Category: BLOG POSTS

Three strikes and out? Major defeats for Government Judicial Review reform plans in the Lords

28 October 2014 by Guest Contributor

Lords Pannick and Faulks

Last night saw the important Report Stage consideration of Part 4 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill in the House of Lords. Angela Patrick, Director of Human Rights Policy at JUSTICE provides a summary.

Widely – and quickly – reported as a “crushing” or an “emphatic” defeat – in a rare turn – the Government was last night defeated in three consecutive votes on its proposals to restrict access to judicial review. With a ‘hat-trick’ of blows, on three crucial issues, votes on amendments tabled by Lords Pannick, Woolf, Carlile and Beecham were decisive. On the proposal to amend the materiality test – the Government lost by 66. On the compulsory disclosure of financial information for all judicial review applicants, and again on the costs rules applicable to interveners, the Government lost by margins on both counts by 33. A fourth amendment to the Government proposals on Protective Costs Orders – which would maintain the ability of the Court to make costs capping orders before permission is granted – was called after the dinner break, and lost.

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Government not required to disclose full details of defence

27 October 2014 by Rosalind English

CF v The Ministry of Defence and others [2014] EWHC 3171 (QB) – read judgment

Angus McCullough QC of 1 Crown Office Row acted as Special Advocate in this case. He has nothing to do with the writing of this post.

The High Court has ruled that in a case against the state which did not directly affect the liberty of the subject, there was no irreducible minimum of disclosure of the state’s case which the court would require. The consequences of such disclosure for national security prevailed.

Factual and legal background

The claimant, Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed, had made a number of claims against various government departments, alleging complicity in unlawful and arbitrary detention and inhuman and degrading treatment and torture on the part of British authorities in Somaliland.  He also sought damages for trespass, breach of the Human Rights Act 1998, and misfeasance in public office. As Irwin J said,

The remedy sought is not confined to ordinary compensation, but extends to damages for breach of the Convention and to declaratory relief, which in the context of this case, and if the Claimant succeeded, would represent an important marking of unlawful behaviour: a matter in which there is a legitimate public interest.

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Barclay bros duck out – leaving Supreme Court to sort out the constitutional problem

25 October 2014 by David Hart KC

R (ota) Sir David Barclay and Sir Frederick Barclay v Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, The Committee for the Affairs of Jersey and Guernsey and Her Majesty’s Privy Council [2014] UKSC 54 – read judgment

 The Supreme Court has just ruled on a case which appeared before the Administrative Court on the judicial workings of Sark, and the power of the ruling body to alter the pay of the local judge (known as”Seneschal”). The Administrative Court had thought this was potentially open to arbitrary use and therefore incompatible with Article 6 of the Human Rights Convention – read judgment and Rosalind English’s post here.

But things took a different turn in the Supreme Court. For reasons unexplained, the Barclay brothers (who own these island just off Sark) dropped out of the case, and none of the remaining parties sought to uphold the judgment of the Administrative Court. The Article 6(1) point was not adjudicated upon, and the case became a constitutional one. The Channel Islands are not part of the UK, and have their own legislatures, though they act internationally by the UK Government.

In those circumstances – how should a UK Court go about reviewing the London approach to reviewing a measure put forward by an independent legislature?

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Anorexia, alcoholism and the right to autonomy

22 October 2014 by Rosalind English

A NHS Foundation Trust v Ms X (By her litigation friend, the Official Solicitor), 8 October 2014  [2014] EWCOP 35 – read judgment

The issues that arose before the Court of Protection in this case encapsulate the difficulties involved in applying legal tools to the organic swamp of human pathology. Everything that one may envisage, for example, in planning a “living will” (or, more precisely, an Advance Decision under the Mental Capacity Act), may have no application at the critical time because the human body – or rather the way it falls apart – does not fit in to neat legal categories. In such a situation it is often the right to autonomy that is most at risk, since what you plan for your own medical and physiological future may not square with what the authorities you decide you were capable of planning. Cobb J’s sensitive and humane judgement in this sad case is a very encouraging sign that courts are beginning to resist the tyrannous claims of Article 2 and the obligation to preserve life at all costs.

