Human rights explained in a beautiful two-minute animation
15 October 2015
RightsInfo made a lovely new animation. Please like, share and spread the word.
Reassessing the role of parliament in law and human rights – Brian Chang
14 October 2015
Credit: guardian.co.uk
What is the role of parliament in the protection and realisation of the rule of law and human rights? Should there be a set of internationally agreed principles and guidelines on this issue to help parliaments develop their role? If so, what should be the content of any internationally agreed principles and guidelines? And how do we get international agreement on them? These were some of the questions posed and addressed at a recent high-level international conference held last month at Westminster.
The conference heard about the growing international consensus about the importance of the role of parliament in the protection and realisation of the rule of law and human rights, which has emerged over the last five years. International and regional institutions, including the United Nations General Assembly, the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC), the Council of Europe and the Commonwealth Secretariat, have taken a number of active steps to increase parliament’s role. Just last week, the HRC passed a third resolution at the close of its October 2015 session, addressing the “contribution of parliaments to the work of the HRC and its Universal Periodic Review” (link here).
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Surveillance under RIPA: neither a strict legal framework nor rigorously overseen – Sam Lincoln
13 October 2015
Those charged with the task of protecting the public from harm resort to assertion similar to that here attributed to a GCHQ spokesperson:
Our work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight.
I was the Chief Surveillance Inspector at the Office of Surveillance Commissioners for eight years until August 2013. My own view is that the legal and policy framework is not strict and that oversight is not rigorous. Until they are, we should not blame public authorities for exploiting opportunities that enable them to meet their operational and investigative objectives.
Regardless of one’s views on the actions of Mr. Snowden, public knowledge of covert capabilities has encouraged those who engage in covert conduct to explain what it is they require and why. The reports published by the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, the Intelligence and Security Committee and RUSI make important contributions but tend, in my view, to focus on the effect of technology and the impact of so-called mass surveillance. All agree that the law and oversight should be improved. Here’s my take on those two fundamentals.
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Court of Protection upholds the right of a confused, lonely man to refuse treatment
13 October 2015
Wye Valley NHS Trust v B (Rev 1) [2015] EWCOP 60 (28 September 2015) – read judgment
The Court of Protection has recently ruled that a mentally incapacitated adult could refuse a life saving amputation. This is an important judgement that respects an individual’s right to autonomy despite overwhelming medical evidence that it might be in his best interests to override his wishes. The judge declined to define the 73 year old man at the centre of this case by reference to his mental illness, but rather recognised his core quality is his “fierce independence” which, he accepted, was what Mr B saw as under attack.
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The Round-Up: Lawyers lament UK’s refugee response
12 October 2015
This week’s Round-up is brought to you by Hannah Lynes.
In the news
- Call from legal community for urgent action on refugee crisis
More than 300 lawyers have signed a statement denouncing the Government’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis as “deeply inadequate”.
The document, whose signatories include former President of the Supreme Court, Lord Phillips, three former Law Lords and over 100 Queen’s Counsel, describes Prime Minister David Cameron’s offer to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees over 5 years as “too low, too slow and too narrow.”
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Parents’ wish to treat child’s cancer with Chinese medicine overruled by Family Court
11 October 2015
JM (a child), Re [2015] EWHC 2832 (Fam), 7 October 2015 – read judgment
Mostyn J, ruling in the Family Division that a child should receive surgical treatment for bone cancer against the wishes of his parents, has referred to Ian McEwan’s “excellent” novel The Children Act (Jonathan Cape 2014), which is about a 17 year old Jehovah’s Witness refusing a blood transfusion. The judge noted however that the book was in fact “incorrectly titled”:
a question of whether a medical procedure should be forced on a 16 or 17 year old should be sought solely under the High Court’s inherent jurisdiction, and not under the Children Act.
This case on the other hand concerned a ten year old child, J. The NHS Trust sought permission to perform urgent surgery of a serious nature on his right jawbone, where he has a very rare aggressive cancer. Its medical name is a craniofacial osteosarcoma, presenting a tumour in the bone of about 4 inches long and 1½ inches wide. The unambiguous medical evidence before the court was that if it was not removed very soon then in 6 months to a year J would die “a brutal and agonising death”. The oncologist had spelt this out in unflinching detail:
J will not slip peacefully away. The cancer will likely invade his nerve system affecting basic functions such as speaking, breathing and eating. His head will swell up grotesquely. His eyes may become closed by swelling. A tracheostomy may be needed to allow breathing. Above all, the pain will likely be excruciating.
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CJEU ruling on prisoner voting – open door for successful UK challenge?
9 October 2015
Image: Guardian
Delvigne (Judgment), [2015] EUECJ C-650/13 – read judgment.
