Category: BLOG POSTS
2 July 2013 by David Hart KC
Bedford v. Bedfordshire County Council, 21 June 2013, Jay J – read judgment
On 29 May 2004, Bradley Bedford, then aged 13, was beaten senseless by one AH, then 15, whom he had the misfortune to encounter entirely by chance near the seaside in Torbay. AH was in a children’s home there which was contracted to the Defendant Council; AH was a “looked after” child under section 20 of the Children Act 1989. Bradley sued the Council for failing to protect him. His claim was limited to one under the Human Rights Act, and Article 8 ECHR in particular.
Jay J dismissed the claim on the grounds that (a) it was brought too late; (b) there was not a real and immediate risk of harm to Bradley of which the Council should have been aware; (c) even if there was, the local authority took reasonable steps to eliminate or substantially reduce any risk. All these rulings are of some interest.
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1 July 2013 by Rosalind English
Case C-131/12: Google Spain SL & Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) & Mario Costeja González – read Opinion of AG Jääskinen
This reference to the European Court of Justice (CJEU) concerned the application of the 1995 Data Protection Directive to the operation of internet search engines. Apart from demonstrating the many complications thrown up by this convoluted and shortsighted piece of regulation, this case raises the fascinating question of the so-called right to be forgotten, and the issue of whether data subjects can request that some or all search results concerning them are no longer accessible through search engine.
All of these questions are new to the Court.
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30 June 2013 by Daniel Isenberg
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular LS Lowry matchstick panorama of human rights news and views. The full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here. Links compiled by Adam Wagner, post by Daniel Isenberg.
With the continuing progress of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill through Parliament, focus was turned this week to the same issue in the USA. Meanwhile, it was extra-judicial scrutiny being meted upon Chris Grayling’s money-making proposals, and the Sun was censured by the PCC over an EU-ECtHR mix-up.
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29 June 2013 by Matthew Flinn
Hollingsworth v Perry – No. 12–144 – Read judgment
United States v Windsor – No. 12–307 – Read judgment
In rulings that have the potential to influence the jurisprudence of courts around the world, the Supreme Court of the United States has handed down two landmark decisions pertaining to the issue of same-sex marriage.
The right of gay and lesbian couples to wed remains one of the most controversial and debated civil rights issues of our time. However, the ground has been shifting with increasing rapidity in recent years and months. The direction of change is clear. There are now fifteen countries which permit or will permit same-sex marriages, including most recently Uruguay, New Zealand and France. With bills steadily progressing through the Parliamentary process, there is a strong possibility that England, Wales and Scotland may soon be added to the list.
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27 June 2013 by Rosalind English
Salahuddin Amin v Director General of MI5, Chief of MI6, the FCO, the Home Office and the Attorney General- [2013] EWHC 1579 (QB) – read judgment
Do not be misled by the impressive cast list of defendants in this case. It means simply that the claimant was attempting to attack the integrity of his criminal conviction via the civil courts.
He framed his case against the defendants principally in vicarious liability for the alleged torts of individual SS or SIS officers committed in the performance of their duties, when he was arrested and detained in Pakistan and the UK. In a short judgment, Irwin J set out his reasons for allowing the Particulars of Claim to be struck out as an abuse of the process of court.
The somewhat complicated procedural history of this case can be briefly summarised. In 2008 the claimant was convicted of conspiracy to cause explosions likely to endanger life. His appeal failed. In 2009 he commenced these proceedings, claiming that the mistreatment he received at the hands of the Pakistani authorities and whilst in detention in the UK had rendered the evidence so unreliable that it should not have been admitted at the original trial.
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27 June 2013 by Lauren Godfrey
Dumfries and Galloway -v- North [2013] UKSC 45 – Read judgment
Yesterday’s much heralded equal pay ‘victory’ in the Supreme Court (see BBC Report) undoubtedly will be good news for the specific female claimants in the case who seek to vindicate their European Union rights to equal pay.
The female claimants do so by comparing their pay with male colleagues working in entirely distinct parts of the same local authority (being Dumfries and Galloway Council) but arguably on common terms and conditions of employment (often referred to as the ‘same employment’ test).
However, in legal terms, arguably the unanimous Judgment delivered by Lady Hale in the Supreme Court is not quite so revolutionary. Many practitioners, outside Scotland at least, had anticipated its outcome.
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26 June 2013 by Rosalind English
CM v The Executor of the Estate of EJ (deceased) [2013] EWHC 1680 (Fam) – read judgment
You would have thought the law would be entirely behind a person who intervenes to help a stranger in distress. Indeed most civil law countries impose a positive duty to rescue, which means that if a person finds someone in need of medical help, he or she must take all reasonable steps to seek medical care and render best-effort first aid. A famous example of this was the investigation into the photographers at the scene of Lady Diana’s fatal car accident: they were suspected of violation of the French law of “non-assistance à personne en danger” (deliberately failing to provide assistance to a person in danger), which can be punished by up to 5 years imprisonment and a fine of up to 70,000 euros. But the position in common law countries like the UK and the United States is completely different: you can watch a child drown and not be held to account.
Of course no good citizen would do such a thing and in this case the claimant, a medical doctor, went out of her way to try to save the life of someone in extremis. She was driving home, off duty, in South East London, when she saw a body lying motionless on the pavement.
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26 June 2013 by Adam Wagner
Updated | Remember Inhuman Rights, The Sun’s garbled reporting of this Court of Appeal decision on Criminal Record Bureau checks? In February, I wrote this: No, The Sun, the Human Rights Act is not the EU. My complaint was about the headline, which screamed “Now EU could let fiends like him prey on your children“. This was obvious nonsense, since the judgment had nothing to do with the EU.
