What really goes on in the Supreme Court

15 December 2013 by David Hart KC

On 9 December 2013, Professor Paterson launched his new book, Final Judgment (Hart Publishing, absolutely no relation), via the Second annual Bailii lecture, Decision-making in the UK’s top court – read lecture here, order book here (£21.25, Amazon) or direct from the publishers at £20 here (reference ‘PATERSON’ to get the further discount)

The lecture summarises a wise, perceptive, and at times funny work of scholarship, and this post is an unashamed plea that you read the book as well as the lecture.

The book is based upon over 100 interviews with Law Lords, Justices and counsel. Paterson is particularly well-placed, having carried out a review in the 1970s with 15 then current or former Law Lords and 46 counsel. He has also looked at the judicial notebooks of two of the outstanding leaders of the judicial House of Lords, namely Lord Reid in the 1960s and 1970s, and Lord Bingham in the 2000s. These notebooks contain not only records of counsel’s arguments, but also details of what the Law Lords or Justices thought at the end of the “first conference” held immediately after the oral hearing. And the revelation was that in many important cases the judges’ view shifted between that conference and the ultimate decision, often with a critical impact on the outcome. One of the particular interests of the book is to follow through the big cases of the last years, and see how the judges ended up where they did.

Continue reading →

Court of Appeal calls on Supreme Court to resolve conflict between UK and Strasbourg law

11 December 2013 by Rosalind English

Kaiyam v Secretary of State for Justice and Haney v Secretary of State for Justice (9 December 2013) [2013] EWCA Civ 1587 – read judgment

The Court of Appeal has ruled that continued detention in prison following the expiry of the “minimum terms” or “tariff periods” of their indeterminate terms of imprisonment did not breach prisoners’ Convention or common law rights, but has left it to the Supreme Court to determine the substance of the Convention claims in detail.

The appellant prisoners claimed that their continued detention breached the Article 5, and in one case Article 14.  The courts at first instance had been  obliged to dismiss the claims under Article 5 in the light of the House of Lords decision in  R(James and others) v Secretary of State for Justice [2009] UKHL 22, [2010] 1 AC 553, notwithstanding that Strasbourg subsequently held in James, Wells and Lee v United Kingdom that the House of Lords decision was wrong.
Continue reading →

Don’t mess up your European Court of Human Rights application… a new rule

11 December 2013 by Adam Wagner

I don’t usually post about court procedure, but as any lawyer knows, a failure to comply with what may seem like boring  court rules can lead to a case being struck out before it even begins – this is what we in the trade call a “bad outcome”. In the UK context, see this terrifying recent Court of Appeal judgment. 

Well, the European Court of Human Rights will from 1 January 2014 be toughening up its procedure rules with a new Rule 47 of the Rules of Court. Essentially, if you don’t get the forms right and provide the required information, your case will be rejected outright. This is part of the strategy to minimise the court’s enormous caseload. The changes are summed up in this handy press release – key extracts below:

Continue reading →

The Supreme Court on “prohibitively expensive” costs: Aarhus again

11 December 2013 by David Hart KC

R (Edwards & Pallikaropoulos) v. Environment Agency et al, Supreme Court, 11 December 2013 read judgment

This is the last gasp in the saga on whether Mrs Pallikaropoulos should bear £25,000 of the costs of her unsuccessful 2008 appeal to the House of Lords. And the answer, after intervening trips to the Supreme Court in 2010 and to the CJEU in 2013, is a finding by the Supreme Court that she should bear those costs.

The judgment by Lord Carnwath (for the Court) is a helpful application of the somewhat opaque reasoning of the European Court on how to decide whether an environmental case is “prohibitively expensive” per Article 9(4) of the Aarhus Convention, and thus whether the court should protect the claimant against such liabilities. The judgment also considers the guidance given by A-G Kokott more recently in infraction proceedings against the UK for breaches of that provision: see my post.

But note that the dispute has been largely overtaken by recent rule changes, and so we should start with these before looking at the judgment.

