Search Results for: bill of rights/page/67/HTML
22 June 2011 by Adam Wagner
Updated | Yesterday saw the release of the Government’s flagship justice bill, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill.
There is a lot in the bill. In terms of its long term effect on the justice system, the most important parts relate to legal aid and litigation funding; that is, the options available to claimants to fund their cases – for example, no-win-no-fee arrangements or government funding. The reforms have been long-heralded, and the government has now responded to its consultations on both (see here for legal aid and here for litigation funding).
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12 September 2012 by Adam Wagner
Almost ten years after the death of Rachel Corrie on 16 March 2003, her case still raises troubling questions. How was a 23-year-old protester killed by an Israeli military bulldozer? Did the driver do it deliberately, as the family have claimed? Were the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) responsible in some other way?
Those questions were all in play in a civil negligence claim brought against the Israeli state by Corrie’s family, who claimed $1 in damages. Having exhausted other avenues, the family were looking for answers, not a pay out. The Haifa District Court examined the issues over 15 days of oral testimony, and two weeks ago Judge Oded Gershon released a 73-page ruling (Hebrew) as well as a detailed summary of the Judgment (English).
I was particularly interested in the judgment as a significant proportion of my work recently has involved public inquiries into allegations against the British Armed Forces over events which happened in Iraq in 2003/4. Unfortunately, the reporting of the ruling has been fairly poor. The Guardian published eight articles and a cartoon about the ruling (by comparison, the appointment of a new Justice Secretary generated four). But despite the sheer volume of commentary, I had no sense from reading the articles that the writers had attended the oral hearings, read the judgment (which is long and in Hebrew) or even consider the court’s English summary. The Guardian’s legal section is very good so it is disappointing that the legal interest of the story was largely ignored.
With this in mind, I thought I would post a summary of the judgment and brief discussion of how an equivalent claim would work in the UK.
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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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5 August 2014 by Guest Contributor
Last week Justice Secretary Chris Grayling reported on how often closed material proceedings (CMPs) have been sought under the Justice and Security Act 2013 (JSA), as he is required to do annually under the Act. As the first and only official consolidated presentation of how the new CMP regime is being used, this two-page written ministerial statement warrants close attention.
The Secretary of State’s report provides only numbers. In the Bingham Centre’s Review of the First Report by the Secretary of State, we have tried to match cases to those numbers and, when read in light of the cases, have found good reasons to be concern about the difficulty of verifying the accuracy of the report, the ways that CMPs are being used, and the adequacy of the reporting requirements.
What are the reporting requirements?
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22 June 2010 by Adam Wagner
Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, United States Supreme Court – Read judgment
The US Supreme Court has ruled that it does not violate the US Constitution for the government to block speech and other forms of advocacy supporting a foreign organization that has been officially labeled as terrorist, even if the aim is to support such a group’s peaceful or humanitarian actions.
The judgment does not, of course, have any direct effect on the UK. But UK anti-terrorism legislation already provides the police with broad powers to prosecute those who support terrorist groups. The UK Government is likely to be keeping a close eye on the United States in order to guide future policy, in terms of what is and what is not beyond the pale in restriction freedom of expression.
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19 October 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated x 2 – full details of review below | The much-heralded Ministry of Justice budget cuts will be announced shortly as part of the government spending review. Previously, it had been reported that the department’s budget would be cut by around 20%, or £2bn (see our post). However, over the weekend the Observer reported that the cut would be much larger, running to £3bn – around 30% of the total budget – which represents a 50% increase on the original figure.
The justice minister Ken Clarke is believed to have had to take an extra hit “after the defence secretary, Liam Fox, and Michael Gove at education won more generous agreements than previously expected“.
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20 September 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated, Tue 21 Sep | It is being reported that Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, is looking to end the ban on prisoners voting in elections. If the law were to change, it would represent the end of a very long road for campaigners. However, they have been waiting since 2005 and may well be waiting for longer yet.
The Times apparently reported this morning (I haven’t confirmed this as it is behind a pay wall) that the deputy prime minister is backing plans for prisoner enfranchisement.
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15 July 2013 by Daniel Isenberg
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular Swiss Army Knife of human rights news and views. The full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here. Links compiled by Adam Wagner, post by Daniel Isenberg.
The focus of this week’s news was on the European Court on Human Rights’ views on whole life tariffs and miscarriages of justice, which has fed into the recent Abu Qatada deportation and continuing questions about the relationship between the UK, the Convention and the Court. Elsewhere, the Attorney-General was deemed to have lawfully exercised his override to suppress disclosure of Prince Charles’ letters, and there will be no public inquiry into the death of Litvinenko.
Supreme essay success
Top billing this week comes from our very own Daniel Isenberg’s fantastic winning essay in the UK Supreme Court, which has now been published on Guardian.co.uk – Do we need more or fewer dissenting voices in the UK supreme court? [Daniel did not put his own essay in top billing, it was me – but from everyone at UKHRB, we wish him hearty congratulations! Adam]
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4 June 2020 by David Hart KC
Serafin v. Malkiewicz [2020] UKSC 23
This is, to say the least, a rather unfortunate saga. The Claimant, Mr Serafin, brought a defamation claim against a Polish newspaper run by the Defendants. An article had alleged various things including that he was financially untrustworthy and was dishonest in his dealings with women. At trial before Jay J, he represented himself. He was comprehensively disbelieved by the judge. His claim was dismissed, in most cases because the judge found that the article was accurate, but in some instances because the defendants had a public interest defence under s. 4 Defamation Act 2013.
