Category: BLOG POSTS
10 April 2012 by Wessen Jazrawi
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your weekly helping 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.
In the news
The big news of today is that Abu Hamza, Babar Ahmad and 3 others are highly likely to be extradited to the USA to face terrorism charges, following a ruling in the European Court of Human Rights – see Isabel McArdle’s post on the ruling. This aside, the main topics in the news this week have been the response by the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights (the Joint Committee on Human Rights or the “JCHR”) to the Government’s Justice and Security Green Paper and the leaks that the Government plans to introduce “real time” monitoring of how we use the internet in the interests of national security.
by Wessen Jazrawi
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10 April 2012 by Isabel McArdle
BABAR AHMAD AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM – 24027/07 [2012] ECHR 609 – Read judgment / press release
The European Court of Human Rights (Fourth Section), sitting as a Chamber, has found that five men accused of serious terrorist activities can be extradited from the UK to the US to face trial.
They had argued that their article 3 rights (article 3 prohibits torture, inhuman and degrading treatment) would be violated if they were extradited and convicted. A sixth man’s case has been adjourned pending further submissions from the parties to the proceedings.
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8 April 2012 by David Hart KC
A long saga with a very new twist which should make even the most strident critic of international courts think again.
On 12 December 1999, the Erika sank some 60 nautical miles off the Brittany coast, spilling some 20,000 tonnes of heavy fuel which in due course polluted some 400 km of the French coastline. On 24 May 2012, the Cour de Cassation is due to rule on whether Total is criminally liable for the spill. Previous courts (the Criminal Court of First Instance, and the Court of Appeal in Paris) had said that it was. But now Advocate-General Boccon-Gibod has recently advised the Cour de Cassation that Total has no criminal liability. The problem, as often with international environmental issues, particularly criminal ones, is the jurisdiction for the offence charged – can, in this instance, the French prosecute this crime, even though someone can also do so somewhere else? What better reason for the founding of an international environmental court – a forum where one tribunal can seek to enforce common rules against those responsible for major pollution, wherever the pollution occurs and wherever the parties may be resident.
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7 April 2012 by Rosalind English
R (on the application of Amada Bizimana) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2012] EWCA Civ 414
In the wake of France’s apparently unencumbered expulsion of individuals on public interest grounds there has been a fresh outcry from the press about the shackles imposed by the Human Rights Convention on the UK authorities which other signatory states seem to ignore with impunity. The Times leader column, headed “Sarko’s way”, asks “Why is it that the French can deport their foreign undesirables but we in Britain cannot?” –
Bish, bosh, no problem, it seems. Although all three men, apparently have the right to appeal against their sudden lack of access to France, they will have to exercise it from afar. And at this point one can only wonder how on earth they can do it in France, but we cannot do it here in Britain…
The actions of the French Government raise the obvious question (as well as a gigantic eyebrow): how come they can do it, and we can’t? What does Nicolas Sarkozy have that David Cameron lacks? France accepts the judgments of the ECHR and is regarded as being as civilised, almost, as we are.
But in truth the Convention is not always to blame in these cases; sometimes deportation can run aground on a strict interpretation of English statute law without the help of human rights, as the case below demonstrates.
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6 April 2012 by Adam Wagner
I highly recommend Dominic Casciani’s excellent BBC Newsnight piece on Barbar Ahmad, which is currently available on iPlayer (UK only).
Ahmad’s case cuts across a number of different rights controversies. The BBC challenged the Ministry of Justice’s initial refusal to allow an interview with the terrorist suspect, who is currently held at a maximum security jail, and won – see our post. Ahmad is also currently the longest serving prisoner who has not been charged with a criminal offence; he has been detained for nearly 8 years.
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6 April 2012 by Guest Contributor
Civil liberties and the coalition have been happily filling the political pages this week. The damning conclusion of the Joint Committee on Human Rights that there is no evidence to justify expanding closed proceedings (expertly dissected by Rosalind English earlier in the week) vied for column inches with leaks that the Government planned to introduce “real time” monitoring of how we use the internet in the interests of national security.
These latter “snooping” proposals echo the ill-fated Communications Data Bill 2008, proposed by the Labour Government. After cross-party condemnation and criticism from the Information Commissioner’s Office and others, that Bill was withdrawn, with Home Office officials sent back to the drawing board.
After meeting similar condemnation in the press and online this week, and reservations expressed by the Deputy Prime Minister; it appears we can expect a draft Communications Data Bill to be resurrected in the Queen’s Speech.
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6 April 2012 by Richard Mumford
DL v A Local Authority & Others [2012] EWCA Civ 253 – Read judgment
Where adults have capacity under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA 2005), does the “great safety net” of the High Court’s inherent jurisdiction still exist to guard them from the effect on their decision making of undue influence, coercion, duress etc? In its judgment handed down on 28 March 2012, the Court of Appeal confirmed that it does.
DL proceeded in the High Court and the Court of Appeal on assumed (as opposed to agreed) facts, many if not all of which were contested by the appellant. For the court’s purposes however, it was assumed that DL, a man in his 50s who lived with his mother and father (90 and 85 respectively), had behaved aggressively towards his parents, physically and verbally, controlling access to visitors and seeking to coerce his father into transferring ownership of the house into DL’s name, whilst pressuring his mother into moving into a care home against her wishes. The Court of Appeal’s judgment uses the term “elder abuse” for such a situation.
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5 April 2012 by Adam Wagner
The UK Human Rights Blog launched on 30 March 2010 with a total of 2 readers and a budget of £200. Two years later, despite the budget remaining consistent, the Blog has just surpassed 1,000,000 individual page views and has over 10,000 subscribers over email, Twitter and Facebook. I would like to take a moment to reflect on this success.
