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UK Human Rights Blog - 1 Crown Office Row
Search Results for: environmental/page/15/Freedom of information - right of access) [2015] UKUT 159 (AAC) (30 March 2015)
The relationship between women’s rights and the police has been at the forefront of the news again this week, with shocking new revelations in the Sarah Everard case increasing concerns about institutional sexism in the police force, in addition to a scathing judgement from the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) condemning the sexual relationship carried out by a male undercover police officer as a human rights abuse.
Further details about the tactics used by the police officer Wayne Couzens to kidnap Sarah Everard before her rape and murder were released earlier this week after being presented in court. Couzens used his Metropolitan police-issued warrant card to convince Everard that she was being legitimately arrested for breaching Covid regulations. The new information has heightened debates about whether the Met has an internal culture which tolerates sexism, misogyny, and abuse, with many female police officers reporting inappropriate behaviour and sexual assaults. Towards the end of the week, it was revealed that two officers in a WhatsApp group with Couzens, which allegedly swapped misogynistic, racist, and homophobic messages, remain on duty. Furthermore, the Metropolitan Police’s response to Couzens’ sentencing hearing has been seen by many as completely inadequate, with Commissioner Cressida Dick suggesting that women approached by a plain clothes police officer should consider, inter alia, ‘waving a bus down’ to avoid kidnap. The Met has recently unveiled an action plan to restore trust, but campaigners argue that it is more concerned with changing women’s behaviour than addressing the underlying culture that enables misogynistic behaviour to thrive.
The police were also severely criticised in an IPT judgement handed down last week for violating the human rights of a woman, Kate Wilson, who was tricked into a relationship with undercover police officer Mark Kennedy. Kennedy is thought to have exploited his relationships with Wilson and numerous other women to ingratiate himself with the political organisations he infiltrated. The report found that Wilson’s treatment contravened five rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR): freedom from inhuman or degrading treatment (Art.3); respect for private and family life (Art.8); freedom of expression (Art.10); freedom of assembly and association (Art.11); and the right for convention rights to be applied without discrimination, in this case on the ground of sex (Art.14). The IPT asserted that the senior officers were either ‘… quite extraordinarily naïve, totally unquestioning, or chose to turn a blind eye’. While numerous women have brought civil suits against undercover officers who employed similar tactics, Wilson is the first to bring a claim to the IPT. The Met issued a statement responding to the judgement, accepting and apologising for the ‘damage caused’.
The UN working group on arbitrary detention have concluded that the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been “arbitrarily detained” by Britain and Sweden in the Ecuadorian Embassy for the last three and a half years. In particular, the working group considered that Mr Assange had not been guaranteed a fair trial, in violation of Articles 9 and 10 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and Articles 9, 10 and 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. They have called on Britain and Sweden to end Assange’s deprivation of liberty, respect his physical integrity and freedom of movement, and afford him the right to compensation – which all seems rather steep for someone who has in effect used the Embassy “as a safe haven to avoid arrest” – in the words of the dissenting member of the working group, Ukrainian lawyer Vladimir Tochilovsky.
Julian Assange sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2012 after the UK Supreme Court rejected his appeal against a European Arrest Warrant issued by the Swedish prosecution authority for rape and sexual assault allegations. He has remained there since, now claiming the UN opinion marks a “sweet victory” – but which the UK and Sweden have flatly rejected, on the basis that only one detaining Assange there is Assange himself.
Joshua Rozenberg answers the question on everyone’s minds – how did the UN get it so wrong? The definition the panel gave for Assange’s “arbitrary detention” was that “non observance … of the international norms relating to the right to a fair trial … is of such gravity as to give the detention an arbitrary character”. Of course, such a definition of arbitrary detention presumes detention in the first place – which in this case, was self-confinement in the Embassy.
Tochilovsky, the lone dissent on the panel, was the only one to make the point that “fugitives are often self-confined within the places they evade arrest and detention” and “self-confinement cannot be considered places of detention for the purposes of the mandate of the working group”. Continue reading →
While the press (and the rest of us) were preoccupied by the debate on equal marriage and the public dissection of the Huhne marriage, the Justice and Security Bill completed its next stage of passage through the Parliamentary process. Largely unwatched, a slim majority of Conservative members supported by Ian Paisley Jr., reversed each change made to the Bill by the House of Lords restoring the Government’s original vision: a brave new world where secret pleadings, hearings and judgments become the norm when a Minister claims national security may be harmed in civil litigation.