Continue reading →

A rare “win” for Scientology – Supreme Court

11 December 2013 by Rosalind English

 R (on the application of Hodkin and another) v Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages [2013] UKSC 77 On appeal from [2012] EWHC 3635 – read judgment

The Supreme Court has ruled, unanimously, that a Scientologist chapel is “a place of meeting for religious worship” for the purposes of section 2 of the Places of Worship Registration Act 1855, and therefore it may be licensed for the solemnisation of marriage

This was an appeal from a ruling by Ouseley J ( [2012] EWHC 3635) that  a church of the Church of Scientology could not be recordable as a “place of meeting for religious worship”.

The following summary is taken from the Supreme Court’s press release. A full analysis of the case will follow shortly.
Continue reading →

Gay discrimination and Christian belief: Analysis of Bull v. Hall in the Supreme Court

11 December 2013 by Alasdair Henderson

Bull v. Hall and Preddy [2013] UKSC 73 – read judgment here.

The recent confirmation by the Supreme Court that it was unlawful discrimination for Christian hotel owners to refuse a double-bedded room to a same-sex couple was of considerable interest as the latest in a string of high-profile cases involving religious belief and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (and the first such judgment involving the highest court in the land). We have already provided a summary of the facts and judgment here, and our post on the Court of Appeal ruling can be found here.

The case has been  portrayed in some media as a clash between gay rights and religious freedom, with gay rights winning – see e.g. the Daily Mail’s headline: B&B owners’ right to bar gay couple crushed by ‘need to fight discrimination’. This is despite the best efforts of Lady Hale, who gave the main speech, to emphasise at paragraph 34 that this decision did not amount to replacing legal oppression of one community (homosexual couples) with legal oppression of another (Christians and others who shared the appellants’ beliefs about marriage), because the law equally prohibits a hotel keeper from refusing a particular room to a couple because they are heterosexual or because they have certain religious beliefs. However, moving beyond this simplistic portrayal of the issue at stake, there are several interesting legal points in the decision, which may raise more questions than it answered.

Continue reading →

Caesarean Escalation, Judges on Human Rights and Happy Birthday – the Human Rights Roundup

8 December 2013 by Sarina Kidd

Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular seasonal sack-load of human rights news and views.  The full list of links can be found here.  You can find previous roundups here.  Links compiled by Adam Wagner, post by Sarina Kidd. 

This week, bloggers tried to get to the bottom of the ‘forced caesarian’ case, a Supreme Court judge weighed in on the relationship between the UK and European law, and on Tuesday it’s the 65th birthday of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Continue reading →

Continued detention pending removal of failed asylum seeker on hunger strike not unlawful

6 December 2013 by Rosalind English

IM (Nigeria) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2013] EWCA Civ 1561 (25 November 2013) – read judgement

The Court of Appeal has ruled that the secretary of state for the Home Department had the power to detain an immigration detainee in hospital to ensure that he received appropriate medical treatment pending his removal from the United Kingdom.

This was an appeal by a failed asylum seeker against the ruling by Ouseley J that his continued immigration detention was lawful ([2013] EWHC 3764 (Admin)).

Factual backgound

The appellant, a Nigerian national, had been refused asylum and leave to remain and was detained pending removal. He refused food and most fluids, stating further that he did not want medical treatment. His capacity to understand the significance or consequences of his decision had been tested on a number of occasions and was not in issue. An end-of-life plan had been prepared by nursing staff at the immigration removal centre. He had refused transfers to hospital, insisting on a condition of release from detention. His release had been refused despite referrals stating that he was unfit for detention at the IRC. The secretary of state had made a direction under the  Immigration Act 1971 Sch.2 para.18(1)  in relation to the appellant’s continued detention.
Continue reading →

Christian care worker loses Sunday working discrimination appeal – Richard Wayman

5 December 2013 by Guest Contributor

Mba v London Borough Of Merton [2013] EWCA Civ 1562 – Read judgment

The Court of Appeal has dismissed the appeal of a Christian care worker against the decision of the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) that a requirement that she work on Sundays indirectly discriminated against her on the grounds of religion or belief.

The Court unanimously found that although both the EAT and the Employment Tribunal (ET) had erred in law, the ET’s decision was ‘plainly and unarguably right’ [24], and applying the principle in Dobie v Burns International Security (UK) Limited [1984] ICR 812, the errors did not make any difference to the outcome.

Continue reading →

National Security trumps disclosure of Litvinenko secret documents, rules High Court

5 December 2013 by Dominic Ruck Keene

Continue reading →

Human rights for homo sapiens’ closest relatives?

