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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)
Dudgeon Offshore Wind v. Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government et al, HHJ Waksman QC, hearing 23 March 2012, read judgment
Running a hearing can be difficult enough when you are sitting as a judge and are faced with parties in a civil case. At least then you have an agenda set by the legal documents (or pleadings) and your primary role as judge is to decide whether the points made by one or other side are good or bad. Sometimes you may be sorely tempted to suggest better ones, but usually you do not run parties’ cases for them. And if you do, it is obviously fair for you to tell both parties what is going through your mind. After all, there may be very good reasons why a party has not taken a point apparently advantageous to them. Anyway, you must give the other side the opportunity to deal with the point.
All the more difficult in an inquiry, of which a planning inquiry is a good example. Here you are not just the judge. Your job is to inquire into whatever you think is necessary to decide whether to let a scheme proceed. Much of the time, it is a bit like a civil case, with the local planning authority trying to uphold its grounds for refusal, and the developer trying to show why the grounds do not stack up. But then in many planning appeals you have the third or fourth dimension, a group or groups of (usually) objectors who are saying that there are additional grounds for refusing the scheme. Sometimes, these issues come out all tidily before the inquiry starts, because the objectors have asked to participate in the formal procedures (Rule 6 parties in the jargon). On other occasions, it all just comes out as the inquiry proceeds.
On 30 March 2018, whilst working on the demolition of an oil tanker on the beach at Chittagong, Bangladesh, Mr Mollah fell to his death.
There is powerful evidence that essentially manual ship breaking of this sort is extremely unsafe and carries environmental risk given the asbestos and heavy metals aboard: see e.g. the work of NGO Shipbreaking Platform here. It does not take much more than a glance at the photographs to appreciate the problem. Conditions were grim; Mr Mollah was working at least 70 hours a week for long pay. Some 200,000 workers are thought to work under these conditions.
But this litigation is happening in the UK Courts. Mr Mollah’s widow did not even know the name of her Bangladeshi employer and she did not sue the owner of the “yard” there – in practice, the beach.
It is fashionable at the moment to speak about ‘evidence-based’ policy. The concept has been imported from the sciences by advocates such as Dr Ben Goldacre. In short, policies should be based on empirical evidence, statistics and perhaps even randomised trials. Very sensible. So sensible, you would hope that Government has been doing it anyway.
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.
Commentary on the Leveson report is again dominating the blogosphere this week – and once again, there is some discussion on whether the UK should maintain a relationship with Strasbourg. Gay marriage is also back in the news. However, we also have some “new” news, covering such diverse topics as homosexuality in the Channel Islands, “indie lawyers” and legal aid. A quick reminder: tomorrow (Monday 10 December) is Human Rights Day. We will be hosting a guest post which you can read in the morning.
The UK Human Rights Blog launched on 30 March 2010 with a total of 2 readers and a budget of £200. Two years later, despite the budget remaining consistent, the Blog has just surpassed 1,000,000 individual page views and has over 10,000 subscribers over email, Twitter and Facebook. I would like to take a moment to reflect on this success.
As you can probably guess, we are (and I am) thrilled at the response to UKHRB. When we launched, our aim was to provide a new voice in the always colourful but often shrill arena of human rights commentary. We felt that there was a gap in the market (as it were – the blog has been and remains free to access) for a non-ideological legal human rights update service which would be accessible to the lawyers and lay persons alike.
This decision by the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal (NICA) on 16 September 2025 is the latest stage of long-running litigation concerning odour from the Mullaghglass landfill, in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. It is an object lesson in the various pitfalls which may stand in the way of a successful judicial review of public authorities’ response to environmental problems.
First, the parties. Ms McAleenon lived just over a mile from the landfill site and had been affected by odours from about 2018 onwards, caused by hydrogen sulphide generated by the waste. She sued Lisburn Council (LCCC) who were under a duty to investigate potential statutory nuisances in their area. She also added as defendants the NI Environment Agency (NIEA), which ran the environmental permitting system for the landfill, and the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA, the Northern Irish equivalent of DEFRA) who oversaw NIEA. She filed medical evidence from a Dr Sinha supporting a linkage between hydrogen sulphide and lung damage.
