Category: Protocol 1 Article 1 | Peaceful enjoyment of property
4 July 2012 by Rosalind English
Herrmann v Germany (Application no. 9300/07) 26 June 2012 – read judgment
The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the obligation of a landowner to allow hunting on his property violated his Convention rights. Although the majority based their conclusion on his right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions, the partially concurring and dissenting opinions and the judgment as a whole provide an interesting insight into the way freedom of conscience challenges are to be approached in a secular society where religion holds less sway than individual ethical positions on certain issues.
Background
In 2002 the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany ruled that the granting of exceptional authorisation for the slaughter of animals without previous stunning, on religious grounds, did not breach the German Basic Law Schächt-Entscheidung (BVerfGE 99, 1, 15 January 2002). The social uproar that followed the ruling led to the German constitutional legislature taking a significant step aimed at protecting animal welfare with the 2002 constitutional reform, by including Article 20a in the Basic Law:
“Mindful also of its responsibility toward future generations, the State shall protect the natural foundations of life and animals through legislation…”
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19 May 2012 by Alasdair Henderson
Burnip v. Birmingham City Council, Trengrove v. Walsall Metropolitan Council, Gorry v. Wiltshire Council [2012] EWCA Civ 629 – read judgment
In the same week that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan-Smith, announced his intention to implement sweeping reforms of the current system of disability benefits, the Court of Appeal has ruled that housing benefit rules were discriminatory against disabled people, in breach of Article 14 read with Article 1 Protocol 1 of the European Convention.
Mr Duncan-Smith has already faced opposition to his reform proposals but has made it clear that he is willing to tackle this controversial issue. However, this week’s ruling is a timely reminder that social security law is extremely complex and that the Government will have to tread very carefully to avoid unwittingly causing further instances of unlawful discrimination.
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22 March 2012 by David Hart KC
Cases T-439/10 and T-440/10, Fulmen & Mahmoudian v. Council of the European Union, read judgment
Fulmen, as many of you will know, means thunderbolt in Latin. So it must have seemed when this Iranian company had its assets frozen. This case is a good example of how general principles of European law were applied to annul measures taken against these Iranian applicants. The measures were part of EU policy to apply pressure on Iran to end nuclear proliferation. Fulmen was said to have supplied electrical equipment on the Qom/Fordoo nuclear site and Mr Mahmoudian is a director of Fulmen. Hence they were both listed in Council Decision 2010/413/CFSP. The upshot was that all of their assets were frozen by the EU.
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15 March 2012 by Rachit Buch
Malik v United Kingdom 23780/08 [2012] ECHR 438 (13 March 2012) – Read judgment
The European Court of Human Rights held that the suspension of a GP from the Primary Care Trust (PCT) Performers List did not violate his right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions under Article 1 Protocol 1 (A1P1) of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court declined to decide whether there was a possession that could be interfered with in this case, but held that suspension did not affect Dr Malik.
Dr Malik ran a general practice from premises he owned in London. He was under a general medical services contract with his PCT so that he had to ensure patients on his list were provided with GP services (whether by himself or a salaried doctor); his premises was rented (for a notional amount) so that it could be used for NHS services. Dr Malik was also on the PCT’s performers list so that he personally could provide GP services.
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5 March 2012 by Rosalind English
Merchant International v Naftogaz International [2012] EWCA Civ 196 – read judgment
The Court of Appeal has ruled that domestic courts may refuse to recognise a judgment of another Convention country on the basis that it failed to respect the fair trial principles in Article 6.
In this case the Ukraine Supreme Court was said to have “flagrantly” disregarded the principle of legal certainty. Whilst the English court should apply a strong presumption that the procedures of other Convention States complied with Article 6, it was not wrong for an English court to consider whether a judgment of a court of a Convention State contravened the Convention.
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2 January 2012 by Rosalind English
Dobson and others v Thames Water Utilities Ltd [2011] EWHC 3253 – read judgment
David Hart QC acted for the defendants in this case. He has played no part in the writing of this post.
An operator carrying out activities authorised by legislation is immune from common law nuisance liability unless the claimant can prove negligence. Any damages for such a nuisance will constitute “sufficient just satisfaction” for the purpose of the Human Rights Act; even if breach of a Convention right is proved, no further remedy will be available.