4 December 2013 by Rosalind English

On Monday at 10.00 Eastern Time, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed suit in Fulton County Court in the state of New York on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee, who is being held captive in a cage in a shed at a used trailer lot in Gloversville.

According to the NRP, this is the first of three suits they are filing this week. The second was filed on Tuesday in Niagara Falls on behalf of Kiko, a chimpanzee who is deaf and living in a private home. And the third will be filed on Thursday on behalf of Hercules and Leo, who are owned by a research center and are being used in locomotion experiments at Stony Brook University on Long Island.

The organisation, led by the animal-rights lawyer Steven Wise, is using the writ of habeas corpus on behalf of the animals to ask the judge to grant the chimpanzees the right to bodily liberty and to order that they be moved to a sanctuary where they can live out their days with others of their kind in an environment as close to the wild as is possible in North America.

| Updated (10 December)|: The judge has declined the application for habeas corpus.  According to Steven Wise, Judge Boniello said  “that ‘I’m not going to be the one to make that leap of faith.’” Yet Boniello, who decided that chimpanzee personhood is ultimately a matter for legislatures to decide, was also “unexpectedly sympathetic”, calling their arguments sound and wishing them luck. “I’ve been in a lot of cases, and there’s not been many where the judge says, ‘Good luck.’ Usually they just say, ‘denied’.

Continue reading →

“Imprecise” injunctions against Facebook unenforceable, says NI judge

3 December 2013 by Rosalind English

J19 and Another v Facebook Ireland [2013] NIQB 113 – read judgment

The High Court in Northern Ireland has chosen to depart from the “robust” Strasbourg approach to service providers and their liability for comments hosted on their sites. Such liability, said the judge, was not consonant with the EC Directive on E-Commerce.

This was an application on behalf of the defendant to vary and discharge orders of injunction dated 27 September 2013 made in the case of both plaintiffs. One of the injunctions  restrained “the defendant from placing on its website photographs of the plaintiff, his name, address or any like personal details until further order.” These interim injunctions were awarded pursuant to writs issued by the plaintiffs for damages by reason of  the publication of photographs, information and comments on the Facebook webpages entitled “Irish Blessings”, “Ardoyne under Siege” and “Irish Banter” on 11 September 2013 and on subsequent dates.
Continue reading →

Lessons learned from the ‘Forced C-section’ case

3 December 2013 by Adam Wagner

Updated x 2 | Journalist Christopher Booker reported in Saturday’s Telegraph that an Italian woman was forced by Essex County Council social services to have a cesarean section, and then had her baby taken away from her – all sanctioned by the Court of Protection.

The story has become international news. I was going to write in detail on this, but family law barrister Lucy Reed has done a much better job than I would have been able to do. Her blog is here. Essex County Council have also released a statement of facts, which is here. I also recommend Elizabeth Prochaska and Suesspicious Minds.

I will keep this very simple. It was pretty obvious, based on Christopher Booker and John Hemming’s form (see my blog from 2011), that we were only getting a partial view of the story.

Continue reading →

CJEU sets itself against secret “nod and a wink” justice

2 December 2013 by David Hart KC

Fulmen & Mahmoudian v. Council of the European Union,28 November 2013,  read judgment

I posted last year on a decision by the General Court in Luxembourg, in which Fulmen successfully challenged sanctions taken against it as 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 was said to be a director of Fulmen. Hence all of their assets were frozen by the EU.

The CJEU has now roundly dismissed the appeal by the EU Council from the ruling of the General Court. The sanctions order has been annulled – over 3 years after it was made. The Council has been told that if it wants to uphold such orders, it must adduce evidence to the Court, however sensitive the subject matter, and even if not all of that evidence is passed on to those affected.

Continue reading →

Equality, Christianity and Who Decides on Human Rights – the Human Rights Roundup

2 December 2013 by Celia Rooney

Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular winter wonderland of human rights news and views.  The full list of links can be found here.  You can find previous roundups here.  Links compiled by Adam Wagner, post by Celia Rooney. 

This week, equality issues dominate the headlines, while elsewhere judicial heavyweights throw their views into the ring on the institutional question of who should have the final say on issues involving human rights. 

Continue reading →