In May 2022, Ms McAleenon failed before Humphreys J against all defendants. She appealed to the Court of Appeal ([2023] NICA 15), who did not engage with the merits but determined that Ms McAleenon had alternative remedies which she should have pursued – her own statutory nuisance prosecution or a civil claim for private nuisance. Part of their reasoning was that it was unjust that the claim should be determined without cross-examination of the relevant expert witnesses.
This decision was reversed by the Supreme Court in 2024. The SC said that it is a matter for a claimant to decide which sorts of claims were better calculated to request environmental regulators to comply with their public law duties: [4] of the latest NICA decision.
The SC referred the case back to NICA, and hence this decision of 16 September 2025.
But this choice of remedy for Ms McAlennon came at a cost. She chose the public law route and she had therefore to abide by the public law rules about deference to the specialist regulators’ opinions when concerned with hazardous activities. Ultimately it was these principles which led to the NICA to dismiss her claim. But, for her status as victim under the Convention, it probably did not matter that Ms McAleenon had moved out of the immediate vicinity of the landfill, nor did it matter that the landfill had closed in November 2022.
Updated x 2 | At the risk of sounding like a broken record, The Sun has got it badly wrong on human rights. Again. On 24 August 2014 Craig Woodhouse reported that “Euro judges go against UK in 3 out of 5 cases” (£). This is false and seriously misleading.
I explored this issue in detail back in 2012 when the Daily Mail as well as others claimed that the UK loses 3 out of 4 cases. Since that debacle, the European Court of Human Rights has produced some very clear documents on the statistics page of its website.
According to page 8 of this document, there have been 22,065 applications against UK 1959-2013. That means that 22,065 people or so have brought cases against the UK. Of those cases, there have been 297 resulting in a violation.
I am no statistician but 297 as a percentage of 22,065 is not “3 out of 5”. It is in fact 1.35%. Less than 2 in 100.
A highly experienced magistrate – Richard Page – has been sacked for airing views opposing same-sex couples being allowed to adopt. In a statement the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office said his views – which he had expressed in an BBC interview in 2015 – constituted “serious misconduct which brought the magistracy into disrepute”. Alice Arnold in the Guardian agrees with the decision to sack him (“the law is clear… magistrates must respect it”), whereas the Christian Legal Centre say this represents a “new political orthodoxy” and “modern day madness”. In a subsequent development, Mr Page is now planning to sue Michael Gove, citing religious discrimination. Continue reading →
North Norfolk District Council v. Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, [2014] EWHC 279 (Admin), Robin Purchas QC sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge, 14 February 2014 – read judgment
In my last post, I explained how Chris Grayling’s proposed reforms might affect planning and environmental challenges, and, hey presto, within the week, a perfect illustration of one of the points which I was making – with implications for all judicial reviews.
One of the proposals in the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill (see here) is that a challenge to an unlawful decision should fail if it is highly likely that the outcome for the applicant would not have been substantially different, had the public authority not acted unlawfully. This compares with the current test which is that the decision should be quashed unless it is inevitable that the decision would be the same.
Cue a proposed wind turbine (86.5m to blade tip) to be placed on one of the highest points of Norfolk and affecting the setting of two Grade I listed buildings (Baconsthorpe Hall and Barningham Hall) and a number of Grade II* churches. The Inspector allowed the turbine on appeal from the local planning authority, which decision the judge has now set aside. Continue reading →
Remember the three girls from Bethnal Green Academy, who in February slipped through Gatwick security to join so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)? If, watching the footage, you exclaimed, “how can we stop this?”, then read on. Eight months and a massacre in Tunisia later, the Courts have intervened in more than 35 cases to prevent the flight of children to Syria or to seek their return.
