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18 September 2015 by David Scott
Does the current jurisprudence on Article 1 of the ECHR create potential human rights problems in the Syrian conflict?
by David Scott
Reports of two British citizens killed by RAF drone strikes in Syria last week have thrown up a whole host of ethical and legal questions. Former Attorney General Dominic Grieve has already suggested the decision to launch the attack could be “legally reviewed or challenged”, while Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has made clear that the UK would not hesitate to launch such attacks in the future.
This post assesses the (European) human rights dimension of these targeted drone strikes, particularly in the wake of Al-Saadoon & Ors v Secretary of State for Defence [2015] EWHC 715 (Admin). I must express gratitude to Dr Marko Milanovic, whose lectures at the Helsinki Summer Seminar and excellent posts on EJIL: Talk! greatly informed this post. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.
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6 May 2016 by Guest Contributor
Photo credit: Guardian
By Marina Wheeler QC
In a speech about Brexit last week, the Home Secretary shared what she called her “hard-headed analysis”: membership of an unreformed EU makes us safer, but – beware the non-sequitur – we must withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, which does not.
It is surely time for some clearer Government thinking about these questions. If politicians could put politics to one side, they might recognise that the Convention and the Strasbourg court are not enemies of our sovereignty, but there are aspects of EU law as applied by the Court of Justice in Luxembourg which are.
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18 March 2024 by anuragdeb
Anurag Deb & Colin Murray
In Dillon [2024] NIKB 11, the controversial Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 (Legacy Act) was challenged head on. The Court disapplied a number of provisions of the Act as being in breach of relevant aspects of EU law which continue to apply to Northern Ireland via the Windsor Framework. We have covered the precise EU law aspects of Dillon elsewhere and will only cover the ECHR elements of the judgment in this post. As will become clear, however, there is a critical link between these two main aspects of the judgment.
The disapplication of any part of an Act of the UK Parliament is infrequent enough to be notable. Given that Dillon marks not only some of the most extensive disapplication in history but also is the first such event after Brexit, the decision is significant. But, as we will demonstrate, the decision is not radical. Far from it, much of Mr Justice Colton’s 738-paragraph judgment is an orthodox application of the relevant law.
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12 August 2010 by Adam Wagner
It is possible that the European Union will soon sign up to the European Convention on Human Rights. The change would have interesting implications for European human rights law, as well as for UK citizens seeking redress for alleged human rights violations.
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It may sound odd that whilst member states are signed up to the European Convention, the European Union as a corporate body is not. But negotiations began last month (see this Council of Europe press release) on the European Union’s accession to the European Convention. The Vice-President of the EU’s Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship said “We are now putting in place the missing link in Europe’s system of fundamental rights protection, guaranteeing coherence between the approaches of the Council of Europe and the European Union”.
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20 October 2013 by Daniel Isenberg
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular chocolate fondu of human rights news and views. The full list of links can be found here. You can find previous roundups here. Post by Daniel Isenberg, edited and links compiled by Adam Wagner.
The issue of prisoner votes returned to the courtroom this week, with an unsurprising judgment on many fronts. Meanwhile Lord Neuberger made his views known on how access to justice forms a crucial component of the rule of law; and commentators discuss why public bodies can’t bring claims under the HRA.
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23 September 2012 by Sam Murrant
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your weekly bulletin of human rights news. The full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here.
UPDATED: Thank you to all the those who pointed out my errors in this post – hopefully you will now find they are corrected.
In the news
A few fairly major issues to chew over this week: we have commentary on the controversial Sarah Catt abortion case, responses to the Strasbourg decision on indefinite prison sentences in the UK, and more additions to the debate about religion and human rights, among other things.
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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’.
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5 March 2012 by Adam Wagner
1689 and all that
Things have been quiet recently on the Commission for a Bill of Rights front, with media attention focussed on the upcoming Brighton Conference on European Court of Human Rights reform and the growing controversy over the Justice and Security Green Paper. But this important Commission only has 10 months left to publish its report, and it should be courting public attention, not avoiding it.
There has been limited action on the Commission’s website, with publication of relatively illuminating minutes from the 15 November and 14 December meetings. The website has also published a list of all responses to the recent consultation. Apparently there were over 900 responses to the somewhat scanty discussion paper which was published last year.
Two suggestions. First, in my view, all of the responses should be published on the Commission’s website, not just a list of the respondees. I asked the Commission by email they would be doing so, and they responded:
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10 September 2012 by David Hart KC
Back to basics, then, as the new academic year starts. Which courts decide human rights cases, when, and by what rules?
