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The European Court of Human Rights has found that the deportation of a Nigerian man from the United Kingdom violated his right to respect for private and family life guaranteed by article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The applicant in Unuane v United Kingdom successfully argued that his removal from the UK was a disproportionate interference with family life because it separated him from his children. Though finding for the applicant, the Court rejected his attack on the compatibility of the Immigration Rules – an issue that as recently as 2016 the Supreme Court had authoritatively settled. The decision is of interest for the Court’s approach to the necessary balancing exercise to be carried out in the sensitive area of human rights challenges to the deportation of foreign criminals.
The facts
The applicant, Mr Unuane, is a Nigerian national who came to the UK in 1998. He has three children with his Nigerian partner, all of whom are (now) British citizens and one who has a rare congenital heart defect. In 2005 the applicant was convicted of obtaining a money transfer by deception and in November 2009 he and and his partner were convicted of offences relating to the falsification of thirty applications for leave to remain in the UK. He was sentenced to a period of five years and six months’ imprisonment, while his partner was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment. Since the applicant was sentenced to more than twelve months, he was deemed to be a ‘foreign criminal’ and as such the Secretary of State was required to make a deportation order against him (s32(5) UK Borders Act 2007). An order was made against the applicant’s partner for the same reason and against two of his children as dependent family members (only one was a British citizen at the time).
Covid, clinical negligence, quarantine, lockdown, inquests, nerve agents, algorithms, child abuse, coercive and controlling behaviour and racism. What’s there not to like in our smorgasbord of favourites from the past eleven months?
Worry not: there are laughs to be had. A bee bothers a bureaucrat with solemn consequences for subordinate legislation in a motion of regret debate.
On Thursday, Harry Dunn’s family were granted permission to appeal against the High Court ruling handed down on 24 November, which held in no uncertain terms that Mrs Sacoolas did enjoy diplomatic immunity at the time she killed 19 year-old Harry Dunn while driving on the wrong side of the road in August of last year. The US state department has refused to waive her immunity under Article 32 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, stating that to allow the waiver, and thereby the extradition request that would inevitably follow would set an “extraordinarily troubling precedent”. The arrests of diplomats Michael Kovrig in China and Rob Macaire in Iran over the last year highlight the continued importance of the inviolability of diplomatic agents serving abroad. However, where there has been an unlawful killing by a family member of an agent, natural inclinations of justice are upset by the failure of a longstanding diplomatic ally to simply do the right thing.
The issue before the Court of Appeal was whether the Secretary of State for Education had acted unlawfully in failing to consult certain bodies representing children in care, including the Children’s Commissioner for England, before introducing the Adoption and Children (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Regulations 2020 (“the Amendment Regulations”) following the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic.
On 24 November 2020, the Court of Appeal allowed the appellant’s appeal, granting a declaration that the Secretary of State for Education had acted unlawfully by failing to consult those bodies before introducing the amendments.
I was put on to this decision from the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta by a response to a post from the Secret Barrister on Twitter (@barristerSecret) . This concerns the Magna Carta tsunami that has wreaked a certain amount of havoc on social media in response to the government’s Covid restrictions.
A case about medical treatment for children experiencing gender dysphoria is bound to evoke strong feelings. So, in early October, when the parties in R (on the application of Quincy Bell and A v Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust and others arrived for the hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice, they found a buzz of press photographers and a throng of campaigners with placards.
Now the Divisional Court has delivered its judgment in this controversial and difficult case. On 1 December 2020, it substantially upheld the Claimants’ challenge to the practice of prescribing puberty-blocking drugs to children, some as young as 10, with gender dysphoria.
The first Claimant, Quincy Bell, was born female. At about 15 she was prescribed puberty blocking drugs (PBs) to halt the development of female sexual characteristics. Subsequently she transitioned to a male using “cross-sex hormones” and then underwent a double mastectomy. She told the court her doubts began before the surgery and she now wished to identify as a woman, reverting to the sex on her original birth certificate. “I made a brash decision as a teenager” she said, “… trying to find confidence and happiness except now the rest of my life will be negatively affected…transition was a very temporary, superficial fix for a very complex identity issue.”
The second Claimant was the mother of 15 year old with autismexperiencing gender dysphoria whom she feared would be prescribed puberty-blockers.