Background
It has been a long established canon of common law that no action will lie in nuisance against a body whose operation interferes in one way or another with neighbouring land, where Parliament has authorised the construction and use of an undertaking or works, and there is a statutory scheme in existence which is inconsistent with such liability.
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21 December 2011 by Guest Contributor
Freezing
One could be forgiven, amidst the furore over the European Court of Human Rights’ Al-Khawaja judgment last Thursday, for missing the first report of the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation on the operation of the Terrorist Asset-Freezing etc Act 2010. The Report runs to over 100 pages and is the most comprehensive account of UK terrorist asset freezing in print.
It is the third report of the current Independent Reviewer, David Anderson Q.C., since he took up the post in February. Asset freezing is something of a speciality of his, as he has appeared in litigation in both EU and UK courts on the matter. It is therefore unsurprising that the Report exhibits the same attention to detail that made the Anderson’s previous two efforts essential reading.
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16 December 2011 by David Hart KC
OBG Ltd et al v. United Kingdom, 29 November 2011
We have become quite used to the Strasbourg Court having a serious go at bits of our statutory law, whether it be prisoners’ rights, anti-terrorist legislation or housing law. A lot of this statute enables the state to do things to private citizens which may or may not offend the Convention. But what is rather rarer in Strasbourg is the case where an applicant challenges judge-made law or common law, and does so where the dispute is between two private parties. Perhaps the best known example is the MGN/Naomi Campbell case in which privacy and costs issues got an intense scrutiny from the Strasbourg Court.
OBG sounds much less glamorous and more obscure, but is nonetheless interesting. The human rights of companies which have been injured by the wrongful exercise of administrative receivership powers have not been minutely examined in the case law, to say the least. But if this case sounds dry, and likely to hoist me by my own petard (should lawyers get named and shamed for being boring?), bear with me. Because it is actually quite a sad story of people being dealt an unjust result – for which neither domestic nor Strasbourg courts felt able to fashion a suitable remedy.
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7 December 2011 by David Hart KC
Leeds Group v. Leeds City Council et al [2011] EWCA Civ 1447
Retrospective legislation often gives rise to claims under Article 1 Protocol 1 of the Convention – you may have some legal advantage (whether it be property or a legal claim) which you then find yourselves losing as a result of the change of law. I have posted on some of these, the ban of the pub fag machine, or the change in the law that meant insurers had to pay compensation for pleural plaques caused by asbestos. These A1P1 cases are not easy to win, not least because the courts are wary in thwarting legislative changes via one of the less fundamental and most qualified rights in the Convention locker.
The Leeds Group case is a good example of this. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (CROW) changed the basis on which town and village greens could be registered. Put very shortly, you can register some land as a green if people had “indulged” in “lawful sports and pastimes” on the land for not less than 20 years, in the rather quaint and de haut en bas language of the drafter. The changes under CROW were quite subtle. You now have to show a “significant number” so indulging, but these people can come from “any neighbourhood within a locality”, rather than from a “locality” – a term on which previously masses of ink has been split and by which otherwise meritorious claims for greens disallowed. And the sports and pastimes now had to continue to the date of registration – you and your fellow Morris dancers could not just stop dancing or whatever once you had done your 20 years, if you wanted to register the greens.
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13 October 2011 by David Hart KC
AXA General Insurance Ltd & Ors v Lord Advocate & Ors (Scotland) [2011] UKSC 46 (12 October 2011
When you breathed in asbestos fibres from your dusty shipbuilding job on the River Clyde in the 1950s and 1960s, some of those fibres stuck around in the lungs. Some may cause the pleural plaques seen on my image, some may cause asbestosis, and some may lead to the highly malignant mesothelioma.
So your doctor (20+ years later when these diseases manifest themselves) would X-ray you and tell you what form of the disease you had. If he told you you had pleural plaques, you would, at first, breathe a huge sigh of relief that it was not mesothelioma. Because pleural plaques are almost invariably asymptomatic and harmless.
But on second thoughts, now you know you have indeed been exposed to asbestos such that you might develop mesothelioma – and you have seen colleagues die a miserable death from that disease. So, when you leave your chest physician’s room, you are worried, not about what you have, but about what you might get. Do you get damages for this? And anyway, where do the human rights in my title – those under Article 1 of Protocol 1 to ECHR, or the right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions – come into this story?