As you can probably guess, we are (and I am) thrilled at the response to UKHRB. When we launched, our aim was to provide a new voice in the always colourful but often shrill arena of human rights commentary. We felt that there was a gap in the market (as it were – the blog has been and remains free to access) for a non-ideological legal human rights update service which would be accessible to the lawyers and lay persons alike.
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4 April 2012 by Rosalind English
The Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights has now responded to the Government’s consultation on the proposals set out in their Justice and Security Green Paper Cm 8194. The idea is to extend “closed material procedures” so as to be available in all civil proceedings, i.e. not just in some highly restricted national security contexts such as deportation appeals before SIAC (the Special Immigration Appeals Commission), control orders, and their successor regime known as TPIMs.
On the one side…
is the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson QC, who has concluded that secrecy of evidence should be maintained in civil procedures as well; after reviewing secret evidence relating to a small selection of civil claims, he reported that issues in some damages claims could not be determined at all without resort to a closed material procedure.
On the other …
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2 April 2012 by Sam Murrant
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your weekly bulletin 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.
In the news
This week we have further developments in freedom of information (both in terms of the right to free speech and the right to receive information under Article 10 of the Convention) and on the reform of courts, both at home and in Strasbourg. Also making news this week: the new Terrorist Prevention and Investigation Measures and flooding in Vladivostock.
Freedom of speech and freedom of information
This week, judgment was given in the case of Cairns v. Modi, in which Chris Cairns, former New Zealand cricketer, successfully won £90,000 in damages from Modi, the former Chairman of the Indian Premier League, who published a defamatory statement about Cairns on Twitter. Inforrm’s blog provides a case summary with a bit more detail, for those interested. Rosalind English commented on this case, and on libel cases in the context of instantaneous Internet publishing more generally, for the UK Human Rights blog on Wednesday, in which she likens the current judicial attitude to rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
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2 April 2012 by Guest Contributor
Austin & Others v. The United Kingdom, [2012] ECHR 459, 15th March 2012 – read judgment
The Grand Chamber of the ECtHR recently tackled the question of whether the police tactic of “kettling” (verb, UK, of the police – to contain demonstrators in a confined area) amounted to a deprivation of the liberty of four applicants within the meaning of Article 5(1) of the ECHR.
The facts of this case reveal a clash of perspectives between private and public interests. However, as the applicants argued, the deprivation of liberty cannot be justified by a wider public interest motive.
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31 March 2012 by Isabel McArdle
The Government of the Republic of South Africa v Shrien Dewani- Read decision
The extradition to South Africa of Shrien Dewani, the man accused of murdering his wife on honeymoon there in 2010, has been delayed pending an improvement in his mental health.
The case made headlines in 2010, when the story broke of a honeymooning couple who had been ambushed in the township of Gugulethu, South Africa. Mr Dewani told police he had been travelling in a taxi which was ambushed by two men. He described being forced from the car at gunpoint and the car driving away with his wife still inside. She was found dead shortly after. However, evidence emerged which led the South African authorities to believe that Mr Dewani had initiated a conspiracy with the taxi driver and the men who ambushed the taxi to murder his new wife. Consequently, they sought his extradition from the UK, to which he had returned, to face a trial for murder.
In an appeal to the High Court from a decision by a Senior District Judge that Mr Dewani could be extradited, Mr Dewani made two arguments:
1. Prison conditions in South Africa were such that his Articles 2 (right to life) and 3 (prohibition on torture, inhuman and degrading treatment) Convention rights would be violated if he were extradited;
2. His mental health and risk of suicide were such that his should not be extradited.
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30 March 2012 by Isabel McArdle
Bourgass and others v Secretary of State for Justice [2012] EWCA Civ 376 Read decision
The ability to interact with other prisoners is a major part of prison life, and not one many prisoners would give up willingly. But there are circumstances where prisoners have to be segregated from the rest of the prison population, such as where they are posing a violent threat to another prisoner or planning an escape. The Court of Appeal has recently looked into the question of how decisions to segregate are made, including the initial decision, the review of the decision and ultimately judicial review, in a human rights context.
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30 March 2012 by Matthew Hill
Reynolds v United Kingdom [2012] ECHR 437 – read judgment
What – if anything – can a claimant do when she suspects that the domestic law is not only out of kilter with Strasbourg jurisprudence but is also denying her even an opportunity to bring a claim? Taking arms against a whole legal system may be an heroic ideal, but the mundane reality is a strike out under CPR rule 3.4 by a district judge in the County Court. It is a long way from there to the European Court of Human Rights.
This was the position in which Patricia Reynolds and her daughter Catherine King found themselves following the sad death of (respectively) their son and brother. David Reynolds suffered from schizophrenia. On 16 March 2005 he contacted his NHS Care Co-ordinator and told him that he was hearing voices telling him to kill himself. There were no beds available in the local psychiatric unit, so Mr Reynolds was placed in a Council run intensive support unit. His room was on the sixth floor and at about 10.30 that night Mr Reynolds broke his (non-reinforced) window and fell to his death.
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30 March 2012 by David Hart KC
R (o.t.a Cornwall Waste Forum, St Dennis Branch) v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Court of Appeal, 29 March 2012, read judgment
The CA has just held that Collins J was wrong to hold (per my previous post) that the local NGO had a legitimate expectation that the Secretary of State would decide an air pollution issue, rather than leave it to the Environment Agency. In a nutshell, the Inspector (and hence the Secretary of State) was entitled to change his mind on this issue. So the expectation crumbled, and so did this judicial review to quash a decision to allow a waste incinerator to proceed.
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