthy of a Hollywood film, the trial of six environmental campaigners charged with conspiring to shut down a power station has apparently collapsed after an undercover police officer switched sides.
According to the BBC:
The six were charged with conspiring to shut down the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottingham in 2009. The case was due to start on Monday, but was abandoned after Pc Mark Kennedy contacted the defence team to say he would be prepared to help them. The prosecution subsequently dropped their case. Mr Kennedy had been intimately involved in the green movement since 2000.
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9 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic US congresswoman, is in a critical condition after being shot at a public meeting in Tucson, Arizona. Six other people died in the shooting, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old child. Eighteen others suffered gunshot wounds.
Little is known as yet about the alleged shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, save that he had a troubled past and may have mental health problems. It is also possible that there was a second person involved.
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7 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
Former Member of Parliament David Chaytor has been sentenced to 18 months imprisonment by Mr Justice Saunders after pleading guilty to 3 charges of false accounting in relation to his Parliamentary expenses.
The sentence marks the end of a long legal road for Mr Chaytor, whose case – along with two others – has already reached the Supreme Court without any criminal trial taking place. In a fascinating case for those interested in the British constitution, the Supreme Court was asked to rule on whether a court could try a Member of Parliament in relation to the submission of an allegedly dishonest claim for Parliamentary expenses. The men claimed it could not, relying on Article 9 of the 1688 Bill of Rights, which states:
That the Freedome of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parlyament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any Court or Place out of Parlyament.
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7 January 2011 by Guest Contributor
This week 18 defendants were sentenced after being found guilty of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass. Guest blogger Eleanor Cooombs of Wild Law reports.
Their crime was to attempt the shut-down of Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the UK’s third largest coal-fired power station. Yet, they argue that they are not criminals but defenders of the very future of the planet.
Their defence raised the argument of necessity which makes it excusable to commit an act which would otherwise be a crime, in order to prevent death and serious injury. A classic example is that it would be legal to break the window of a burning house in order to save the life of a child who was inside it. The defendants posited that they were acting to prevent the greater crimes of death and serious injury caused by climate change. They hoped their actions would prevent around 150 thousand tonnes of carbon emissions from being released into the atmosphere and would draw attention to the ‘failures of our present political system’ -the perceived lack of government action towards meeting its legal duty to cut emissions by 80% by 2050.
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7 January 2011 by Rosalind English
[Updated] In the spirit of our coverage of environmental activism in one form or another, here is the website strapline for the Campaign for Real Farming, which sets out to
achieve nothing less than the people’s takeover of the food supply
Some of the initiatives for that takeover were being aired at the CRF’s “fringe” farming conference which took place in Oxford this week, voicing polite but forceful protest against the high production objectives of the mainstream Farming Conference in the Examination Schools next door.
According to CRF founder Colin Tudge, if we are serious about feeding 9 bn people in a few decades’ time, the current food production system, which is designed to make money, has to be dismantled in favour of small scale, labour intensive farming, which is designed to feed people. Like any reform movement, this “agrarian renaissance” is about wresting power away from existing authorities and it has set its sights on, amongst other things, the constellation of laws and regulations governing the cultivation of food.
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Morge (FC) (Appellant) v Hampshire County Council (Respondent) on appeal from [2010] EWCA Civ 608- Read judgment
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