We use cookies to enhance your browsing experience. If you continue to use our website we will take this to mean that you agree to our use of cookies. If you want to find out more, please view our cookie policy. Accept and Hide [x]
Canada Goose UK Retail Ltd v Persons unknown and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) [2020] EWCA Civ 303 on appeal from [2019] EWHC 2459 (QB)– Gareth Rhys
All references in square brackets are to paragraphs in the Court of Appeal judgment
The Court of Appeal has articulated the guiding principles that apply when seeking interim and final relief against ‘persons unknown’ in cases of public protests. The decision will be regarded as a win for civil liberties organisations and activist groups given that the Court has greatly restricted the circumstances in which injunctive relief may be sought against unknown protesters. This case has distilled the jurisprudence following the decisions in Cameron v Liverpool Insurance Co Ltd [2019] UKSC 6 and Ineos Upstream Ltd v Persons Unknown[2019] EWCA Civ 515.
Background
Canada Goose is an international company that manufactures and sells clothing containing animal fur and down. They brought a claim in damages and injunctive relief against ‘persons unknown’ who protested the use of animal products outside Canada Goose’s Regent Street shop.
Ilias v Hungary (Application no. 47287/15) was the first case in which the ECtHR considered a land border transit zone between two member states of the Council of Europe, where the host state, Hungary, was also a member of the EU and had applied the safe third country rule under the EU asylum regime. The Grand Chamber held that the applicants’ detention did not breach Article 5 (the right to liberty and security of the person).
The applicants, Mr Ilias and Mr Ahmed, were both Bangladeshi nationals who had left Bangladesh at different times and in differing circumstances. They met in Greece and then traveled together to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, then to Serbia, and then to Hungary. On 15 September 2015 they arrived in Hungary and entered the border transit zone at Röszke. They submitted asylum requests on the same day. Within several hours their requests were rejected as being inadmissible and they were ordered to be expelled from Hungary back to Serbia as a safe third country. The applicants then spent 23 days in the transit zone whilst they appealed this decision. On 8 October 2015, following a final decision of the Hungarian courts which rejected their applications for asylum and ordered the applicants’ expulsion, Mr Ilias and Mr Ahmed were escorted out of the transit zone and crossed the border back into Serbia.
Quarantines and lockdowns are sweeping Europe: Italy, France, Spain. Through them, states seek to contain Covid-19 and so save lives. It is difficult to imagine higher stakes from a human rights perspective: mass interferences with whole populations’ liberties on one side; the very weighty public interest in protecting lives on the other; and all this under the shadow of uncertainty and disorder. What, if anything, do human rights have to say?
To begin sketching an answer to this complex question, this post analyses the situation in the European state furthest down this path: Italy. After outlining the Italian measures (I), it argues that Italy’s mass restrictions on internal movement are unlikely to violate the right to free movement but pose problems in respect of the right to liberty (II). I conclude by summarising the tangle of other rights issues those measures raise and making a tentative reflection on the currently limited role of human rights law (III).
Before beginning, I should note that analysing measures’ human rights compliance in abstracto is difficult and slightly artificial: a great deal turns on how measures are implemented in practice and particular individuals’ circumstances. Moreover, my analysis is limited to the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’), and I do not profess expertise in Italian law (which is proving complex to interpret). The aim of this post is therefore to start, not end, debate about human rights’ role as these measures begin to spread across Europe.