The Claimants contended that prescribing these drugs to under 18s was unlawful because they lacked competence to give valid consent to the treatment, and were given misleading information.
I wrote about the launch of these proceedings earlier this year (Legal Challenge to Lockdown) where Mr Dolan was refused permission to appeal the refusal of his application for judicial review. (see Dominic Ruck Keene’s post on that decision). Since then UKHRB has been covering this and similar challenges closely: see here and here, as well as alerting our readers to cases in other countries: New Zealand, and South Africa. My recent post on “vaccine hesitancy” and proposals for mandatory Covid-19 vaccines has attracted a considerable number of readers and comments.
Getting back to the case in hand, this latest defeat for Dolan’s team is slightly more complicated. The Court of Appeal’s ruling can be summarised briefly, but anyone wanting to be reminded of the details will do well to go back to Emmet Coldrick’s enlightening series on the earlier stages of this case and the arguments raised by the appellants in Part 1 and Part 2.
The criminal records disclosure regime provides information through Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) certificates to employers about an individual’s criminal record. That information is then used by employers when considering the suitability of applicants for eligible roles or work.
The Order removes the requirement for automatic disclosure of youth cautions, reprimands and warnings and removes the ‘multiple conviction’ rule, which required the automatic disclosure of all convictions where a person has more than one conviction, regardless of the nature of their offence or sentence.
The opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of its author. Legal scrutiny of the provisions discussed in this piece is warranted but should not be taken to question the requirement to obey the regulations.
Article 9 ECHR provides as follows:
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching practice and observance.
2. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
This protects the right to public and communal worship where that is part of the belief held by an individual or group, and accordingly Article 9 is clearly engaged.
Nevertheless, when considering the legality of the lockdown it is relevant that the neither latest iteration of the Coronavirus Regulations, nor the previous version that imposed the earlier lockdown, in any way restrict the Article 9(1) right to hold a belief, or choices made regarding personal behaviour outside the context of places of worship.
Further, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held in Pavlides v Turkey [2013] (Application 9130/09) at [29] that Article 9, taken alone or in conjunction with Article 11, does
not bestow a right at large for applicants to gather to manifest their religious beliefs wherever they wish.
The issue is therefore whether any interference with Article 9 rights was or is both necessary to meet the pressing social need of protecting the health of infected and potentially infected people (the specified exemption from Article 9) and also proportionate.
In her judgment of 27th February 2020 Hilder J laid down certain rules regarding what a property and affairs deputy can and cannot do in relation to seeking legal advice and taking steps in litigation. In these joined cases the deputies applied to the COP seeking orders for authorised expenditure of the protected persons’ estate for their costs in obtaining legal advice and conducting proceedings on P’s behalf.
The Senior Judge’s conclusions are set out in her summary at the end of the judgment. In Episode 131 of Law Pod UK Amelia Walker of 1 Crown Office Row discusses some of the salient issues in this comprehensive “one stop shop” ruling with Rosalind English.
On Monday 23rd November, a self-isolating Boris Johnson announced a new system of restrictions to replace the UK’s second month-long lockdown, due to come into effect on Wednesday 2nd December. The new set of rules represents a stricter and no less confusing version of the old three-tiered system.
Non-essential shops, gyms, and hairdressers will be allowed to reopen across the country. People are still encouraged to minimise travel and to work from home where possible. The following additional tiered restrictions will apply:
Tier 1 (Medium Risk):
The ‘Rule of Six’ will apply for both indoor and outdoor gatherings
Pubs and restaurants must shut at 11pm
Limited numbers of spectators may be permitted at sports and music events
Tier 2 (High Risk):
People from different households may not meet indoors
The ‘Rule of Six’ will apply for outdoor gatherings
Pubs and restaurants must shut at 11pm
Alcohol can be served only alongside a substantial meal
Tier 3 (Very High Risk):
People from different households may not mix indoors or outdoors in hospitality venues or private gardens
People from different households may only mix in public spaces like parks, where the ‘Rule of Six’ will apply
Pubs and restaurants must close except for takeaway and delivery services
Travelling into and out of the area is discouraged
The house owner did not hear when Ms Mahlangu drowned in the family swimming pool. She was a domestic worker who had given 22 years of her life to tending to that family’s needs. Like most domestic workers in South Africa, she was a Black woman. Her daughter – Sylvia Mahlangu – sought to claim compensation from a statutory fund set up for employees who suffer injuries at work. Her claim failed because the legislation excluded domestic workers, like her mother, from the definition of ‘employee’ (see here, (xviii)(d)(v) excluding “a domestic employee employed as such in a private household” from compensation).