In the very first cases, in which Martin Downs of these Chambers appeared, the High Court’s inherent jurisdiction was invoked to make the children wards of court. The value of this mechanism, previously used in child abduction cases and to thwart forced marriages, is that the ward requires permission of the Court to leave the jurisdiction, and passports can be seized. (See, for example, Re Y (A Minor: Wardship) [2015] EWHC 2098 (Fam)). Continue reading →
Why we should replace ‘revenge porn’ with ‘image based sexual abuse’ and reform the mens rea of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015
The digital world is becoming an increasingly dominant part of daily life. This has been thrown into sharp relief by the current public health crisis, which has seen almost every facet of our lives move online; from socialising, to work, to healthcare, to dating and sex. However, regulation of the digital world is struggling to keep pace with technological change (see the UK Human Rights Blog’s technology section for commentary on this phenomenon). Lawmakers simply cannot keep abreast of the reforms necessary to protect victims from online criminality. One area in which Parliament has made some progress is the sharing of private sexual images, or ‘revenge porn’, as it has come to be known. This article will outline recent developments in the law around sharing of private sexual images; interrogate the terminology used in this area; and suggest reforms to the relevant legislation.
In 2014, the Crown Prosecution Service published guidelines on existing legislation, in an attempt to support convictions for the crime of sharing private sexual images without consent.[1] However, after mounting pressure from campaign groups, the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 (‘the Act’) created the offence of ‘Disclosing private sexual photographs and films with intent to cause distress’, which is punishable by up to two years in prison.[2]
More recently, legislation around sharing private sexual images became the subject of a new campaign, seeking to make the act of threatening to share private sexual images a criminal offence. This campaign was supported by organisations such as Refuge, 44,615 of whose supporters wrote to government ministers requesting a change in the legislation.[3] A reality television star, Zara Mcdermott, added her voice to this campaign in a BBC documentary entitled ‘Zara McDermott: Revenge Porn’.[4] In the documentary, Ms McDermott recounts two instances of having private sexual images shared without her consent. The documentary also covers the harrowing story of Damilya Jossipalenya, who was at university in London when she jumped to her death from the window of her flat. Ms Jossipalenya’s suicide followed a campaign of harassment by her boyfriend, who had threatened to share a video of Ms Jossipalenya with her family in Kazakhstan. This segment of the documentary ends with Ms McDermott explaining why she believes the threat to share private sexual images can be equally as damaging as the act of sharing them.
For non-Apple devices the podcasts are available via the Audioboom app.
For ease of reference the following three posts set out the introductions to each of the presentations and the case citations. Click on the heading for PDF copies of each of the presentations.
Introduction
The Civil Courts have now been involved in cases of radicalisation brought before them by local authorities for very nearly three years (we are approaching the third anniversary of the first case). What was then innovative is now reasonably well-established (see President’s Guidance on Radicalization Cases in the Family Courts (8 October 2015) and the judgment of Hayden J in London Borough of Tower Hamlets v B [2016] EWHC 1707.
Concern was stirred originally by the spectre of significant numbers of people travelling to Syria to demonstrate their support for ISIS or the Al Nusra Front. This problem is not novel as 80 years ago Britain and Ireland were similarly fixated with the problem of volunteers departing for Spain to fight on both sides in the Civil War. A portrayal of the indoctrination of school age children to fight in that war even seeped into popular culture courtesy of Muriel Spark’s novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The current situation is complicated by the relative ease of international travel, the tactics and targets used by extremists and the fact that the UK has already experienced domestic terrorism inspired by international examples.
The number of UK nationals travelling to Syria may have fallen but reports in 2016 of significant numbers of youths travelling from Kerala to Syria show that the problem has not fallen away and is truly international.
We all want to know about American libel law, now that President Trump has launched his pre-action missile at the BBC. If he pursues his claim it will be under Florida law, where his defamation action will not be statute barred. In the UK such claims must be commenced within one year of publication; Florida allows two. There are other significant differences between English and American defamation systems, which I will explore in this and the following post. Whatever the outcome of Trump v the BBC, the question that is occupying libel lawyers in the US at the moment is not a human run journalistic enterprise, whatever its flaws. It is the collision between antiquated libel laws the world over and the runaway publication machine called Artificial Intelligence.