The Supreme Court, via a single judgment from Lord Wilson, thought that the judge’s judgment was “remarkable”, “intricately constructed and beautifully written”. So what, if anything, had gone wrong, and why did the SC order a retrial?
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21 September 2010 by Guest Contributor
Regular readers may have noticed that in the past few weeks we have the opened up reader comments on the UK Human Rights Blog. This took a few months to get going for practical reasons, but comments are now enabled for every new post.
Please use the comments section on this post to let us know if there are any new features which you would like to see appear on the blog.
We are approaching 6 months since launch, and we want to thank all of our readers for supporting the blog. The response has been fantastic. We have had around 80,000 page views since launch, and next week will have had around 20,000 during September alone. We also have over 1,000 subscribers on email, Facebook, RSS and Twitter. If you have not subscribed for free, then click here to find out how.
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22 May 2015 by Guest Contributor
Sajid Javid’s reported objections to the Government’s pre-election proposals on countering extremist ideas uncover just how controversial the new laws will be. He had objected, it seems, to a mooted expansion of Ofcom’s powers to take pre-emptive action to prevent the broadcast of programmes with ‘extremist content’ before they are transmitted.
That specific proposal may no longer be part of the proposed laws, but Ofcom is likely to be given powers to move against broadcasters after transmission. And there will be plenty else to discuss when the legislation is likely announced in the Queen’s Speech next week.
The main points have already been revealed when last week the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary announced that new laws will be introduced ‘to make it much harder for people to promote dangerous extremist views in our communities.’ As always in counter-terrorism laws, the relationship between freedom and security will be brought into sharp focus when the proposals are debated. In this piece we set down some of the questions which we think warrant attention.
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29 September 2014 by Adam Wagner
Even by the usual brazen standards of human rights reporting, this correction from The Daily Mail stands out. Obviously, we weren’t meant to take Richard Littlejohn’s August 2014 comment piece seriously, it being semi-rabid comment bait, but surely the article should have included a health warning to that effect?
In”seriousness”, the Mail’s response to the false claim that “Others have won the ‘right’ to heroin and gay porn behind bars” is pathetic. The claim which has been corrected was not presented as a joke and it would not have been understood as one. As it happens, Littlejohn was probably referring to the longstanding human rights myth that a serial killer, Dennis Nilsen, was allowed to receive hardcore gay porn in jail thanks to human rights law. His case was in actual fact refused permission to proceed in the High Court – page 30 of this government report gives more detail:
Dennis Nilsen’s application was refused by the single judge at the permission stage. He did not establish that there was any arguable case that a breach of his human rights had occurred, nor that the prison’s rules were discriminatory. He also failed to receive any greater access to such materials as a result. The failure of his application at the first hurdle was not widely reported, nor his further failure on renewal.
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3 November 2011 by Adam Wagner
A major review by David Norgrove into the family justice system has been published today. You can find the report here or reposted below via Scribd.
The 225-page Family Justice Review was commissioned jointly by the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Education, and the Welsh Assembly Government. It aims to “improve the system so that it is quicker, simpler, more cost-effective and fairer whilst continuing to protect children and vulnerable adults from risk of harm.” The full terms of reference can be found here.
The report has already been widely reported:
- Professor Richard Moorhead points out that the report makes “measured but telling criticisms of the legal aid proposals” which might be “sophisticated civil servant speak for, “There’s a fast train coming…. better get us off them tracks.””
- The BBC highlights the report’s criticism of family justice delays and recommendation that all childcare decisions should be made within six months.
- The Guardian, amongst others, picks out the lack of a recommendation (contrary the interim report – see para 108) for fathers to be granted a legal right to guarantee that their child has “a meaningful relationship with both parents”.
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21 April 2013 by Rosalind English
ZAM v CFW & Anor [2013] EWHC 662 (QB) – read judgment
The permanent damage that internet publications can inflict is very much the focus of Tugendhat J’s assessment of damages in this case, encapsulated in the memorable description he quoted in an earlier judgment:
what is to be found on the internet may become like a tattoo.
Since the advent of internet search engines, information which in the past would have been forgotten (even if it had been received front page coverage) will today remain easily accessible indefinitely. So a libel claimant who has a judgment in his favour nevertheless risks having his name associated with the false allegations for an indefinite period.
This is just what had happened in the present case. The second defendant’s liability for libel had already been established. This hearing was to assess the appropriate level of damages for allegations he had published on the internet, in breach of restraining orders against him, suggesting the claimant was guilty of misappropriation of family funds and paedophilia.
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8 September 2011 by Rosalind English
The 1,400 page final report on the inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa has been published today after three years of hearings. The chairman of the inquiry, retired Court of Appeal judge Sir William Gage, has condemned members of the 1st Battalion The Queen’s Lancashire Regiment for their “lack of moral courage” to report abuse and the use of banned interrogation after Mousa died of 93 injuries in British army custody in Basra in 2003.
Mousa was arrested with nine other Iraqi men after 1QLR soldiers found weapons, fake ID cards and military clothing at the hotel where he was working as a receptionist.
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