The Bill will return to the Commons for its crucial final stages on Monday. In anticipation of the debate, the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) has published a third damning critique of the Government’s proposals. The cross-party Committee was unimpressed by the Government rewrite of the Lords amendments. Most of Westminster was busy in Eastleigh and few political commentators flinched.
Welcome back to the human rights roundup. Our full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here.
by Melinda Padron
In the news
Will Detainee Inquiry hearings broadcast? Have your say
The Detainee Inquiry Panel has shown its commitment to carrying out an inquiry that is as open and inclusive as possible by inviting comments on their broadcasting proposal, before making a final decision. The Panel welcomes views on this issue from the media, potential witnesses, NGOs and any other groups or individuals who are interested in the Inquiry’s work. You may submit comments via email by 7th January 2012. You can find more details here.
Russia’s state prison service released a public statement on Friday reporting that opposition leader and vocal Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has died in prison. Russian authorities are reportedly refusing to release the body, raising questions about the manner of his death. Navalny was sentenced in 2023 to 19 years imprisonment on a plethora of extremism charges, which he was serving in the Polar Wolf penal colony in the Arctic Circle. Lord Cameron, Foreign Secretary, said to broadcasters at the Munich Security Conference that ‘we should hold Putin accountable for this. And no one should be in any doubt about the dreadful nature of Putin’s regime in Russia after what has just happened’, while UK Security Minister Tom Tugendhat, in a post on X (formerly Twitter), has directly accused Vladimir Putin of murdering Navalny in order to silence him. Multiple judgments have been previously issued by the European Court of Human Rights finding that Navalny’s rights to fair trial, liberty and security, and freedoms of expression and association had been violated by Russian authorities.
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.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has decided not to charge Daniel Thomas for posting a homophobic message on Twitter, the social networking site, about the swimmer Tom Daley. The press release, which takes the form of an extended quote from the Director of Public Prosecutions, is fascinating. I have reproduced it in full below.
In short, the CPS has decided not to charge Thomas as he “intended the message to be humorous”, removed it quickly, didn’t intend it to go beyond his followers (“however naive” that was), has expressed remorse and Daley did not find out about the message until after it had been reported in the media.
The DPP has also used the opportunity to announce that he is drafting new guidance for social media prosecutions and also to say that whilst “serious wrongdoing” could be the subject of prosecutions,
The fact that offensive remarks may not warrant a full criminal prosecution does not necessarily mean that no action should be taken. In my view, the time has come for an informed debate about the boundaries of free speech in an age of social media.
Review: Family Courts without a Lawyer: A Handbook for Litigants in Person – Lucy Reed – Buy book here
Family Courts without a Lawyer : A Handbook for Litigants in Person is written by Lucy Reed, barrister and author of the Pink Tape blog. A title that may, on its first reading, strike fear into the heart of family lawyers and, hopefully, give a sense of relief to many litigants in person. However, this is the book that all family practitioners wish they had written and which litigants in person may consider buying, its aim being to make any interaction with the Family Courts, for the uninitiated, as stress free as possible.
The book is described as providing “as practical tool to help you in court and a reference to help you understand what happens in family proceedings, whether or not you have a lawyer”. It does not suggest going to court as a litigant in person is to be preferred over attending at court with a lawyer, nor does it suggest the opposite; it allows the reader freedom of choice.
R (BB) v. Special Immigration Appeals Commission and Home Secretary – Read judgment.
The Divisional Court has ruled that bail proceedings before the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (“SIAC”) are subject to the same procedural standard under Article 5(4) of the European Convention (the right to liberty) whether they take place before or after the substantive judgment. That standard is that the applicant must be given sufficient information about the allegations against him to enable him to give effective instructions in relation to those allegations, as set out in A v United Kingdom and R (Cart) v. SIAC.
This decision forms the latest in a string of cases considering the extent to which the Government can rely on secret or ‘closed’ evidence in defending appeals by individuals challenging decisions made against them. A judgment by the Supreme Court is imminently expected in the conjoined cases of Al-Rawi v. Security Service and Tariq v. Home Office (see helpful summary here and our analysis of the broader issue of open justice here), which consider this issue in relation to civil damages claims and employment law claims. However, BB is the High Court’s most recent pronouncement on the position in the fraught area of immigration and national security.
Is anonymity incompatible with the public interest?