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26 September 2011 by Adam Wagner
Today, an open letter from 158 lawyers and academics has been published in The Guardian claiming that the law on squatting, on which the Government has proposed reforms, has been misrepresented by politicians and the media.
I am one of the letter’s signatories. Amongst other things, it states that:
a significant number of recent media reports have stated that squatters who refuse to leave someone’s home are not committing a criminal offence and that a change in the law – such as that proposed by the government – is needed to rectify this situation.
The accompanying article is here. One interesting aspect of this campaign is that it was organised in part by one of the longest standing and best legal blogs, Nearly Legal. Nearly Legal have used social media, which an ever increasing number of lawyers follow, to gather many of the signatures. Their response is here and some of their previous posts on the topic here and here.
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11 August 2011 by David Hart KC
Updated| R (Infinis) v. Ofgem & Non-Fossil Purchasing Agency Limited, Interested Party [2011] EWHC 1873 (Admin) Lindblom J, 10 August 2011 Read judgment
In a recent post, I suggested that successful claims under Article 1 Protocol 1 (the human right to peaceful enjoyment of property) faced all sorts of difficulties, hence the particular interest of that decision in Thomas which bucked the trend. Rash words at the end of a busy legal term: hard on the heels of that judgment of the Court of Appeal, there comes this further example of an A1P1 claim succeeding in the environmental context.
This time, the claim arose as a result of a judicial review, where the judge decided that the regulator had come to an unlawful decision, and hence that unlawfulness gave rise to a damages claim against the regulator.
So how and why?
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27 July 2011 by David Hart KC
Update | Thomas v. Bridgend County Borough Council [2011] EWCA Civ 862, Court of Appeal. Read judgment
Conventional wisdom has it that an Article 1 Protocol 1 (the human right to peaceful enjoyment of property) environmental claim faces all sorts of difficulties. The claimants may have a right to the peaceful possession of property, but that right is immediately counter-balanced by the public interest of the scheme under challenge. Furthermore, the court does not look too closely at the detail when applying the proportionality test, as long as the scheme is lawful. Or does it?
Our case is a refreshing example of where manifest injustice was avoided by a successful claim under Article 1 of the First Protocol of the ECHR. It also shows off the muscles of the duty to interpret legislation, under section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998, in accordance with the ECHR.To find what it was about, we need to go to the Hendre Relief Road in Pencoed, Bridgend and those who live nearby.
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20 June 2011 by David Hart KC
Sinclair Collis Ltd, R (o.t.a) v. The Secretary of State for Health [2011] EWCA Civ 437 read judgment here
Sinclair Collis own cigarette machines, some 20,000 of them. So when cigarette machines were banned by law, there was nowhere for their owners to go, apart from the Courts. On Friday, the Court of Appeal dismissed their challenge to the ban, but there was a powerful dissent from Laws LJ on both the law and its application. This makes the prospect of an appeal to the Supreme Court all the more likely. Even that might not be the end of the line, if the SCt refer the case to Europe.
The case – all 70+ pages of the decision – is an object lesson in how to challenge a ban. But, hang on, some of you will say, how can you challenge a ban once it has become the law? Well, until 1973 you couldn’t. That is when we gained the first way of challenging a law, through joining the EEC and thus taking on the obligation to make our laws EEC-compliant. This was Sinclair Collis’s first string to its bow. In 2000, the second string arrived – the coming into force of the Human Rights Act. But there is still no third string – no purely domestic challenge to legislation once enacted – Parliament is still sovereign.
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9 June 2011 by Rosalind English
Atapattu, R. (On the Application of) v The Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] EWHC 1388 (Admin) – read judgment
1 Crown Office Row’s John Joliffe appeared for the Secretary of State the Home Department in this case. He is not the writer of this post.
This case on the wrongful retention of the passport of a Sri Lankan national raises some interesting questions about the scope of the duty owed by the Home Office’s agents when exercising their powers of entry clearance under the Immigration Act 1971.
The question in this case was whether the claimant, who had applied for a United Kingdom student visa, could sue the Secretary of State for the Home Department for damages for conversion under the Torts (Interference with Goods) Act 1977. There were other submissions, that the withholding of the passport breached his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights 1950 and that the Secretary of State was liable to him in negligence.
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