Search Results for: environmental/page/26/Freedom of information - right of access) [2015] UKUT 159 (AAC) (30 March 2015)
24 May 2012 by Rosalind English
BSkyB and another, R(on the application of) v Chelmsford Crown Court [2012] EWHC 1295 (Admin) – read judgment
The police failed to satisfy the court that their need for footage taken by TV organisations was likely to be of substantial value to criminal investigations and therefore would be a justified interference with the rights of a free press under Article 10 of the Human Rights Convention.
Sky, BBC, ITN etc. succeeded in quashing an order to produce of 100+ hours of video footage to Essex Police of the Dale Farm protesters on the grounds that there were no “reasonable grounds” for believing that the footage of over 100 hours included material likely to be of substantial value to the investigation.
Background facts
After the Dale Farm evictions and the disorder that ensued, the police sought an order for the recordings taken by the claimant organisations to help identify those who had committed indictable offences when attempting to prevent the eviction. They submitted that it was necessary, not least for the prevention of similar disorder on future occasions, to identify as many as possible of those who committed indictable offences in attempting to frustrate the lawful enforcement procedures. Production orders were duly made by Chelmsford Crown Court, defendant in this action.
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7 December 2021 by Guest Contributor
White v General Medical Council [2021] EWHC 3286 (Admin) (03 December 2021)
A case in which the High Court reminds the regulator of requirements for imposing curbs on free speech.
Dr Samuel White is a GP. Earlier this year he posted a seven minute video on Instagram explaining that he had resigned from his job because, he said, he could no longer stomach the lies surrounding the NHS approach to the pandemic and because medical professionals were having their hands tied behind their backs in treating patients. He stated that he was being prevented from using treatments that had been established as being effective both as prophylaxis and treatment for Covid-19, naming hydroxychloroquine, budesonide inhalers and ivermectin, which he described as safe and proven. He raised concerns about the safety of the Covid-19 vaccine and claimed that 99% of people who contract the virus survive, with the only fatalities in those with multiple medical problems. He stated that masks do absolutely nothing. He invited his viewers to do their own research, but referred to a number of websites which supported his view.
A complaint was made to the General Medical Council, which commenced an investigation into his fitness to practise as a doctor. The GMC referred his case to an Interim Orders Tribunal on the basis that his practise should be restricted pending investigation and the conclusion of the case. The role of an IOT is not to find facts, but to conduct a risk assessment based on the information before them and determine whether an interim order is necessary to protect patients or otherwise in the public interest.
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20 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
Terry Jones, an American pastor who threatened to burn Korans on the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, has been banned from entering the UK “for the public good”.
He has told BBC Radio 5 live that he would challenge the “unfair” decision as his visit could have been “beneficial”. But, as I posted last month, the recent case of an Indian preacher who challenged his exclusion from the UK suggests that the courts would be unlikely to quash the Home Secretary’s decision. The following is taken from my previous post on the topic.
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13 December 2010 by Adam Wagner
Terry Jones, an American pastor who threatened to burn Korans on the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, may be banned from visiting the UK by the home secretary.
Jones, an otherwise unknown local pastor in Gainsville, Florida, cause worldwide controversy earlier this year when he proposed an “International Burn a Koran Day”. He has not as yet carried out his threat.
It is well known that free speech protections mean that we have to protect the rights of those we disagree with. A recent High Court case involving an Indian preacher shows that the protection probably does not extend to non-UK residents such as Jones, but it may to his supporters.
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20 November 2018 by Conor Monighan
Conor Monighan brings us the latest updates in human rights law
Max Hill QC. Credit: The Guardian
In the News:
Max Hill QC, the new Director of Public Prosecutions (‘DPP’), has said that rape victims’ mobile phones will no longer be seized “as a matter of course”.
His comments come in the wake of allegations that prosecutors are increasingly making demands to access victims’ personal data. The Association of Police and Crime Commissioners suggested that the CPS been pushing investigators to make more invasive searches, even if officers are satisfied that they have pursued all reasonable lines of inquiry. This may be part of an effort to improve conviction rates.
Big Brother Watch wrote to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) last week arguing against this trend. The campaigning group said it was becoming ‘routine’ to download the contents of sexual offence victims’ phones, and that the information could legally be stored for 100 years. In response, the ICO is considering widening its investigation into the use of victims’ information. It also spoke out against accessing rape victims’ mobile phone data and personal records.
Max Hill QC says that he aims to boost public confidence in the CPS and would improve the disclosure of evidence in criminal trials. The organisation has been struggling under 25% budget cuts and revelations of recent disclosure failings.
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14 July 2010 by Adam Wagner
Don't follow the money
Flood v Times Newspapers Ltd [2010] EWCA Civ 804 (13 July 2010) – Read judgment
A Detective Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police accused of taking bribes has won his battle against the Times to prevent the newspaper relying on the Reynolds defence, which allows allegations to be reported even the it they turn out to be wrong, in the interest of media freedom.
In June 2006 the newspaper had published an article entitled “Detective accused of taking bribes from Russian exiles”, leading the detective to sue in libel The Court of Appeal reversed the decision of Mr Justice Tugendhat in the High Court which had said the Times could rely on Reynolds privilege. The Inforrm Blog has provided an excellent analysis of the judgment. The post sums up the facts as follows:
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15 October 2018 by Alasdair Henderson
The cake at the centre of the controversy — Image: The Guardian
Lee v. Ashers Baking Company Ltd – read judgment here.
