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UK Human Rights Blog - 1 Crown Office Row
Search Results for: environmental/page/26/Freedom of information - right of access) [2015] UKUT 159 (AAC) (30 March 2015)
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.
Opinion has been divided this week after a landmark High Court ruling on Friday declared that the government’s right to rent scheme is breaching human rights laws and actively creating racial discrimination in the housing market.
The scheme requires landlords in England check the immigration status of tenants, with fines of up to £3,000 and a potential prison term if they fail to do so. Introduced by sections 20-37 of the Immigration Act 2014, right to rent is a cornerstone of the government’s hostile environment policy, which aims to reduce the number of illegal immigrants in the UK. The High Court said that it would be illegal to roll the scheme out out in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland without further evaluation. Mr Justice Spencer noted that the scheme had ‘little or no effect’ on immigration control, and that independent evidence ‘strongly showed’ the scheme was ‘indirectly’ discriminatory, causing landlords to turn down potential tenants because of their nationality or ethnicity.
The Supreme Court recently dismissed two appeals concerning the role and rights of siblings in children’s hearings in Scotland. It held that the provisions of the Children’s Hearings (Scotland) Act 2011 in question were compatible with article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.Background
The appeals concerned whether a sibling is a “relevant person” for the purposes of the Children’s Hearings (Scotland) Act 2011 (‘the 2011 Act’), which governs the children’s hearings system in Scotland.
A relevant person is defined as including a person who has parental responsibilities or rights in relation to the child (section 200(1) of the 2011 Act). If a person does not fall under this definition, they may still be classed as a relevant person under a procedure set out in sections 79-81. Section 81(3) provides that a person can be deemed a relevant person if it is decided that the person has, or recently had, a significant involvement in the upbringing of the child. In most circumstances, this would not include a sibling.
It will come to the surprise of many that the common law offence of blasphemy in the UK was only abolished in 2008. It has no place in a secular society such as ours. However attempts have been made to use the Public Order Act 1986 to introduce blasphemy by the back door, by criminalising religious hatred offences.
This legislation excludes “antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religiions’ from its religious hatred provisions.
The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 is set to become law in the United Kingdom following its passing of the third stage of legislative scrutiny earlier this month. The Act seeks to consolidate and amend the legislative framework which governs the use of investigatory powers, including the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA). It is expected to receive royal assent by the end of 2016.
NT 1 & Anor v Google LLC [2018] EWHC 261 (QB) (15 February 2018) – read judgment
This was a Pre Trial Review of an application by the claimants to have details about an old criminal conviction and other information removed from Google and associated websites under the “right to be forgotten”. Each of the claimants sought orders prohibiting the defendant (Google) from continuing to return internet search reports which included information about the claimant which he claimed was inaccurate, stale, irrelevant, and thereby infringed his data protection and privacy rights. The “right to be forgotten” is, in this context, also referred to as “de-listing”. The two cases are due to be tried by Warby J at the end of February. In order to avoid an own goal at trial, where those very names and convictions would be made public, the parties sought to come up with forms of pseudonym or cipher that would protect them. One proposal was that
in the NT1 case a co-defendant of the claimant at his criminal trial in the late 1990s should be referred to as “Mr A”, and that certain offshore companies used by NT1 should be referred to as “Companies A and B”. There are also references to “Businesses A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H”. In the NT2 case, the claimant also had a co-defendant, and the proposal is to call him “Mr A”. This is not the same person as the “Mr A” in the NT1 case. “Company A” in the NT2 case is a cipher for “The business in which the claimant [NT2] previously had an interest.” It is not the same as Company A in the NT1 case. The Confidential schedule in the NT2 case also features “Companies F, G, H, I, J, K and H” which are all different from any of those that feature in the NT1 claim.
Warby J was unimpressed with this alphabet soup. He did not relish the prospect of preparing a judgment, or two judgments, using these ciphers. Continue reading →
Charlotte Bellamy contemplates the latest human rights happenings
Until recently the Tolpuddle Martyrs peered down from a banner in Westminster Hall in an exhibition celebrating the journey of rights in democratic society over the last 800 years.
The Tolpuddle Martyrs were taken down last month. Meanwhile, the Trade Union Bill has passed through its second reading in the House of Lords. Just before the reading, the Equality and Human Rights Commission released a report on the human rights implications for the Bill, the thrust of which is that its ‘regressive nature’ may cause the UK to fall short of its obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights. Continue reading →
Laura Profumo brings you the latest human rights happenings.
In the News:
In a critical, though arguably overdue, decision, the Court of Appeal has suspended the fast-track immigration appeals system. The process, under which rejected asylum seekers are detained and given only seven days to appeal, was held “structurally unfair” by the High Court, before being halted altogether by last week’s appeal. The ruling was welcomed by the appellant charity, Detention Action, as meaning “asylum seekers can no longer be detained…simply for claiming asylum”. Previously, the fast-track deadlines could be imposed on any asylum seeker from any country, if the Home Office considered their case could be decided quickly. This marks the third time courts have found the system to be unlawful, yet the suspension will now stay in force until a government appeal is mounted. The decision deals a major blow to a system which is “inefficient, bureaucratic, demeaning and dehumanising”, writes immigration expert Colin Yeo. Whilst there is “no doubt” a replacement fast track will soon be found, in the meantime “let us savour the respite” from such crude expediency.