Well, I am delighted to report that following my post, the European Commission, which represents the interests of the European Union, complained to the Press Complaints Commission and the complaint has now been upheld. There was a “clear failure to take appropriate care over the accuracy of the coverage and a breach of the Editor’s Code, which was particularly significant at a time when the roles of both the EU and the Convention were a matter of major public debate“.
The newspaper has now published a correction. The full Adjudication can be found here. This is the main bit:
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25 June 2013 by Alasdair Henderson
R (Dr Hans-Christian Raabe) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2013] EWHC 1736 (Admin) – read judgment
Dr Hans-Christian Raabe lost his judicial review challenge to the revocation of his appointment as the GP member of the Government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). His appointment was revoked less than a month after he had accepted an offer to join the ACMD, as a result of certain views about homosexuality expressed in a paper he had co-written in Canada some 6 years earlier.
This case deals with a heady cocktail of controversial issues, ranging from same-sex marriage to the level of crystal meth use in gay clubs, and from paedophilia to the ostracising of Christians because of their religious beliefs. Indeed, it hits so many hot-button issues at once that it is very surprising it has not yet received much media coverage, despite the judgment being handed down on 20 June.
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25 June 2013 by David Hart KC
Cusack v. London Borough of Harrow [2013] UKSC, 19 June 2013 read judgment
This is the tale of how a solicitor from Harrow ended up litigating about his off-street parking in the Supreme Court – and reached for Article 1 of Protocol 1 (A1P1) of ECHR, by way of a second string to his bow. Not his choice, as he had won in the Court of Appeal on other grounds. But his failure on the point reminds us that in the majority of cases A1P1 is a difficult argument to bring home.
Mr Cusack had been parking his car in front of his premises since the late 1960s. He got temporary planning permission for his offices in 1973, but hung on when this expired and got established planning rights in 1976.
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23 June 2013 by Sarina Kidd
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular grape and strawberry fondu of human rights news. The full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here. Links compiled by Adam Wagner, post by Sarina Kidd.
This week, important figures criticise the legal aid reforms, the MoD may have to watch their back, surveillance activities threaten to challenge a number of laws and secret ‘justice’ is slammed once again.
by Sarina Kidd
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22 June 2013 by David Hart KC
Bank Mellat v HM Treasury [2013] UKSC 39 (see judgment)
My post of earlier this week explained why the majority of the Supreme Court struck down a direction telling all financial institutions not to deal with this Iranian Bank. The legal ground (involving, as Lord Sumption described it, “an exacting analysis of the factual evidence in defence of the measure” [20]) was that the direction was “disproportionate”. The judgments (particularly the dissenting one of Lord Reed) tell us a lot about the scope of proportionality. And there is a good deal more to it than there might at first sight appear.
So it may be worth doing a bit of a bluffers guide, hand in hand with Lord Reed.
The concept arises in human rights law and in EU law. Its ECHR and EU incarnations derive from German administrative law, but its development in English law shows strong common-law influences. It applies in many different contexts, and the intensity of the review required critically depends on that context as well as the right being interfered with. So it is no simple thing to explain, but Lord Reed at [68] – [76] distils the main elements.
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21 June 2013 by Paul Reynolds
R(on the application of Christopher Wilford) v The Financial Services Authority [2013] EWCA Civ 677 – Read judgment
This Court of Appeal judgment further reduces the scope for judicial review of a Decision Notice issued by the Financial Services Authority (“the FSA”, now the Financial Conduct Authority). Indeed it comes close to excluding judicial review of these Notices. This is because there is a statutory mechanism for challenging Decision Notices. This case sheds light on the very limited role of judicial review where there is such a statutory right.
The FSA regulates the financial services industry. Its Regulatory Decisions Committee (“the RDC”) decides whether or not a regulated person has breached the relevant rules and issues Decision Notices.
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20 June 2013 by Rosalind English
Smith and Others (Appellants) v The Ministry of Defence (Respondent) and other appeals – read judgment and our previous post for summary of the facts
So, the Supreme Court has refused to allow these claims to be struck out on the principle of combat immunity. It has also asserted that jurisdiction for the purpose of an Article 2 right to life claim can extend to non-Convention countries, and that the state can owe a positive duty to protect life, even in a situation of armed combat.
This ruling deserves close attention not least because it takes common law negligence and Article 2 into an area which is very largely uncharted by previous authority. Lord Mance does not mince his words in his dissent, predicting that yesterday’s ruling will lead, inevitably, to the “judicialisation of war”. Lord Carnwath is similarly minded; in this case, he says, the Court is being asked to authorise an extension of the law of negligence (as indeed of Article 2), into a new field, without guidance from “any authority in the higher courts, in this country or any comparable jurisdiction, in which the state has been held liable for injuries sustained by its own soldiers in the course of active hostilities.” Lord Wilson also dissented on this point.
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20 June 2013 by Rosalind English
In the matter of B (a child) (FC) [2013] UKSC 33 – read judgment
This appeal concerned whether a child of two years of age should be permanently removed from her parents and placed for adoption; and, in that regard, whether the child was likely to suffer “significant harm: within the meaning of s.31(2)(a) of the Children Act 1989; and a consideration of whether her permanent removal might interfere with the exercise of the right to respect for family life under Article 8 of the ECHR, and, if so, whether the order should be proportionate to its legitimate aim of protecting the child.
The following summary is based on the Supreme Court press report. References in square brackets are to paragraphs of the judgment.
Background facts
The child concerned had been removed from her parents at birth under an interim care order. The mother was for many years in an abusive relationship with her step-father. She also had criminal convictions for dishonesty and a history of making false allegations. She had been diagnosed with somatisation disorder, a condition which involves making multiple complaints to medical professionals of symptoms for which no adequate physical explanation can be found.
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Bedford v. Bedfordshire County Council, 21 June 2013, Jay J – read judgment
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