19 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
RT (Zimbabwe) & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2010] EWCA Civ 1285 (18 November 2010) – Read judgment
The Court of Appeal has ruled that asylum seekers cannot be forced to lie about not holding political beliefs when returning to their home country. The potentially wide-ranging decision extends the protection arising from a recent Supreme Court decision which found that homosexuals could not be sent back to their home country if they would have to lie about their sexuality.
The case concerned four Zimbabwean asylum seekers. In previous asylum cases involving Zimbabwe, it had been assumed that it is legitimate to require applicants, in order to avoid persecution, to demonstrate loyalty to Zanu-PF, itself a persecutory regime. The men in this case did not hold strong political views, but did not support the Zanu-PF either. The question was whether it would breach their human rights to send them back if they would be forced to join the ruling party.
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18 November 2010 by Isabel McArdle
Adakini Ntuli v Howard Donald [2010] EWCA Civ 1276 – Read judgment
Take That’s Howard Donald has failed to maintain an injunction against the press reporting details of his relationship with a former girlfriend. He had originally sought the injunction after receiving a text from the woman saying: “Why shud I continue 2 suffer financially 4 the sake of loyalty when selling my story will sort my life out?”
‘Superinjunctions’ have received a great deal of press coverage recently, not least because they are usually granted in cases involving celebrities’ private lives. They are injunctions, usually in privacy or breach of confidence cases, which prevent not only the publication of certain matters, but even the publication of the existence of legal proceedings. These cases are of particular interest because of the competing ECHR rights in play: Article 8, the right to respect for private and family life, and Article 10, the right to freedom of expression.
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18 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
By all accounts, it has been a gloomy year for access to justice. The legal aid budget is to be reduced by £350m and state assistance has effectively disappeared in non-criminal cases. The overall justice budget, which is already low by international standards, is to be cut by a further 23%. But believe it or not, there may be reasons to be cheerful.
In the virtual world, legal blogs are becoming an established voice in the UK legal community and the flourishing blogosphere has given the public a lively, accessible and most importantly free new way of engaging with the law. With legal aid becoming scarcer and Citizens Advice Bureaus losing their funding, free information services such can be the last resort for those who seek legal help without having to pay for a lawyer.
But none of these services would exist without their hidden backbone: BAILII. To that end, when Legal Week published its excellent review of legal blogging last month, the failure to mention BAILII caused a min-revolution from a gaggle of legal bloggers in the comments section.
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17 November 2010 by Guest Contributor
We are delighted to announce that the UK Human Rights Blog by 1 Crown Office Row chambers has been shortlisted for the JUSTICE Human Rights Award 2010.
Also shortlisted are Reprieve and Bail for Immigration Detainees. The Human Rights Awards have been held each December since 2001 to commemorate Human Rights Day. As described by JUSTICE, the awards aim to recognise and encourage individuals and organisations whose work is dedicated to protecting and promoting the rights of others. Last year’s winner was the Gurkhas Justice Campaign. A full list of previous winners can be found here.
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17 November 2010 by Alasdair Henderson
As we reported recently, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission has ruled that Abu Hamza, the extremist Muslim cleric, cannot be stripped of his British citizenship since this would have the effect of making him stateless.
This is the latest in a string of decisions by various courts in a long-running legal saga surrounding the British government’s attempts to remove Abu Hamza from the UK. Hamza is also facing extradition to the United States, but this has been stayed pending the substantive decision of the European Court of Human Rights as to whether the prospect of serving a life sentence in a ‘supermax’ US prison would breach his Article 3 rights (our analysis of the admissibility decision can be found here).
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16 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated | One of the many points of interest from yesterday’s announcement that legal aid is to be cut by £350m per year was the underlying justification, put by Ken Clarke in his announcement, that England and Wales spend more on legal aid than other countries.
The Justice Secretary said that “we currently have one of the most expensive legal aid systems in the world“. But where does this often-quoted statistic arise from?
In its consultation document, the MoJ quotes (at para 3.43) a report commissioned from the University of York into comparative international legal aid systems. The report, Efficiency and quality of justice European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ); International comparison of publicly funded legal services and justice systems, was produced in October 2009 by Roger Bowles and Amanda Perry. It investigated the legal aid systems in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand and Sweden and compared these to the system in England and Wales.
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16 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
Binyam Mohamed
Updated | It is being widely reported that around 12 men, who accused the government of complicity in their mistreatment in various places including the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, have reached a financial settlement worth millions of pounds with the government.
Update, 16:30: Ken Clarke has announced the settlements to Parliament. The terms are confidential, no admission of culpability has been made and the claimants have not withdrawn their allegations. The alternative to any payments would have been “protracted and extremely expensive” litigation. This could have cost between £30m and £50m. There could have been no inquiry while those cases were under way. However, the Gibson inquiry cannot run in parallel with a criminal inquiry. The criminal investigations have to conclude first.
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16 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated | The legal community has been digesting yesterday’s announcement of government plans for legal aid to be reduced by around £350 per year from 2014-15.
Most commentators and legal professionals are worried that less money for legal representation will lead to less access to justice for the poorer members of society. But some have also expressed relief that the criminal legal aid scheme has been left largely untouched, as have funding for inquests, judicial reviews and asylum cases.
For those who have a view on the reforms, the Ministry of Justice has an online questionnaire which can be filled in here.