In other news, the spotlight remains on America, in the euphoric wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v Hodges. The final paragraph of Justice Kennedy’s judgment, in its stirring clarity, is set to make legal history. Yet not everyone is “enveloped in a warm and fuzzy feeling”, writes UKHRB’s own Jim Duffy. Justice Scalia, the firebrand conservative, “pulled no punches” in his dissent, citing the majority opinion as “egotistic” and a “threat to American democracy”. Scalia’s arrival in London last week further stoked the Obergefell debate. Speaking at a Federalist Society event, Scalia held his colleagues had wrongly used the due process clause to distill a substantive, rather than procedural, right. Defending his position as a constitutional originalist, Scalia maintained the meaning of the Constitution as fixed, rather than the “wonderfully seductive judicial theory” of living constitutions, in which “we can have all sorts of new things, like same sex marriage”. When asked about the proposed Bill of Rights, the Justice’s response was particularly biting: “You can’t do any worse than the situation you’re in now”. Continue reading →
Prudential plc and another , R (on the application of) v Special Commissioner for Income Tax and another [2013] UKSC 1 23 January 2013 – read judgment
The Supreme Court has ruled that legal advice privilege should only apply to advice given by a member of the legal profession; that this is what the common law has always meant, and that any wider interpretation would lead to uncertainty. Two strong dissents do not find any principled underpinning for the restriction of the privilege to advice from solicitors or barristers.
The following summary is based on the Supreme Court’s press release (numbers in square brackets denote paragraphs in the judgment).
Bank Mellat v HM Treasury [2013] UKSC 38 (CMP: see judgment) and 39 (main: see judgment)
Two sets of judgments today from a 9-judge Supreme Court in the Bank Mellat case. The first explains why the Court adopted a secret procedure in the absence of the Bank (i.e. a Closed Material Procedure) but added that the whole palaver in fact added nothing to their knowledge. The second concludes that financial restrictions imposed in 2009 on an Iranian Bank which effectively excluded it from the UK financial market were arbitrary and irrational and were also procedurally unfair.
The saga started when on 9 October 2009 the Treasury made a direction under Schedule 7 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 requiring all persons operating in the financial sector not to have any commercial dealings with Bank Mellat. The Treasury said that the Bank had connections with Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programme. Continue reading →
“For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe the horse was lost, for the want of a horse, the rider was lost, for the want of a rider, the message was lost, for the want of the message, the battle was lost, for the want of the battle, the kingdom was lost, and all for the want of a horse shoe nail”.
A proverbial lesson in causation, and one pressed into service by Lady Smith in the Court of Session in Scotland last week, in a judgment rejecting the judicial review petition of two Catholic midwives employed at a major Glasgow hospital.
Seeking review of Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board’s rejection of their grievances, the pair contended that the conscientious objection provisions of the Abortion Act 1967 – which provides that “no person shall be under any duty, whether by contract or by any statutory or other legal requirement, to participate in any treatment authorised by this Act to which he has a conscientious objection” – was not limited to ‘direct’ participation in abortions, but entitled them to refuse to delegate to, supervise or support staff on their labour ward who were directly involved in medical terminations. Horse shoe nail.
Gas and Dubois v France(2012) (application no 25951/07). Read judgment (in French).
The French government did not violate articles 8 (right to respect for private and family life) and 14 ECHR (right not to be discriminated against in one’s enjoyment of Convention rights and freedoms) in not allowing one partner in a homosexual couple to adopt the child of the other. And the Daily Mail goes off on another frolic of its own.
Ms Valerie Gas and Ms Nathalie Dubois, now in their 50s, lived together as a lesbian couple, obtaining the French equivalent of a civil partnership (the pacte civil de solidarité, or PACS) in 2002. Ms Dubois, through artificial insemination in Belgium using an anonymous sperm donor, gave birth to a girl in September 2000. Together, they took care of the child and, in 2006 , Ms Gas, applied to adopt the girl with the consent of her partner, Ms Dubois. Continue reading →
R (on the application of David Tracey, personally and on behalf of the estate of Janet Tracey (deceased)) v Cambridge University Hospital and The Secretary of State for Health with the Resuscitation Council and Others intervening (17 June 2014) [2014] EWCA Civ 822 – read judgment
Philip Havers QC, Jeremy Hyam and Kate Beattie of 1 Crown Office Row represented the appellant in this hearing. They have nothing to do with the writing of this post.
The Court of Appeal has declared that the failure of a hospital to consult a patient in their decision to insert a Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Notice in her notes was unlawful and in breach of her right to have her physical integrity and autonomy protected under Article 8.
The Resuscitation Council, intervening, made the point that in recent years there has been a reduction of inappropriate and unsuccessful attempts at CPR . Their concern was that a judgment requiring consultation with the patient save in exceptional cases would be likely to reverse that process.
Background Facts
The wife of the appellant, Mrs Tracey, had been diagnosed with lung cancer in February 2011 and given nine months to live. Two weeks after this diagnosis she sustained a serious cervical fracture in a major road accident and was placed on a ventilator in a critical condition. When the medical team reviewed her treatment, a first Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Notice was placed in her notes. However, she was subsequently successfully weaned from the ventilator and her condition appeared to improve. A few days later her condition deteriorated again and a second DNACPR notice was completed. Mrs Tracey died on 7 March. Continue reading →
In Medmoune v France App no 55026/22 (ECHR, 5 February 2026), the Fifth Section of the European Court of Human Rights considered the extent of a Member State’s obligation under Art. 2 ECHR (the right to life) when deciding to withdraw life support, in circumstances where the patient had explicitly asked for it to be continued.[1] The judgment helpfully illustrates the contentious boundary at which informed patient consent must give way to the expert opinion of medical professionals.
Association de médiation sociale v Union locale des syndicats CGT, Hichem Laboubi, Union départementale CGT des Bouches-du-Rhône, Confédération générale du travail (CGT), Case C‑176/12 – read judgement
The Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled on whether the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union can apply in a dispute between private parties, although it is not quite clear what its conclusion implies.
This was a request for a preliminary ruling under Article 267 TFEU from the Cour de cassation (France), received by the CJEU in April last year. Continue reading →
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