In the politically-charged and at times feverish aftermath of the Brexit referendum, Gina Miller became a “magnet for hatred” for exercising her right of access to courts and winning two landmark public law cases against the UK Government. The magnitude and ferocity of abuse directed at Gina Miller made those who followed in her footsteps wary enough to seek anonymity. In Yalland and others v Brexit Secretary, 4 claimants were granted anonymity in relation to a judicial review claim concerning UK participation in the European Economic Area Agreement.
Anonymity in Northern Ireland is not uncommon where some part of a claimant’s deeply personal life or history play a role in the determination of their claim. JR80 for example involved a claimant who had suffered egregious institutional abuse as a child, while JR123 involved a claimant with ancient convictions which disproportionately impacted his life.
In JR181(3)’s application for judicial review, however, anonymity was ordered to continue in the face of a politically-charged atmosphere reminiscent of the worst of the Brexit era.
When you breathed in asbestos fibres from your dusty shipbuilding job on the River Clyde in the 1950s and 1960s, some of those fibres stuck around in the lungs. Some may cause the pleural plaques seen on my image, some may cause asbestosis, and some may lead to the highly malignant mesothelioma.
So your doctor (20+ years later when these diseases manifest themselves) would X-ray you and tell you what form of the disease you had. If he told you you had pleural plaques, you would, at first, breathe a huge sigh of relief that it was not mesothelioma. Because pleural plaques are almost invariably asymptomatic and harmless.
But on second thoughts, now you know you have indeed been exposed to asbestos such that you might develop mesothelioma – and you have seen colleagues die a miserable death from that disease. So, when you leave your chest physician’s room, you are worried, not about what you have, but about what you might get. Do you get damages for this? And anyway, where do the human rights in my title – those under Article 1 of Protocol 1 to ECHR, or the right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions – come into this story? Continue reading →
T, R on the application of) v Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, Secretary of State for the Home Department and Secretary of State for Justice; AW, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for Justice and JB, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for Justice [2013] EWCA Civ 25 – read judgment
The Court of Appeal has ruled that the statutory requirement that criminal convictions and cautions must be disclosed in an enhanced criminal record check (“ECRC”) in the context of particular types of employment interfered with the appellants’ right to respect for private life under Article 8.
Neither of the disclosure provisions, under the Police Act 1997 and the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975, were proportionate since they went beyond the legitimate aims of protecting employers and vulnerable individuals.
See Panopticon’s post on the ruling and their previous post (republished on our blog) on the dismissal of T’s application for judicial review in the Administrative Court. We add a few words of our own. Continue reading →
The rights of immigrants and asylum seekers have been at the forefront of the news this week, with the Home Secretary coming under fire both in the courts and in the political arena. On Wednesday, a landmark court ruling held Ms Patel accountable for failures properly to investigate deaths among asylum seekers at detention centres. The case concerned two Nigerian nationals, one of whom was found dead in Harmondsworth immigration centre in 2019. His friend, Mr Lawal, was a key witness in the investigation of the death, but the Home Office sought to deport him before he could give evidence. The court held that the Home Secretary’s initial policy, which sought to remove Mr Lawal, its replacement, applied from August 2020, and the current policy, were unlawful and breached human rights because they failed to ensure that those who had relevant information would be able to give evidence before removal proceedings were commenced, thus frustrating inquiries into immigration centre deaths. Days later it was reported that this may be a widespread problem, with suggestions that scores of people had been prevented from giving key evidence to police investigations as a result of early deportation. While Ms Patel was warned that this practice must be curbed by a coroner in August, it is suggested that her response did little to address the problem.
The Supreme Court in British Indian Ocean Territory ruled in December on an important issue concerning the detention of asylum seekers in Diego Garcia. While their cause has progressed (including in a settlement reached on behalf of many, and in this judgment).
Ms Justice Obi, Acting Justice of the Supreme Court of the British Indian Ocean Territory, determined that the Claimants had been unlawfully detained since their arrival in October 2021.
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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While the press (and the rest of us) were preoccupied by the 
Welcome back to the human rights roundup. Our full list of links can be found 
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your weekly bulletin of human rights news. The full list of links can be found 
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has decided not to charge Daniel Thomas for posting a homophobic message on Twitter, the social networking site, about the swimmer Tom Daley. The 
R (BB) v. Special Immigration Appeals Commission and Home Secretary – 
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