In a judgment much anticipated on both sides of the Channel, the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) has held that French restrictions on the eligibility of prisoners to vote are lawful under EU law.
by Fraser Simpson
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Does Article 8 survive adoption?
6 October 2015
Image: Guardian
There has been further consideration of potential post-adoption Article 8 rights for natural parents in a judgment by Peter Jackson J in the case of Seddon v Oldham MBC. There are no surprises in the conclusions he reaches.
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The Round-up: Cameron’s ‘bonanza benefits’ from the slave trade, and the HRA at 15
6 October 2015
Image credit: Guardian
This week’s round-up is brought to you by Charlotte Bellamy
Instead of reparations and an apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, David Cameron is to bestow Jamaica with £25m (or 40%) towards the cost of a new prison – an offer which is “an insult to the people of Jamaica”, according to Jamaican MP Mike Henry, who had led the effort to force a vote on reparations which took place in the Jamaican Parliament in January and passed unanimously. The motion stated that Jamaica would be entitled to receive reparations equivalent to what former slave owners received after abolition.
Prior to Cameron’s visit, Sir Henry Beckles, the chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, called on the PM to acknowledge his responsibility for his share of the situation and to contribute to a “joint programme of rehabilitation and renewal”. He described the PM as “a grandson of the Jamaican soil who has been privileged and enriched by your forebears’ sins of the enslavement of our ancestors”. The Cameron family was said to have reaped “bonanza benefits”. During his visit, however, Cameron announced that financial reparations “were not the right approach”.
Is a UK-subsidised prison the right approach? BBC political correspondent Carole Walker suggested that some eyebrows may be raised by such an allocation of the Foreign Aid budget. Frances Crook, the CEO of the Howard League, has raised not just her eyebrows, but also concerns that building a prison in Jamaica is “not the answer to the UK’s prison problems”, not least because it is “wrong to spend British aid on building a prison” when “refugees in camps are facing winter and the budget is stretched”. In addition, the Jamaican prison would only take 300 men by 2020, when prison numbers in this country are going up by more than 300 every month.
Other news
- In the week that saw the Human Rights Act turn 15, Sir Simon McDonald, the British Foreign Office Chief, inauspiciously commented that human rights are “no longer a top priority” for the Government. Resources will be funnelled into trade deals ahead of fighting injustice in other parts of the world, as part of the Conservatives’ “Prosperity Agenda”, the Independent reports. This perhaps explains George Osborne’s recent silence on human rights abuses during his “trade mission” to China, for which he has been praised by a grateful if somewhat surprised Chinese Government, and criticised by Amnesty International.
- More fuel was thrown on the fire of the UK’s tangled relationship with Saudi Arabia when it emerged last week via leaked Saudi Foreign Ministry files that the UK made a secret deal with the Saudis to bag themselves both countries seats on the UN Human Rights Council in 2013. Saudi Arabia – who has sanctioned more than 100 beheadings this year – now chairs a UNHRC panel that selects senior officials to draft international human rights standards and report violations. Allan Hogarth, Amnesty International UK’s Head of Policy and Government Affairs, described the revelation as “a slap in the face for those beleaguered Saudi activists who already struggle with endemic persecution in the kingdom”.
- The daughter of a man who committed suicide in 2013 after being declared fit to work by an Atos ‘heathcare professional’ is compiling a dossier of information on her father’s case to assist the imminent UN investigation into whether Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms have led to “grave or systematic violations” of disabled people’s rights. This follows a coroner’s conclusion that Mr O’Sullivan’s suicide was a direct result of the outcome of the assessment. The coroner reported found that the Atos healthcare professional (an orthopaedic surgeon in this case) had failed to take into account the views of any of the deceased’s doctors, who had diagnosed him with recurrent depression, panic disorder and agoraphobia.
- The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has called for “firmer measures” against States ignoring judgments of the Strasbourg Court, urging Council of Europe ministers to make use of the 2010 “infringement procedure” (a tool “as yet untried”) which allows the Court to rule on whether a State has breached its obligation to abide by the Convention. This recommendation was based on a report focused primarily on nine countries responsible for 80 per cent of the 11,000 unimplemented cases (Turkey, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Romania, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Ukraine), though the UK received a special mention (Appendix 1, s10) for “unresolved issues” relating to “significant implementation problems” specifically in relation to prisoner voting rights, following Hirst v UK (No 2) and the pilot judgments Greens and MT v UK where the UK’s blanket ban on prisoner voting was found to be a violation of Article 3.
In the Courts
- Bouyid v Belgium: slapping by law enforcement officers of individuals under their control was degrading treatment under Article 3 ECHR. Two brothers had alleged that police officers in Belgium had slapped them in the face whilst at a police station in Brussels. The Court found that this had undermined their dignity. The Court emphasised that in a democratic society ill-treatment was never an appropriate response by the authorities, explaining that “a slap to the face affects the part of the person’s body which expresses his individuality, manifests his social identity and constitutes the centre of his senses”.
