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J v Bath and North East Somerset Council & M [2025] EWCA Civ 478 concerns an appeal of a decision by Mrs Justice Lieven. Lieven J had held that there was no need for the High Court to make an order authorising the deprivation of J’s liberty in circumstances where both J’s parents and the local authority consented to the deprivation of liberty.
J is a 14-year-old boy with a number of diagnoses, including autism, ADHD, and Pica. J lives in a specialist children’s home. J is subject to a final care order under Section 31 of the Children Act 1989 (“CA 1989”). The Court of Appeal spelled out that the “major consequence of any care order is that it gives parental responsibility to the local authority, which is shared with the child’s parent(s), but with the local authority having control over the manner in which parental responsibility is exercised [CA 1989, s 33(3)]”.
Updated x 2 | Two court decisions have upset UK governments this week. One is being appealed in the normal way by the Secretary of State for Education, but the other may lead to a fundamental rethink of the Scottish justice system. As a Bank Holiday special, this post is split into 2 parts. Part 1 is here.
Meanwhile, north of the border in Scotland, a more significant constitutional storm may be brewing following Wednesday’s decision of the UK Supreme Court in Fraser v Her Majesty’s Advocate. Rosalind English has already posted on the ruling, which related to a Scottish murder appeal. As Rosalind said,
this was a Scottish criminal case and the Supreme Court would normally have had no business dealing with it … The Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction extends only to a consideration of a “devolution issue” , including whether an exercise of a function by a member of the Scottish Executive is incompatible with any of the Convention rights.
Parliament, through Schedule 6 to the Scotland Act 1998, has given the Supreme Court jurisdiction in relation to devolution issues arising in criminal proceedings. It has been suggested that this was to ensure that a consistent and coherent view upon them could be given across the UK.
The British public owes a lot to Ernest Davies. Few, if any, will have heard of him. A Londoner and scion of a Labour party councillor, he began a career in journalism, spent the war years at the BBC’s north Africa desk and, in the Attlee landslide of 1945, was elected as Member of Parliament for Enfield. After the 1950 General Election, he was appointed Parliamentary Undersecretary of State in the Foreign Commonwealth Office. And at 4 p.m. on 4th November 1950, together with ministers representing ten other European states, he walked into the Salone of the Palazzo Barberini, Rome, and signed the European Convention on Human Rights on behalf of the United Kingdom.
It is intriguing to imagine what Davies would have made of the current debate over the United Kingdom’s participation in the Convention system. Perhaps as a former journalist he would have known all too well that, at least for some sections of the British media, coverage of European affairs isn’t always to be taken at face value or too seriously. He would, no doubt, be surprised at the evolution of the Convention into the system it is today. But I think it would have been surprise mixed with a quiet sense of pride, for he would have known that the text he signed was the product of months of work by British lawyers.
In the 1980s the European Commission embarked upon an ambitious scheme to cultivate, on the basis of free movement, the idea of EU citizenship in higher education. Universities have long been seen as places of national citizenship formation. The Erasmus scheme was designed to further the notion of citizenship untethered to the nation state by funding and therefore encouraging student mobility.
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It’s time for the human rights roundup, a regular bulletin of all the law we haven’t quite managed to feature in full blog posts. The full list of links, updated each day, can be found here. Happy post Bank Holiday reading!
by Graeme Hall
In the news:
Whilst the Neuberger Committee’s report is arguably the best place to kick-off any discussion on privacy, freedom of expression and Super-Injunctions, it is not, as Inforrm’s blog concludes, the “last word” on the matter. Indeed, this “overinflated topic” has been tackled with such gusto by the press and blogosphere that the High Court clearly gave a yellow card for “widespread disobedience“.
Desmond Grant and Roger Charles Gleaves v Ministry of Justice High Court (Queen’s Bench Division) 19 December 2011 – read judgment
The High Court (Mr Justice Hickinbottom) has today dismissed claims by two prisoners that their rights under Articles 3 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights were violated by the prison conditions in which they were detained.
The following is based on the High Court’s summary of the case.
About 360 long term prisoners, who were at HMP Albany between 2004 and 2011, brought claims that their right not to be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment under Article 3 and their right to respect for private and life under Article 8 had been violated by the regime under which they were detained in that prison, which included the use of a bucket for toilet purposes when they were in a locked cell and the later emptying of the bucket at a sluice (“slopping out”). Five lead claims were selected, of which two reached trial. Continue reading →
Raw and others v France – read judgment (only available in French)
This complicated inter-jurisdictional battle between estranged parents is a stark illustration of how difficult it can be in these sorts of cases to apply the law in the fog of family warfare.
Even though the mother’s case was upheld in the Strasbourg Court, one can tell from the modesty of the damages awarded and the strength of the minority opinions that the judges were extremely reluctant to apply hard letter law to the complicated case before them. Indeed in one partially concurring judgment, Judge Nussberger found it distinctly odd that the mother was able to join the children as parties, in the light of their opposition to her wish that they leave their father to join her. Continue reading →
The UK Human Rights Blog is committed to continuing to raise awareness of the vital issues that were brought to public attention in May and June. In this piece, we look at diversity at the bar, with particular focus on the commercial bar.
This article is largely an edited version of a piece which appeared in The Lawyer online in April this year and may be found here. We are very grateful to The Lawyer and to Harry Matovu QC for their kind permission to reproduce that content here.
Although a record number of black and Asian minority ethnic (BAME) barristers were awarded silk status this year (a total of 22), there is still a large diversity gap in the industry. BAME barristers accounting for just under 8 per cent of the QC population overall, according to the latest figures from the Bar Standards Board (BSB). Within the commercial bar, the representation of BAME barristers is particularly low, with only 8 per cent of barristers at a range of leading commercial sets being BAME.