Factual and legal background

Ms X, a young woman who lives alone in a private rented bed-sit, has suffered from anorexia nervosa for the last 14 years. She also suffers an alcohol dependence syndrome which has caused chronic and, by the time of this hearing, “end-stage” and irreversible liver disease, cirrhosis; this followed many years of abuse of alcohol. The combination of anorexia nervosa and alcohol dependence syndrome is unusual, and has always been medically acutely difficult to manage. This is a vicious cycle of self destructiveness and treatment, and as Cobb J observed,

The causes of her distress are multi-factorial but include the treatment for her anorexia itself and the removal of her personal autonomy when treated

So damaging had been the previous admissions for compulsory feeding, her doctors regarded it as “clinically inappropriate, counter-productive and increasingly unethical”  to cause her to be readmitted; their experience revealed that on each recent admission, she had been more and more unwell (as a result of her anxiety to reverse the weight gained in hospital during the previous visit, combined with renewed alcohol abuse).  In fact Ms X had been on an ‘end of life pathway’ twice in recent months and it was said that her physical condition “is now so fragile that her life is in imminent danger.”
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British Jihadists and treason

21 October 2014 by Rosalind English

The news last week was that the Foreign Secretary has proposed a revival of a fourteenth century statute in order to prosecute British jihadists who travel to Iraq or Syria to fight. Cries of foul are coming from the usual quarters, and there’s even a protest that the Strasbourg Court would object, which, given the current controversy surrounding that tribunal, may be a good reason in itself for such a move.

In the current froth over the Convention versus “home grown” human rights, there is much talk of the Magna Carta. So may be of interest to some that in the opinion of one of the greatest legal scholars in history, Edward Coke, the Statute of Treason had a legal importance second only to that of the “Great Charter of the Liberties of England”, piloted by feudal barons to limit King John’s power in 1215.

Politics aside, how would this work? On the face of it, a law which has been on the statute books for centuries, and is found to be applicable to a current state of affairs, is an equum donatum whose dental health should not be examined too closely. Although the last person to be convicted under the 1351 Treason Act – the Nazi propagandist William Joyce (otherwise known as Lord Haw Haw)- was hanged, now any British citizen convicted of the offence could be given a life sentence.
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Tory Plans to Repeal the Human Rights Act: the Legal Community Responds – the Human Rights Roundup

19 October 2014 by Celia Rooney

Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular kicking collection of human rights news and views. The full list of links can be found here. You can find previous roundups here. Links compiled by Adam Wagner, post by Celia Rooney.

This week, the legal community reacts to Tory plans to repeal the Human Rights Act. Given the significance of the proposals for human rights protection in the UK, this week’s roundup focuses on how those plans have been received. 
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Munchausen, MMR and mendacious “warrior mothers”

15 October 2014 by Rosalind English

A Local Authority and M (By his litigation friend via the Official Solicitor) v E and A (Respondents) [2014] EWCOP 33 (11 August 2014) – read judgment

It’s been an interesting week for the extreme fringes of maternal care. The papers report a trial where a mother is being prosecuted for administering toxic levels of medication to her daughter for “conditions that never existed” (as the court heard). Let’s see how that pans out.

And now the Court of Protection has published a ruling by Baker J that a a supporter of the discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield embarked on an odyssey of intrusive remedies and responses to her son’s disorder, fabricating claims of damage from immunisation, earning her membership of what science journalist Brian Deer calls the class of “Wakefield mothers.”

On the face of it, the detailed and lengthy judgment concerns the applicant son’s reaction to the MMR vaccination when it was administered in infancy, and whether it was the cause of his autism and a novel bowel disease, the latter being Wakefield’s brainchild.  But at the heart of the case lies the phenomenon that we all used to know as Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy.

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Consultation process not unfair after all, says Court of Appeal

12 October 2014 by David Hart KC

United Company Rusal Plc (R, o.t.a of) v. London Metal Exchange Trust  [2014] EWCA 1271 (Civ) – read judgment

Deciding whether a given consultation process conducted prior to some administrative decision was or was not sufficiently unfair to warrant  challenge is not an easy task. Three connected problems commonly arise:

(1) did the public body provide adequate information to enable properly informed consultation 

(2) was the consultation at a formative stage of the decision-making process, so it was a real rather than sham process?

(3) did the consultation encompass sufficient alternatives?

In this case, the judge said (see my post here) that consultees were missing important information under (1), and, on the particular facts of the case ,it should have consulted on an option which it had rejected, and so found a breach of (3).