No UK court has yet issued a judgment in a libel or defamation claim concerning AI-generated content, but several cases and legal actions are emerging and the issue is widely anticipated to reach the courts soon. I will discuss these later. There is rather more activity on this front across the pond. American defamation law is very different from ours, but we can see the enormous problems that arise when a technology provider is presented with a libel writ in respect of a statement that has been distributed by AI, if it has caused serious harm to a person’s reputation. A recent example is set out in an article in The New York Times byKen Bensinger, who reports that a solar contractor in Minnesota, called Wolf River Electric, noticed a dramatic fall off in sales.
“When they pressed their former customers for an explanation, the answers left them floored.
The clients said they had bailed after learning from Google searches that the company had settled a lawsuit with the state attorney general over deceptive sales practices. But the company had never been sued by the government, let alone settled a case involving such claims.
Confusion became concern when Wolf River executives checked for themselves. Search results that Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence technology, delivered at the top of the page included the falsehoods. And mentions of a legal settlement populated automatically when they typed “Wolf River Electric” in the search box.
Unsurprisingly, Wolf River executives decided they had no choice but to sue Google for defamation. This is just one instance of half a dozen libel claims filed in the US over the past two years over content produced by AI tools that generate text and images. Another case dating back to 2023 involved a talk radio host and a Second Amendment advocate (the right to carry a gun) who found out that AI had falsely accused him of embezzlement – this was discovered by a journalist looking up the radio presenter’s name on the internet.
Hello all, and happy holidays! 2012 has been a cracking year for the UK Human Rights Blog. As is customary, below are the top 2012 posts by hit count, but also a few of my own highlights of 2012:
After just over two and a half years in operation the blog is now achieving our aim (we hope) of informing and enhancing the human rights debate, which is no less controversial and caricatured than it was in March 2010.
The weekly Human Rights Roundups have become one of the most popular features of the blog, thanks to our fantastic updaters Daniel Isenberg, Sam Murrant and Wessen Jazrawi who moved on to other things in 2012.
In our third year we smashed one million hits and are already getting close to two million. We are regularly quoted across the media and for the first time this year, in the Northern Ireland Assembly. We are now getting close to 100,000 hits per month and are consistently ranked as the top legal blog on the ‘e-buzzing’ influence rankings.
We have over 4,000 email subscribers (just enter your email address in the box to the right to subscribe for free), over 2,000 on our Facebook fan page and 2,000+ on our @ukhumanrightsb Twitter account. You can also follow me on @adamwagner1 and my fantastic co-editors Angus McCullough QC on @amccqc and Rosalind English on @rosalindenglish.
Thank you to all of the fantastic contributors from 1 Crown Office Row (the barristers’ chambers which runs the blog) as well as guest contributors from elsewhere, who have contributed to almost 1,500 individual posts. I have taken more of a back seat editorial role this year so as to get on with my day job (I am a practising barrister, honest – you can read about me here), an arrangement which has strengthened the blog.
Thank you also to all of those who have commented on individual posts both on the blog and on Twitter, which has been particularly vibrant in legal debates this year. Some of those debates have been fantastic and they add immeasurably to the content on the blog. As always, we welcome comments on any aspect of the blog, including the refreshed design which you may have noticed in the past few days. Thank you also to the growing army of fantastic legal bloggers (see our links section on the sidebar) who regularly link to the blog in their own post.
One final reminder: all of our blog posts are categorised by legal topic and article of the European Convention on Human Rights: you can access the categories by way of the drop down menu on the right sidebar (for example family law, technology, Article 8 etc) as well as by clicking categories under individual posts. Our index of European Convention Rights is here.
Without further ado, here are the top twenty posts of 2012:
R(New London College) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] EWHC 856 (Admin) – read judgment
When she introduced the latest changes to the points-based system for allowing entry into the United Kingdom the Home Secretary Theresa May said that “this package will stop the bogus students, studying meaningless courses at fake colleges…it will restore some sanity to our student visa system” (March 22 2011) Whether these changes will alleviate any of the difficulties of applying the criteria to institutions that provide study courses for foreign nationals, only time will tell. This case illustrates some of these problems of enforcement.
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Dudgeon Offshore Wind v. Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government et al, HHJ Waksman QC, hearing 23 March 2012, read judgment
The 
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your weekly bulletin of human rights news. The full list of links can be found 
The 
R(New London College) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] EWHC 856 (Admin) – 
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