Thomas Hayes is a specialist registrar in vascular surgery and forthcoming pupil at 1 Crown Office Row
As teased earlier, the Covid-19 pandemic gives rise to such a volume of material as to justify a slightly more detailed examination of its consequences. In time, the response of governments across the globe to the disease will no doubt be the subject of detailed study by academics across the fields of biology, history and law. For the time being, however, blog readers will have to tolerate the following words of speculation, much of which will probably suffer the cruel fate of being shown to be out of date and/or inaccurate within hours of publication…
The government has announced its intention to bring before Parliament this week emergency laws to help control the outbreak. Whilst at the time of writing, such draft legislation had not been published, press reports suggested it would include new powers to allow the police to detain those breaking quarantine measures. Where the police might take such recalcitrant citizens is not known, however the prospect of detaining in close proximity those suspected of carrying the highly infectious airborne disease presumably fills neither the police nor public health officials with much joy…
The worsening of the Covid-19 pandemic seemed to relegate all other business to a position of relative insignificance this week. Undoubtedly the human, economic and social cost of the outbreak is already severe, with its impact increasingly felt across the globe. However, perhaps more than any other conceivable event, the progression of the disease casts a spotlight on numerous areas of legal controversy. It is hard to recall a post-war phenomenon which so frequently pits the rights and interests of individuals against those of broader society (more here). Indeed, the potential material for upcoming pupillage interview questions seems virtually inexhaustible, assuming that they too don’t fall victim to social distancing measures.
I will be posting a longer article on Covid-19 later today.
Following an Article 2 inquest into the tragic death of Prince Fosu, a vulnerable foreign national detained in an immigration removal centre, a jury has found that Mr Fosu’s death was avoidable and was caused by a number of gross failures on the part of the Home Office and various agencies to provide appropriate care in immigration detention at Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre.
Background
Mr Fosu, a car parts dealer from Ghana, entered the UK in April 2012 on a valid business visa. However, on arrival, he was refused leave to enter. His subsequent in-country appeal was rejected in September 2012 and he was booked on a flight to leave the UK on 5 November 2012.
A month after his unsuccessful appeal, he was arrested after walking naked on the road. He continued to act bizarrely at the police station and kept undressing. However, following assessment, mental health professionals at the station determined that he did not need to be sectioned and was fit for detention. When he urinated in his cell, he was seemingly labelled as a “dirty protestor” rather than being re-referred for medical assessment. After three days in police custody, Mr Fosu was transferred to Harmondsworth on the basis that he had overstayed his stay and was liable to immigration removal.
As part of reception screening at Harmondsworth, Mr Fosu was seen by a nurse, who carried out a five-minute healthcare assessment, without having access to any of his medical records. At the inquest the nurse accepted that she had done a “completely inadequate assessment” and that she was “out of her depth”.
On 26th February, parliament held its second reading of the government’s revised Environment Bill 2020, setting out its agenda for environmental reform and governance post-Brexit. It would provide the secretary of state with powers to create new regulations on air quality, water usage, waste disposal and resource management, biodiversity, and environmental risk from chemical contamination, and would create a new non-departmental public body, the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), as an environment watchdog. The government describes it as the most “radical” environmental legislation to date, and sees the bill as paramount to ensuring both its 25 Year Environment Plan and its Net Zero Carbon Emissions by 2050 goal.
The bill faced criticism both from parliament and from environmental groups. Greener UK, a coalition of 13 major environmental organisation, has said that as it stands, the bill “[would] not achieve what is has promised”, criticising it for lacking ambition and including no legal requirements for the government to prevent backsliding on EU environmental regulation. MPs, both Conservative and Labour, specifically criticised the lack of ambition in air quality. Others criticised the proposed structure of the OEP as being insufficiently independent of the government to match the ambitions of the bill to create “a world-leading environmental watchdog that can robustly hold the Government to account”.
The Bill in Brief
The bill, as it stands, is divided into eight sections, which can be grouped into three major areas: giving the secretary of state the power to amend regulations in areas of environmental concern, legally enshrining biodiversity targets, and creating an environmental watchdog called the Office of Environmental Protection. All three are intimately tied to Brexit, with the government intending to use the bill to “transform our environmental governance once we leave the EU”.