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If you have a human rights event you would like to publicise on the UK Human Rights Blog, please email Jim Duffy at jim.duffy@1cor.com
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ECtHR judge ponders on EU/ECtHR dogfight, and recent trends of timidity in the ECtHR
6 October 2015
A Political Decision Disguised as Legal Argument: Opinion of CJEU 2/13 – and other things
Over the summer an interesting article was published by Graham Butler, on his interview with David Thor Björgvinsson, former Icelandic judge in the European Court of Human Rights – see here.
One subject was the CJEU’s refusal to permit accession by the EU to the ECtHR (see my post here) – despite the EU’s commitment to accede via Article 6 of the Lisbon Treaty, in December 2009. A Draft Agreement on Accession was concluded in April 2013, but it required the obtaining of an opinion from the CJEU on whether the Agreement was compatible with the EU Treaties – to which the CJEU gave a dusty answer in December 2014.
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Limits of judicial review in international relations underlined
2 October 2015
Ministry of Defence (Photo credit: Guardian)
R (Nour) v Secretary of State for Defence [2015] EWHC 2695 (Admin)
How far are the courts willing to go to intervene in matters of foreign affairs in order to protect human rights? Spoiler: they’re not.
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US court takes important step in resolving human/wildlife conflict at sea
30 September 2015
Sea Otters
California Sea Urchin Commission, et al. v Michael Bean, et al, US District Court, Central District of California (September 18 2015) – read judgment
A Californian court has upheld the protection of marine otters over the interests of commercial fishing.
Sea otters are remarkable marine mammals who live their entire lives at sea, giving birth in the water and clutching their cubs to their bellies as they float in rafts of up to a thousand, holding hands while they sleep to avoid drifting off in the ocean’s currents. But they are not just picturesque; they are essential to the health of the seas. A main component of their diet is the ubiquitous sea urchin, which feeds on kelp. As sea otters have been hunted and killed as by-catch over the centuries, their diminishing numbers have led to the proliferation of the sea urchin population and the consequent disappearance of the kelp forests on the seabed. The damage this does to the marine ecosystem has been inestimable.
This somewhat technical judgment, made on a preliminary application for summary judgment by the fishing industry, therefore marks an important step in the judicial response to marine conservation.
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The Round-Up: Holyrood’s Hard-line, and Sumption’s Long Game
29 September 2015
Laura Profumo brings you the latest human rights happenings.
In the News:
Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, announced last week that it was “inconceivable” that the SNP would support the Conservative plans to scrap the Human Rights Act. Talking to an audience in Glasgow on Wednesday, Sturgeon pledged her unequivocal commitment to block the HRA-repeal. Sturgeon warned that human rights remained a “devolved issue”, meaning that Scottish opposition might well hamper Gove’s forthcoming efforts. Many find sympathy with Sturgeon’s stance. Sturgeon values the HRA as a “careful model” which incorporates human rights protection into UK law, without upsetting our constitutional bedrock, writes Alex Cisneros in The Justice Gap.
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We are five! And we’re having a party to celebrate
28 September 2015
The UK Human Rights Blog recently turned five years old, and it would only be right if we celebrated with you, our loyal readers. So, we’re having a party on Thursday 29 October 2015. The full details are below. There will be drinks and some great music.
It’s a free event, but places are very limited so if you want to reserve a place, please email Lisa Pavlovsky (lisa.pavlovsky@1cor.com) with the subject heading “UKHRB Birthday Party”. The body text should only include your name, position (e.g. “solicitor” or “student”) and organisation, if you are attached to one.
Full details:
UK Human Rights Blog Birthday Party
Thursday, 29 October 2015
7pm – 10:30pm
4th Floor Studios,
255-259 Commercial Road,
London E1 2BT
We really hope to see you there and thanks again for your support over the years.
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Is the European Convention Working? Grieve advocates before Faculty of Advocates
25 September 2015
Less than 48 hours before First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s speech in Glasgow (see our coverage here), another rousing defence of the Convention was launched in Scotland. Former Attorney General Dominic Grieve addressed the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh on the 21st September, posing the question “Is the European Convention Working?”, and in reply giving an outstanding analysis of the reasons why the UK must remain within the Convention (full transcript available here).
by David Scott
In the interest of brevity, this post shall skim over the more “standard” defences of the Convention – highlighting the various historical “success stories”, the more serious situations in other states in comparison to the UK, the effective existing dialogue between domestic courts and Strasbourg, problems of EU membership and devolution agreements (of which we have previously discussed here) – and instead focus on the more interesting arguments he makes: namely, the important interactions between the international reputation of the UK and the authority of the Court.
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