Nicholas Green QC (Chairman of the Bar of England and Wales: “A permanent contraction of justice cannot be justified by the “big society” or by any sort of philosophical mantra. Ultimately an efficient justice system is fundamental to the wellbeing of the country. We only have to look at our television screen at events unfolding in Burma and elsewhere to see the undeniable truth of that proposition.”
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15 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated x 2 | The lord chancellor Ken Clarke has announced plans for significant cuts to the legal aid system, which provides funding for legal representation to those who otherwise cannot afford it. The plans were largely as expected and will be open to consultation.
Update: The MoJ has published full details of the plans:
- The main documents, including impact assessments are here
- The proposals can be downloaded here
- Views on the consultation can be submitted online here
- A summary of the plans can be found here.
- The consultation on proposals for reform for civl litigation funding (the Jackson review) is here.
The scale of the cuts is expected to be around £350m out of the £2.2bm budget, which is just over 15%. Some of the plans had been leaked with partial accuracy by the Sunday Telegraph.
Update x 2: Read a summary of the reaction to the cuts here and an analysis of the underlying rational here.
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15 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
Pink Tape, a family law blog written by barrister Lucy Reed, has published the latest Blawg (legal blog) review.
For more about legal blogging, see here. If you have never come across the Blawg review, which has reached its 290th edition, here is the explanation from the blog carnival’s headquarters:
Blawg Review is the blog carnival for everyone interested in law. A peer-reviewed blog carnival, the host of each Blawg Review decides which of the submissions and recommended posts are suitable for inclusion in the presentation. And the host is encouraged to source another dozen or so interesting posts to fit with any special theme of that issue of Blawg Review. The host’s personal selections usually include several that reflect the character and subject interests of the host blawg, recognizing that the regular readership of the blog should find some of the usual content, and new readers of the blog via Blawg Review ought to get some sense of the unique perspective and subject specialties of the host. Thanks to all the law bloggers who collaborate to make Blawg Review one of the very best blog carnivals of any genre.
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12 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
The best of human rights news from the web in the past week. You can read our full list of external links here.
Alternative feminist judgment: R v A (No 2) [2001] UKHL 25 – guardian.co.uk: This ‘alternative’ judgment is part of the new Feminist Judgments Project, an interesting attempt by academics, practitioners and activists to produce 23 alternative feminist judgments to a series of key cases in English law. An introductory article in the Guardian explains that the project’s aim is not to encourage judges taken an ideological viewpoint but, rather, to accept that prejudice may have coloured even the highest judges’ reasoning at various points in English legal history and see whether things could have been different. It could be said that all they are doing is replacing one form of prejudice with another.
In any case, no matter how clever our judges are – and they are very bright indeed – it must be of some relevance that at the highest level they are almost exclusively white males aged 60+. The debate over judges’ prejudices is still much more alive in the United States than it is here, but that doesn’t mean we should continue to ignore it, particularly after the passing of the Human Rights Act which means courts are ruling on increasingly sensitive social issues. This project seeks to tease out the potential of an alternative viewpoint.
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12 November 2010 by Rosalind English
The much-debated “sovereignty clause” has now been published in the European Union Bill.
As predicted by our previous post on the subject and the wealth of commentary elsewhere, the declaratory provision does nothing more than set out, in unambiguous terms, the common law principle of parliamentary sovereignty; the principle that Parliament, being sovereign, cannot abandon its own sovereignty. It has no effect on the rights and obligations conferred by EU law. It simply serves as a reminder that the enforceability of these rights and obligations are dependent on the continuing survival of the European Communities Act 1972, and nothing more.
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12 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
Much has been made of the benefits of mediation and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in recent weeks, both as a means of reducing the bitterness of family justice proceedings and also of saving money in the court system by keeping people out of it.
But is mediation a knight in shining armour or a trendy buzzword used as an excuse to keep people out of the expensive court system? The debate is often heard but rarely goes beyond anecdotal evidence. Lord Neuberger, our highly active Master of the Rolls, has given an excellent speech on the topic, entitled Has mediation had its day?, which presents the evidence on both sides, including references to a number of research studies.
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11 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
The Commons Public Accounts Committee has published a damning report into the Children and Family Court Service’s (‘Cafcass’) response to increased demand following the Baby P scandal.
Cafcass was established nine years ago to advise children and the courts in family proceedings. It has come under significant criticism in that time. The new report deals specifically with the 34% surge in care cases following the Baby P scandal. The report is damning, concluding that Cafcass is not fit for purpose, taking 27 days to allocate a case and finding itself unprepared for the increase of cases following Baby P’s death.
The child protection system is likely to be significantly reformed following the recommendations of Professor Eileen Munro, who has been asked by the coalition government to lead a “fundamental” review. Part 1 of the review can be found here.
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11 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
The Royal College of Nursing & Ors, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for the Home Department & Anor [2010] EWHC 2761 (Admin) (10 November 2010) – Read judgment
The High Court has ruled that a scheme which prohibits people convicted or cautioned for certain crimes from working with children or vulnerable adults breaches human rights law.
The system of automatically banning those convicted for or who admit certain crimes from working with children and vulnerable adults without allowing them to make representations breached their rights to a fair trial.
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RT (Zimbabwe) & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2010] EWCA Civ 1285 (18 November 2010) – Read judgment
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