The Constitutional Court of South Africa unanimously held that the exclusion of domestic workers from the statutory definition of employee breached the right to equality (see here), and, by majority, the rights to dignity and to social security. What I wish to focus on in this post is the diverging approaches to equality between the ‘dissenting’ judgment of Jafta J, on the one hand, and the ‘majority’ judgments of Victor AJ and Mhlantla J, on the other. In particular, I wish to focus on the way Victor AJ and Mhlantla J relied on the concept of ‘intersectionality’ to understand what was truly constitutionally offensive about excluding domestic workers from the statutory definition of employee. What follows is a necessarily high-level overview (at the risk, I accept, of being somewhat blunt). I hope the reader will understand that it is due to the constraints of space in a blog-post; I can only direct the interested reader to the judgments themselves.
At first sight, a rather abstruse dispute, but the 63 page judgment of Henshaw J gives rise to a host of important and difficult human rights points. But his central conclusion is that a statute which was not challengeable at the time of its enactment became so, because of the subsequent evolution of the law, principally common law, to the detriment of insurers.
Sounds mildly counter-intuitive? Not, I think, so, when the story has unfolded.
Inside the main hall of the Royal Courts of Justice. The Court of Appeal undertook a detailed consideration of article 2 this year.
This three-part extended analysis discusses the important recent authorities on article 2 ECHR in the context of the provision of healthcare. Part 1 examined the leading case of Lopes de Sousa and part 2 considered how it has been interpreted and applied. In this final part, the latest decision of the Court of Appeal this year will be analysed and the overall trend in the law explained.
The two lines of Strasbourg authority considered in the two Fernandes cases are extensively cited by the Court of Appeal in the decision in Maguire. This case concerned the death of a patient with Down’s syndrome, learning difficulties and limited mobility who had lived in a residential care home and was subject to deprivation of liberty safeguards. In the days prior to her death she had been ill but had not cooperated with attempts to take her to hospital and the decision was taken to care for her at the home overnight. She deteriorated and was admitted to hospital where she later died. The cause was a perforated gastric ulcer, peritonitis and pneumonia.
The claimant argued that the circumstances of the death engaged the procedural obligation to hold an enhanced inquest under article 2. Whilst agreeing initially, and holding a jury inquest, the Coroner subsequently revisited his decision in light of the Divisional Court’s judgment in Parkinson. Having heard the evidence, he did not consider there was any arguable breach of the substantive operational duty under article 2 and hence the procedural duty was not triggered. A conclusion of natural causes was recorded with a short narrative description of events.
This three-part extended analysis discusses the important recent authorities on article 2 ECHR in the context of the provision of healthcare. Part 1 examined the leading case of Lopes de Sousa. In this part, the way that this case has been addressed will be considered.
Criticism of the approach in Lopes de Sousa
It will be apparent that the requirements for a breach of the substantive obligation under article 2 set by the Grand Chamber overlap to some extent, and it is difficult to understand how all the factors identified in denial of treatment cases can be cumulatively required, as opposed to being alternative bases for a violation in some instances. On any view, however, the overall effect is extremely restrictive and has been criticised as such, not least in a powerfully worded dissenting judgment from Judge Pinto de Albuquerque:
For a State to avoid international-law responsibility under the Convention, it is not sufficient for health-care activities to be circumscribed by a proper legislative, administrative and regulatory framework and for a supervisory mechanism to oversee the implementation of this framework, as the Court held in Powell […] By evading the question of the specific protection of the individual right of each patient and instead protecting health professionals in an untouchable legal bubble, Powell renders the Convention protection illusory for patients. Powell seeks a Convention that is for the few, the health professionals and their insurance companies, not for the many, the patients. This must be rejected outright. [64]
[…]
This case could have been a tipping point. The Grand Chamber did not want it to be that way. I regret that, by rejecting a purposive and principled reading of the Convention, the Court did not deliver full justice [94]
Judge Serghides, also dissenting, but in less trenchant terms, regretted the Grand Chamber had “missed a good opportunity to follow Elena Cojocaru and to abandon the Powell principle for good or distinguish the present case from that old decision.” [15]
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