3 December 2010 by Adam Wagner
R (on the application of Philip James Woolas) and The Parliamentary Election Court [2010] EWHC 3169 (Admin) – Read judgment / press summary
Phil Woolas has lost his appeal by way of judicial review of the decision to strip him of his election victory in Oldham East and Saddleworth in the 2010 General Election. He has said he will not appeal the decision.
Mr Woolas had to first convince the Administrative Court, which handles judicial reviews of the decisions of public bodies, that it had jurisdiction to hear the claim. He won on this point. However, once it had accepted it could hear the case, the Administrative court went on to uphold most of the decision of the Election Court.
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3 December 2010 by Catriona Murdoch
Family law judges have been unusually vocal recently in sharing their ideas for family justice reform. The latest to put his case is the High Court judge Mr Justice Coleridge, in a speech entitled Lets hear it for the Child; Restoring the Authority of the Family Court, Blue Skies and Sacred Cows given at the Association of Lawyers for Children’s 21st Annual Conference last week.
The traditional role of judges is to speak out in court and stay silent outside of it. But the relatively new head of the family courts, Sir Nicolas Wall, has set a strong example of judicial outspokenness, and it appears that the other judges are following suit in the face of large cuts to the family justice budget. That being said, Mr Justice Coleridge has been a vocal advocate for family justice reform for a number of years.
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3 December 2010 by Guest Contributor
The Supreme Court yesterday handed down judgment in the case of Joseph v Spiller ([2010] UKSC 53), the first time it has considered a libel case since its inception. The panel consisted of Lords Phillips, Rodger, Walker and Brown and Sir John Dyson. There is the usual useful press summary. The background to the case has already been covered in a previous case preview on this blog and the background facts and the case history are not repeated in this post.
Despite branding the underlying dispute between the Motown Tribute Band “the Gillettes” and their entertainment booking service a “considerable … storm in a tea-cup”, the Supreme Court have broadened the scope and application of the defence of fair comment. The Supreme Court did so by reducing the burden formerly placed on defendants to identify facts they are commenting on with ‘sufficient particularity’. Lord Phillips also re-named the defence as “honest comment” (as opposed to Court of Appeal in BCA v Singh [2010] EWCA Civ 350, which favoured “honest opinion” [35]) and called on the Law Commission to consider and review the present state of the defence.
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2 December 2010 by Adam Wagner
Cromwell looks on
Chaytor & Ors, R v (Rev 2) [2010] UKSC 52 (01 December 2010) – Read judgment
Updated | The Supreme Court has dismissed the appeal of four men accused of fiddling their Parliamentary expenses. In doing so, it has provided a powerful statement of the limits of Parliamentary privilege against court interference, and of its own powers in our separation of powers system.
The background to the case is set out in my post on the Court of Appeal case. The basic summary is that three ex-MPs, Morley, Chaytor and Devine, and one member of the House of Lords, Lord Hanningfield, are charged with false accounting relating to their parliamentary expenses claims.
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2 December 2010 by Rosalind English
R (on the application of Zagorski and Baze) v Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and Archimedes Pharma UK Ltd – read judgment
The Administrative Court has put down a marker on the potential applicability of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights about the morality of certain trade with the United States. The case concerned the export of Sodium Thiopental, an anaesthetic drug that is used as a preliminary to the lethal injection for prisoners on death row. This is the first time a domestic court has made a definitive ruling on the potential role of the EU Charter in domestic law. Earlier this year the Court of Appeal referred a question on the Charter to the ECJ for determination on its relevance to asylum proceedings: see R (S) v Home Secretary & (1) Amnesty International & AIRE Centre (2) UNHCR and our post on the subject.
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2 December 2010 by Matthew Flinn
In January of this year Paul Chambers used Twitter to express his feelings about the possible closure of Robin Hood Airport due to snow, which he feared would thwart his trip to Belfast to meet his new girlfriend, a fellow twitterer going by the name @Crazycolours.
He said via his @pauljchambers Twitter account:
Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!
The consequences of his tweet were summarised in the Guardian:
A week later, he was arrested at work by five police officers, questioned for eight hours, had his computers and phones seized and was subsequently charged and convicted of causing a “menace” under the Communications Act 2003 .
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1 December 2010 by Adam Wagner
R v Chaytor and others (Appellants) [2010] UKSC 52 – Read judgment / press summary
The Supreme Court has dismissed an appeal by ex-MPs who argued that the courts do not have jurisdiction to try a Member of Parliament in relation to the submission of an allegedly dishonest claim for Parliamentary expenses or allowances.
The court was unanimous in its judgment. Lord Phillips (President) and Lord Rodger give the lead judgments. The Court held that neither Article 9 of the 1688 Bill of Rights nor the exclusive jurisdiction of the House of Commons poses any bar to the jurisdiction of the Crown Court to try the Appellants.