Well, the easy one is domestic courts. They decide whether a public authority has acted or omitted to act unlawfully under the Human Rights Act.
If the act is a decision about housing or immigration status or prisoners’ rights, the courts can quash it, and so tell the decision-maker either to decide it again or if there is only one lawful answer, tell the decision-maker what decision to take. If it was a past course of conduct (unlawful detention, intrusion into privacy, unacceptable pollution), they may award damages for human rights breaches. If the domestic law is itself unlawful, and cannot be interpreted HR-compliantly, the domestic courts can make a declaration of incompatibility under s.4 of HRA – it does the claimant no good in respect of his claim, though it throws a huge gauntlet down to Parliament to do something about the non-compliant law. And in the criminal courts, the obvious sanction is to dismiss the prosecution for some abuse of process involving the defendant’s human rights.
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30 June 2010 by Adam Wagner
The Mayor of London v Hall & Ors [2010] EWHC 1613 (QB) (29 June 2010) – Read judgment
The Mayor of London has won a court order to evict a camp of protesters from Parliamentary Square, with the High Court stating that his response to the protest was proportionate and not a breach of the protesters’ human rights.
The protesters have gained a temporary reprieve by appealing the decision, and according to their website have therefore delayed their eviction until at least 4pm on Friday 2 July
As we posted earlier this month, during the build-up to the General Election a number of protesters erected tents and flags in Parliament Square, a green outside the Houses of Parliament. The protesters named the site “Democracy Village”. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, launched an action for possession against the protestors, who he claimed were trespassing on Parliament Square.
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12 March 2012 by Adam Wagner
As a sequel to this morning’s post on Michael Pinto-Duschinsky’s resignation from the Commission on a Bill of Rights, a comment on his Daily Mail article: I escaped the Nazis – so spare me these sneers about tyranny.
Pinto-Duschinsky explains that because he and his family escaped the Nazis, he has a special perspective on human rights:
I know what the abuse of human rights really means. It is certainly not the kind of nonsense we hear so much about today – parents smacking children, the eviction of travellers from illegal encampments or the deportation of foreign criminals in breach of their supposed ‘right to a family life’.
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6 May 2012 by Sam Murrant
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your weekly bulletin of human rights news. The full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here.
In the news
This week, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office published its Report on Democracy and Human Rights and the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act was enacted. The Leveson Inquiry continues to roll on, and we have a fresh round of commentary over freedom of speech, and over the democratic legitimacy of judicial decisions on human rights.
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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.
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10 February 2013 by Daniel Isenberg
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your recommended weekly dose of human rights news. The full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here.
Same-sex marriage was the talking point of this week, with the Bill passing its first vote in the House of Commons. The courts have also been passing judgment on various acts of the police and the UK military; and immigration, asylum and extradition remain in the headlines. Keep an eye out on some interesting cases from Russia reaching Strasbourg; and a double-header of events featuring former ECtHR President Jean-Paul Costa (see ‘Upcoming Events’).
by Daniel Isenberg
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18 August 2025 by Benjamin Savill
In UK news
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has written to the Home Secretary and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, urging ‘proportionate policing and protection of protest rights’ in the ongoing controversy over the Government’s proscription of the direct-action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. In her letter of 15 August, EHRC chairwoman Baroness Kishwer Falkner raised concerns over recent ‘reports of police engagement in forms of protest that are not linked to any proscribed organisation’, ‘heavy handed policing’, and ‘blanket approaches [which] risk creating a chilling effect, deterring citizens from exercising their fundamental rights to freedom of expression and assembly through fear of possible consequences.’ Baroness Falkner stressed that any ‘restrictions on the exercise of… fundamental freedoms’ imposed by the police must be subject to an ‘established’ three-stage proportionality test, and that ‘all police officers should receive clear and consistent guidance on their human rights obligations in relation to protest.’ On the same day as the EHRC’s intervention, it was reported that Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, Global Witness and the Quakers had written to the Attorney General, urging him to suspend the prosecution of protestors detained under the Terrorist Act until the judicial review of the Government’s ban on Palestine Action (due to be heard in November). Over 700 protestors have been arrested under the Terrorist Act since its amendment last month.
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Does the current jurisprudence on Article 1 of the ECHR create potential human rights problems in the Syrian conflict?
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