R (on the application of Christie Elan-Cane) v Secretary of State for the Home Department with Human Rights Watch intervening [2020] EWCA Civ 363 – read judgment
When we apply for a passport, we are generally asked to state on the form whether we are a man or a woman, and this is generally reflected in our passports. However, in our modern day and age, there are now more than two genders – some people can choose to define as gender neutral, essentially meaning that they don’t like to describe themselves using the normal terms of “man” or “woman”. MX Elan-Cane is one of those individuals. They sued the Home Office because there was no “X” (as in, no gender neutral) option on the passport form as it was a breach of their Human Rights. The High Court said that yes, this engaged Article 8 of the Human Rights Convention (the right to private and family life), but the current passport policy did not breach that right. The Court of Appeal agreed with the High Court, both that this engaged Article 8, but that the rights to a private life were not breached here.
Ofcom make some unlawful regulations in 2015, under which telecom companies have to pay higher fees. The regulations were quashed in 2017. Four telecom companies want restitutionary damages, being the difference between the sums paid under the 2015 regulations and the sums they would have paid under their predecessors, the 2011 regulations.
Big money washing around: the claim was for over £200m.
Ofcom says – no, you are only entitled to the difference between the 2015 payments and the hypothetical fees which we could lawfully have charged had we done our job properly in 2017.
Sounds quite simple, but the answer goes deep into the intersection between public and private law.
The claim, as I have said, was restitutionary.
Ofcom said that the law of restitution is rooted in the private law of obligations. The private law approach (as with any tort claim) is to apply a “but for” test – what would the telecoms have paid but for the unlawfulness? This involves the counterfactual: what lawful fees could Ofcom have imposed?
The telecoms, and the Court of Appeal, disagreed. Ofcom’s argument offended the principles of legality, and parity (the principle that those who pay voluntarily should not be worse off compared to those who refuse to pay and litigate).
The complexity of EU law, and its status during the Brexit transition period and beyond continues to puzzle many if not most of those tasked with understanding it.
The Constitutional and Administrative Law Bar Association (ALBA) recently held a panel event tackling this very topic. The panel included Lord Anderson of Ipswich, perhaps better known as David Anderson QC, Professor Catherine Barnard, Professor of European Union law at Cambridge University (who will be familiar to listeners from our Brexit series), and Alison Pickup, Legal Director at the Public Law Project.
We are enormously grateful to the Committee and Chair of ALBA, as well as the speakers, for allowing us to reproduce their contributions on the podcast, as Episode 104. This talk is occasionally quite technical, and for this reason we have provided the powerpoint slides provided by each speaker (see the following attachments), which we hope will make it easier to follow along.
ALBA is the professional association for barristers in England and Wales practising in public law. Its members also include solicitors, academics and judges with an interest in public law. Details on joining ALBA can be found here, and their upcoming events here.
In a pithy parting shot to the Home Secretary, Lady Hale has given the unanimous judgment of the Supreme Court on the question of whether a person subject to a home curfew under immigration powers had been falsely imprisoned at common law and whether that concept should now be aligned with the concept of deprivation of liberty in article 5 of the ECHR. The Court decided the case against the defendant, as did every court below (the Blog covered the Court of Appeal’s decision here). The defendant had been required to pay the claimant £4,000.
False imprisonment at common law
The opening sentence sets the scene:
The right to physical liberty was highly prized and protected by the common law long before the United Kingdom became party to the European Convention on Human Rights.
The claimant had been subject to an overnight curfew, enforced by way of monitoring equipment and an electronic tag, under paragraph 2(5) of Schedule 3 of the Immigration Act 1971.
Tucked away on page 48 of the Conservative Party 2019 election manifesto, the following passage could be found in a section entitled “Protecting our Democracy”:
After Brexit we also need to look at the broader aspects of our constitution: the relationship between the Government, Parliament and the courts; the functioning of the Royal Prerogative; the role of the House of Lords; and access to justice for ordinary people. The ability of our security services to defend us against terrorism and organised crime is critical. We will update the Human Rights Act and administrative law to ensure that there is a proper balance between the rights of individuals, our vital national security and effective government. We will ensure that judicial review is available to protect the rights of the individuals against an overbearing state, while ensuring that it is not abused to conduct politics by another means or to create needless delays. In our first year we will set up a Constitution, Democracy & Rights Commission that will examine these issues in depth, and come up with proposals to restore trust in our institutions and in how our democracy operates.