The umbrella term of BAME also requires nuance. According to the BSB, of the 3,364 BAME barristers in this country, 1,497 are Asian or mixed, while 479 barristers are black. The difference is even greater at silk level; just 20 of the 149 BAME silks are black.
In a nutshell, therefore, BAME barristers as a whole are underrepresented, and under that umbrella, the representation of black barristers and silks is particularly low.
Henrietta Lacks was a young Black woman who in 1951 was diagnosed with a particularly agressive form of cervical cancer. Her treating doctors at the Johns Hopkins hospital took a sample from the tumour and that was the birth of “HeLa” – an “immortal” line of fast-replicating cells that have been reproduced every since, used in scientific and medical innovations including the development of the polio vaccine, infertility research and even the early research into a vaccine against Covid19. The HeLa cell line was in essence the first time human cells could be successfully cloned and it has been in use continually for research that has touched nearly every realm of medicine.
In October 2021, her estate filed suit against Thermo Fisher, the pharmaceutical company that bought the cells from the hospital. Her family, represented by Ben Crump, the attorney who represented the family of George Floyd in 2020, is asking the company to pay back the full profits gained over 70 years of using her cells without consent. This is the US remedy of “disgorgement of profits”, which essentially involves the transfer of all the company’s patents and profits from the HeLa line to the Lacks estate. In essence, disgorgement removes the incentive to unjustly enrich yourself at another’s expense.
The problem with this remedy is it is dependent on the enrichment being based on the other person’s property. In US law, as in the UK, there is no property in the body. In fact US law is silent on ownership of bodily resources. The only statute that governs this subject is the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act which bans the sale of all organs including kidneys. The ban only extends to the sale of kidneys for transplantation; there is no ban on the sale of kidneys for research and experimentation.
The late US law Professor Paul Miller reflected recently that Beethoven, Stephen Hawking and Elton John were examples of individuals whom, if they had been tested for serious genetic conditions at the start of their careers, may have been denied employment in the fields in which they later came to excel.
Earlier this month the Association of British Insurers announced the latest extension on the moratorium on the use of genetic test results for insurance purposes. But is this “Concordat” sufficient protection? Genetic technologies are becoming increasingly available and profound questions are arising in relation to life and health insurance and employability as genetic screening becomes cheaper and widespread.
According to the Human Genetics Commission (HGC)
The advent of cheap whole-genome sequencing, and greatly reduced costs for genetic tests in general, will provide the platform for genetic testing to be used for novel and unpredicted purposes. (Report on The Concept of Genetic Discrimination, Aril 2011) Continue reading →
On Monday, the Independent reported on the words of the Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency of the United Kingdom, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Having earlier tweeted a graph demonstrating that the UK had sanctioned a higher amount of Russian-owned assets in pound-terms than the US or the EU, Labour and Lib Dem politicians responded by pointing out that the graph better demonstrated the UK’s role in storing and laundering money for highly questionable individuals from Russia and elsewhere. Despite the calls for transparency from, for instance, the president of Estonia long before the invasion of Ukraine, the UK and its territories have remained a bastion for billions of pounds of poorly identified foreign wealth, with large numbers of expensive houses in central London standing empty while house prices soar and the number of homeless grows.
On Wednesday, Boris Johnson gave oral evidence to the Privileges Committee as part of an ongoing inquiry into whether the ex-Prime Minister misled Parliament over lockdown parties in No 10. If the Commons was misled, the Committee will determine whether that constituted a contempt of Parliament – a finding which could result in Mr Johnson’s suspension from the Commons. In his evidence, Mr Johnson accepted he mislead MPs, but that he had not done so “intentionally or recklessly”. He claimed his statements were based upon honest belief, and were made in ‘good faith’ and in reliance on ‘trusted advisers’. The outcome of the inquiry will largely rest on whether Mr Johnson inadvertently, deliberately, or recklessly mislead Parliament – with the most severe sanctions arising if he is found to have deliberately made false statements to MPs. The committee’s report is expected later in the year.
Baroness Casey’s final report on the standards of behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police Service was published this week. The review was commissioned following the death of Sarah Everard at the hands of a serving Met officer. The report describes a culture in the Met of ‘defensiveness and denial’, which lacks integrity, fails to take complainants seriously and has discrimination ‘baked into it’. In Baroness Casey’s own words: ‘we have found institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia in the Met’. This report, alongside tragic events like Ms Everard’s death and the recent conviction of long-serving Met officer David Carrick, highlight a loss of public confidence in the police force.
In France on Thursday, protesters gathered across the country to demonstrate their opposition to President Macron’s pension reform bill, which proposes raising the age of retirement from 62 to 64. The protests began in January, but escalated this week when President Macron forced the proposed bill through parliament without a vote in the National Assembly. It is estimated that approximately one million people took part in the demonstrations. In Bordeaux, the front door of the city’s town hall was set on fire and police have been accused of using excessive force against protesters. Before the bill becomes legislation, it must pass a review by the Constitutional Council.
Smith v Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust & Ors (Rev 2) [2017] EWCA Civ 1916 – read judgment
In a landmark decision handed down on 28th November 2017 the Court of Appeal ruled that cohabiting couples should have a right to claim bereavement damages, putting them in a position analogous to spouses and civil partners.
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The British public owes a lot to 
It’s time for the human rights roundup, a regular bulletin of all the law we haven’t quite managed to feature in full blog posts. The full list of links, updated each day, can be 
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