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1 December 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated – Spiller and another (Appellants) v Joseph and others (Respondents) [2010] UKSC 53 – Read judgment / press summary
The Supreme Court has overturned the Court of Appeal to unanimously hold that the defence of fair comment should be open to a booking agent which said on its website that a Motown tribute band, the Gillettes, were “unprofessional”. The court has also renamed the defence “honest comment”.
The decision will be a relief to those who think that Britain’s libel laws are too tough and that the fair comment defence – an important element of free speech rights – has become too difficult to deploy. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court recommended in its judgment that the whole issue of fair comment should be reviewed by the Law Commission or an expert committee. Presumably, this will be on the agenda for Lord Neuberger’s upcoming review of libel law. The Guardian has commented on the judgment here.
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1 December 2010 by Richard Mumford
On 30 November 2010 the High Court handed down its written ruling upholding the 7/7 inquests Coroner’s decision that there were to be no ‘closed’ hearings at the inquests. An analysis of the Coroner’s decision can be found here. The High Court had previously given its decision, with an indication that reasons were to follow.
The Divisional Court of the High Court, composed of two colleagues of the Coroner (Dame Heather Hallett) in the Court of Appeal, robustly rejected the Home Secretary’s application for a review of the decision. In short, both judges concurred with Hallett LJ’s decision that the Coroners Rules did not provide a power to hear evidence in sessions from which ‘interested persons’ (including families of the 7/7 victims) could be excluded.
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1 December 2010 by Adam Wagner
When the UK supreme court opened for business just over a year ago one of its most exciting innovations was that, for the first time in the UK, hearings would be filmed and recordings made available to broadcasters.
The change followed 20 years of campaigning and preparation, and was heralded as a turning point in the history of our legal system.
So, one year on, are our TV schedules flooded with live feeds of cases of great social importance? Hardly. In fact, Baroness Hale, one of the court’s 11 justices, recently said that although the recordings are available to the media upon request, “they don’t often ask.”
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30 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
Schalk and Kopf v. Austria (application no. 30141/04) – Read judgment / press release / press release 2
The European Court of Human Rights has refused permission to appeal in a challenge to the ban on gay marriage in Austria. The effect of the decision is to make the court’s rejection of the same-sex couple’s claim final.
The decision means that the European Court of Human Rights will not force states to allow same-sex couples to marry, for now at least. This has a potential bearing on the UK, where a number of same-sex and heterosexual couples are currently bringing claims against UK laws which permit civil partnerships for same-sex couples but prevents them from marrying.
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30 November 2010 by Rosalind English
Big business between government and property developers may be at risk from public interest challenges in the courts if current obstacles are removed.
Following critical findings by a UN environmental body, the Government has set out its latest proposals for allocating the costs burden in environmental cases. The current position is that an applicant who seeks to dispute the lawfulness of a decision, say, to grant permission for a development, will only get a court order preventing commencement of construction if they are prepared to pay for the developer’s loss should their claim fail at the full trial of the merits.
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29 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
It has been widely reported that Learco Chindamo, who was convicted of killing headmaster Philip Lawrence in 1995, has been rearrested only months after being released from jail. The story has reopened a debate over the Human Rights Act, on the basis that it prevented Chindamo from being deported to his native Italy. But did it?
In fact, what the case really highlights is that the unpopularity of the Human Rights Act is in part due to inaccurate media reporting of human rights cases, even 10 years after it came into force.
The Telegraph reported at the end of last week that Frances Lawrence, Philip Lawrence’s widow, has urged the prime minister to act on his previous pledges to scrap the Human Rights Act, as
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26 November 2010 by Rosalind English
MA (Somalia) (Respondent) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Appellant) [2010] UKSC 49 – read judgment (press summary in earlier post)
The Supreme Court has ruled that where the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT) had directed itself correctly as to the impact of an asylum seeker’s lies on his claim, the Court of Appeal should have been very slow to find that it had gone on to apply that direction incorrectly.
This case brings to the fore the very difficult task facing immigration judges trying to determine the veracity of claimants’ testimony in asylum cases. The Supreme Court declined to express a conclusive view on the standard of proof in this area, a point which was acknowledged to be “both difficult and important”. It was left for an authoritative decision by that Court – but when such an occasion arise? The importance of settling this point cannot be overstated.
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26 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
HM (Iraq) v The secretary of state for the home department [2010] EWCA Civ 1322 – Read judgment
The Court of Appeal has overruled the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal’s decision to deport a 25-year-old Iraqi citizen who had lived in the UK since he was 12 and had recently been sent to prison for drug dealing, on the basis that it did not think carefully enough about his human rights to private and family life.
The decision – which is unusually concise and easy to follow – highlights the careful balancing exercise which an asylum and immigration tribunal must undertake in order to weigh up whether a person’s human rights to private and family life outweigh the public good of sending them back to their home country. In this case, although HM won his appeal, his case must now be reheard – for a third time – by an asylum tribunal.
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R (on the application of Philip James Woolas) and The Parliamentary Election Court [2010] EWHC 3169 (Admin) – Read judgment / press summary
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