That is something of a laundry list of many of the most charged constitutional issues faced by the United Kingdom. But of all the matters cited, the one which has received perhaps the most attention of late is the Government’s apparent intention to consider changes to our system of judicial review.
National concern about coronavirus rose further this week, as the tally of UK cases rose to 36. The government has said that it will publish an emergency ‘battle plan’ for tackling the virus, based on existing contingency plans for responding to a pandemic flu outbreak. This will include ministers responsible for coronavirus in each department, as well as a public information campaign run from the Cabinet Office; if the virus spreads further, it could also include banning big events, closing schools, and advising against use of public transport. When questioned yesterday on whether cities will be isolated, as in China, Health Secretary Matt Hancock was emphatic that no tactics are “off the table” in the government’s coronavirus strategy.
The Johnson government is facing major setbacks elsewhere this week.
The High Court has ruled that the health authorities owed a duty of care to the daughter of their patient who suffered from the hereditary neurodegenerative order Huntington’s Chorea, to inform her about his condition. But in the circumstances, Yip J concluded that the duty was not breached and that causation had not been established.
The facts of this case are set out in our previous post about the interlocutory proceedings before Nicol J. It will be recalled that the father had killed the claimant’s mother and was detained in a psychiatric hospital at the time of these events.
The outcome of the hearing on the merits has been awaited with anticipation because the finding of an obligation on a doctor to inform a third party may undermine the doctor-patient confidentiality rule, and this in turn would have a significant impact on the health services, particularly as genetic medicine increases the number of diagnoses that affect not just the individual patients but their relatives as well.
The issues before the Court
Now that the full trial of the merits of this case has been held, we have a more nuanced picture of the legal duties and defences. For a start, there were a number of defendants, not just the father’s clinician, but the medical team that made up the family therapy group that treated both claimant and her father. Furthermore evidence has come to light about the claimant’s attitude to the dilemma that she faced which has had implications for the decision on causation.
But first, let’s look at the issues that Yip J had to determine in this important case involving the implications for medical confidentiality in the context of hereditary disease.
i) Did the defendants (or any of them) owe a relevant duty of care to the claimant?
ii) If so, what was the nature and scope of that duty?
iii) Did any duty that existed, require that the claimant be given sufficient information for her to be aware of the genetic risk at a stage that would have allowed for her to undergo genetic testing and termination of her pregnancy?
iv) If a duty of care was owed, did the defendants (or any of them) breach that duty by failing to give her information about the risk that she might have a genetic condition while it was open to her to opt to terminate her pregnancy?
v) If there was a breach of duty, did it cause the continuation of the claimant’s pregnancy when it would otherwise have been terminated? (This involves consideration of whether the claimant would in fact have had the opportunity to undergo genetic testing and a termination in time but for the breach, and whether she would have chosen to do so.)
Airport expansion has taken a long and winding road, not least at Heathrow. But the proponents of the 3rd runway at Heathrow would have been heartened by the Secretary of State’s decision in June 2018 to set out a policy which preferred Heathrow over Gatwick and which was designed to steer planning processes thereafter in support of the new runway.
It is this decision which has just been declared unlawful by the Court of Appeal.
I am afraid this is where the planning jargon starts and the acronyms proliferate. The challenged decision was an Airports National Policy Statement (ANPS). Under planning legislation, an ANPS “sets the fundamental framework within which further decisions will be taken,” as the CA put it in [275]. Those further decisions include the grant of permission for the particular project, done through the Development Consent Order (DCO) process. But you cannot challenge that fundamental framework later in the DCO process; you cannot say later, for instance, that expansion is not necessary at all, or there is a better alternative, say, Gatwick, if the ANPS has decided otherwise.
This blog is maintained for information purposes only. It is not intended to be a source of legal advice and must not be relied upon as such. Blog posts reflect the views and opinions of their individual authors, not of chambers as a whole.
Our privacy policy can be found on our ‘subscribe’ page or by clicking here.
Recent comments