The Court of Appeal disagreed. Both findings were wrong. The consultation process was not unfair.

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The UK in the European Convention: fudge, or a shining example?

9 October 2014 by Rosalind English

Brick Court Chambers Public Law Event 2014: Is it time for the common law to break free from Europe?

Last night’s discussion at Gray’s Inn Hall featured a panel with  Dominic Grieve QC MP (formerly Attorney General), Lord Judge (formerly Lord Chief Justice), Bella Sankey (Policy Director, Liberty), Martin Howe QC (member of the Commission on a British Bill of Rights), David Anderson QC (Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation), all chaired by  Shaun Ley of the BBC.

The Conservative Party’s proposal which sparked off the debate  was that the UK will withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights after the 2015 election unless the European Council of Ministers accepts our proposal that our own common law and statute fulfils the UK’s international obligations.

Martin Howe, a QC most closely involved with this move, simply didn’t understand why it has caused such a “furore”.  Other countries, like Canada and New Zealand, have statutes setting out human rights without having to belong to a regional system. What is so inadequate about the UK’s protection of rights that it should be shackled to Strasbourg, particularly with that court’s history of spending the past sixty years

 inventing entirely new doctrines, not based on the wording of the Convention – in many respects contrary to its express wording

This is an intolerable situation, Howe believes, and it has to be resolved.
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Asbestos victims successfully challenge change in conditional fee/ATE costs rules

8 October 2014 by Rosalind English

Whitston (Asbestos Victims Support Victims Support Groups Forum UK)  v Secretary of State for Justice and the Association of British Insurers (Interested Party) [2014] EWHC 3044 – read judgment

Jeremy Hyam and Kate Beattie of 1 Crown Office Row acted for the Claimant in this case. They had nothing to do with the writing of this post.

In April 2013 the rules permitting recovery of success fees under Conditional Fee Agreements (CFAs) and After The Event (ATE) insurance premiums changed in response to the Jackson proposals – with one exception, namely in respect of mesothelioma claims.

This case concerns the Lord Chancellor’s intention to bring costs rules in mesothelioma claims in line with other claims.

As many of you will know, mesothelioma is an industrial disease caused by the inhalation of asbestos. It is a rare form of cancer which  generally does not become apparent until many years after exposure to asbestos, a feature which at least in the past has led to real problems when mounting a claim against those responsible for the exposure. Once the cancer does become symptomatic its progression is rapid. Most sufferers survive for less than 12 months from the onset of symptoms. Yet the effects of the disease over the period from the onset of symptoms to death are hugely painful and debilitating. This combination of factors means that litigation in relation to mesothelioma is unusual in comparison with many other types of litigation involving personal injury or industrial disease. In almost every case in which a claim is made for damages for mesothelioma the effective defendant is an insurance company.
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The patentability of living things: the latest in the BRCA gene saga

7 October 2014 by Rosalind English

D’Arcy v Myriad Genetics Inc [2014] FCAFC 115 (5 September 2014) – read judgment The recent ruling from the Full Federal Court of Australia allowing the breast cancer gene isolated in the laboratory to be patented contrasts sharply with the ruling by the US Supreme Court last year that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a “product of nature” and therefore not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated. The implications of this ruling for gene testing and patenting of biological products have been eloquently discussed elsewhere and I will not attempt to cover the same ground – see for example the excellent discussion posted by the Enhanced Genetic Services Project. All I want to point up in this post – apart from the obvious need for intellectual property law to encompass the development of science and technology – is the Australian court’s focus on how easily misled one may be by semantics in this sort of dispute. This ruling upholds an earlier decision that gene patenting is permissible under Australian law, declaring that “the boundaries of the conception of patentability are not dictated only by deductive logic from the linguistic premises formulated in the scientific knowledge of a particular age”. The concept of patentability has been broadening since the first quarter of the 17th century, and there is no reason why it should reach an artificial wall erected by unfathomable and unexplained “laws of nature” (a premise much relied upon by the US Supreme Court). I posted last year on the decision of the US Supreme Court in Association for Molecular Pathology v Myriad Genetics Inc. It will be remembered that that Court held that a sequence of DNA mimicking the BRCA breast cancer mutation could not be patented because DNA’s information sequences and  all the other processes that allow the information to manufacture bodily tissues occur naturally within human cells. 
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Strasbourg and why you must give reasons on domestic appeals

6 October 2014 by David Hart KC

Hansen v. Norway, ECtHR, 2 October, read judgment

In any system of appeals, there is always a tension between giving everyone a fair hearing and concentrating on the appeals which do stand a reasonable prospect of success. The UK, like many countries, has introduced some filters on civil appeals in relatively recent times, enabling unmeritorious appeals to be dismissed at the threshold. In doing so, it gives short (sometimes very short) reasons for refusing permission.

You might have thought that this was a classic area where Strasbourg would be wary about intervening in domestic practice and striking the balance between speed and fairness. Yet the Court was persuaded that the Norwegians got the balance wrong, and found a breach of Article 6(1). We therefore need to read it carefully to see whether the same could be said about our system.

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The Fragility of Human Rights

5 October 2014 by Guest Contributor

The announcement this week of a new Conservative Party plan to repeal the Human Rights Act, ‘Protecting Human Rights in the UK’, has brought to a boil a cauldron of incredulity (pictured) about the Government’s attitude towards the law. The response from human rights lawyers and advocacy groups has been swift. Liberty describes the Conservative Party plan as ‘legally illiterate’. The several ways in which that is true have already been the subject of detailed exposition. Indeed, Liberty’s response is even more accurate than it might first appear. If the Conservative Party plan is legally illiterate then it is best read as a political tactic to assure its supporters that it is the party of anti-European sentiment. 

Nevertheless, if the move helps to bring about a Conservative Party government after the general election next May, then there is a great likelihood that steps will be taken to weaken the legal protection of human rights in Britain. The political pressure to do so will be even greater if the government must rely on support from Eurosceptic Members of Parliament for its majority in the House of Commons. Thus, political tactic or not, a Conservative Party-led government will likely take action against human rights law after the General Election.

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Another Strasbourg judgment which Putin may wish to ignore – Scientologists win

5 October 2014 by David Hart KC

Church of Scientology v. Russia, ECtHR, 2 October 2014 – read judgment

Amidst all the current posturing about the Strasbourg Court and how we would like to ignore its judgments we don’t like in future, one cannot help thinking about the old rule of behaviour that your enemy’s enemy is your friend. Western interests have been caught out, time and time again, when they intervene/interfere (insert, as appropriate) in the Middle East, and their enemy’s friend often turns out to be far from its friend.

Cue this case. Scientologists may not be widely favoured, in the UK, but then neither is Russia. And Russia would so love to ignore the slew of Strasbourg judgments against it – think Kordokovsky (€1.6bn, here), Chechnya and the environmental claims (here) against the various businesses which had so seamlessly ended up in the oligarchs’ pockets. But do we really want to feed Putin a line to get out of his difficulties in Strasbourg? This week’s back of an envelope announcements from the Conservative party conference about Strasbourg decisions would appear to do so.

The trigger for this claim in Strasbourg by the Church was the Russian courts’ decision that they were unwilling to allow the Scientologists to register their operations as a legal entity. And, as we shall see, Strasbourg thought that was not on.

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Journalists’ safety and the UN – Jessica Allen

4 October 2014 by Guest Contributor

Resolution A/HRC/27/L.7 on the Safety of Journalists by the UN Human Rights Council

Another day, another dead journalist; or so seems to be the trend in the media profession following recent news of the brutal beheading of an Israeli-American journalist, Stephen Sotloff, by Islamic State militants in Syria on 2^nd September 2014. This Resolution seeks to facilitate the prevention of further fatalities.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 1055 journalists have been killed worldwide in the past 22 years. Gunilla Von Hall, an eminent Swedish foreign correspondent and journalist, opened the Annual Geneva Peace Talks by sharing her experiences as a foreign correspondent to conflict zones such as Iraq and Bosnia. Gunilla commented on her need to ‘write for a visa’, making her withhold certain information from print temporarily so that she could continue to enter certain countries. She has had to openly refuse calls to work in certain areas due to the risks she now faces. Following the birth of her children, Gunilla’s responsibilities have more recently prevented her from risking her safety by travelling to these regions. She observed that, as a result, inexperienced reporters who are based in the countries have to be hired instead. Research undertaken by UNESCO compiled in the report ‘World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development’ suggests that 94% of those targeted have been domestic journalists.

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