On Wednesday the Supreme Court handed down its much-anticipated judgment in the ‘gay cake’ case. The Court unanimously held that it was not direct discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or political opinion for the owners of a Northern Irish bakery to refuse to bake a cake with the message ‘Support Gay Marriage’ on it, when to do so would have been contrary to their sincerely held religious beliefs.
The judgment is a significant and welcome affirmation of the fundamental importance of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. The Court emphasised that refusing to provide a good or service to someone because they are gay (or because of any other protected characteristic) is unlawful discrimination — this judgment should not give anyone the idea that discrimination is now acceptable. However, the Court made clear that the purpose of equality law is to protect people, not ideas, and that no-one should ever be compelled by law to make a statement or express a message with which they do not agree.
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18 January 2013 by Guest Contributor
Mark Kennedy
AKJ & Ors v Commissioner of Police for the Metroplis & Ors [2013] EWHC 32 (QB) – Read judgment
The High Court has ruled that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal was the exclusive jurisdiction for Human Rights Act claims against the police as a result of the activities of undercover police officers, authorised as Covert Human Intelligence Sources, where such conduct was not a breach of a fundamental right. The Tribunal did not have jurisdiction to determine proceedings brought by Claimants at common law.
The decision of AKJ and related litigation is the latest instalment of the fallout from the activities of undercover police officer or Covert Human Intelligence Source (CHIS) Mark Kennedy and another police officer. Kennedy infiltrated environmental protest groups including those that resulted in convictions following events at Ratcliffe on Soar power station. The convictions were later quashed following revelations about Kennedy’s activities which included allegations he had engaged in sexual relationships with a number of female protestors and other prosecutorial impropriety: R v Barkshire [2011] EWCA Crim 1885 (UKHRB post). A number of those affected by Kennedy’s actions subsequently brought claims in tort (for example alleging deception) and under the Human Rights Act 1998.
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3 June 2019 by Conor Monighan
Conor Monighan brings us the latest updates in human rights law
Credit: The Guardian
In the News:
The High Court has granted a without-notice injunction which bans protesters from gathering outside a primary school’s gates.
Protesters have been campaigning for weeks against Anderton Park Primary School’s decision to teach its pupils about LGBT issues. The activists argue that the children are ‘too young’ to understand the relationships. Some have also stated that it conflicts with Islamic teaching.
The Headteacher, Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson, told the media that she has received a number of threatening messages. The school had to close early for half-term due to the protests.
Birmingham City Council applied for the injunction last week on the basis that the protests were beginning to jeopardise the safety of staff, pupils and parents. The injunction will last until the 10th June.
In Other News….
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21 November 2011 by Richard Mumford
This is a case in which Philip Havers QC of 1 Crown Office Row appeared for the General Dental Council; he is not the author of this post.
The General Dental Council v Savery and others [2011] EWHC 3011 (Admin) – Read judgment
Mr Justice Sales in the High Court has ruled that the General Dental Council’s (GDC) use and disclosure of the dental records of fourteen patients of a registered dentist who was the subject of investigation was lawful.
The court also offered general guidance about how the GDC may proceed (particularly by reference to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to privacy and family life) when it wishes to investigate allegations against a dentist of impairment of fitness to practise by reference to confidential patient records in the absence of consent from the patients in question.
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7 October 2014 by Rosalind English
D’Arcy v Myriad Genetics Inc [2014] FCAFC 115 (5 September 2014) – read judgment The recent ruling from the Full Federal Court of Australia allowing the breast cancer gene isolated in the laboratory to be patented contrasts sharply with the ruling by the US Supreme Court last year that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a “product of nature” and therefore not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated. The implications of this ruling for gene testing and patenting of biological products have been eloquently discussed elsewhere and I will not attempt to cover the same ground – see for example the excellent discussion posted by the Enhanced Genetic Services Project. All I want to point up in this post – apart from the obvious need for intellectual property law to encompass the development of science and technology – is the Australian court’s focus on how easily misled one may be by semantics in this sort of dispute. This ruling upholds an earlier decision that gene patenting is permissible under Australian law, declaring that “the boundaries of the conception of patentability are not dictated only by deductive logic from the linguistic premises formulated in the scientific knowledge of a particular age”. The concept of patentability has been broadening since the first quarter of the 17th century, and there is no reason why it should reach an artificial wall erected by unfathomable and unexplained “laws of nature” (a premise much relied upon by the US Supreme Court). I posted last year on the decision of the US Supreme Court in Association for Molecular Pathology v Myriad Genetics Inc. It will be remembered that that Court held that a sequence of DNA mimicking the BRCA breast cancer mutation could not be patented because DNA’s information sequences and all the other processes that allow the information to manufacture bodily tissues occur naturally within human cells.
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8 March 2012 by Rosalind English
W (Algeria) (FC) and BB (Algeria) (FC) and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2012] UKSC 8 – read judgment
As we reported in our summary of the decision earlier, the Supreme Court has confirmed that the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) has the power to order that certain witness evidence may be produced in conditions of absolute and irreversible secrecy.
A brief recapitulation: the appellants were resisting return to Algeria, a a country where torture has been systematically practised by the relevant authorities. The respondent secretary of state had obtained assurances from the Algerian Government that the appellants’ rights would be respected upon return, but, in appeals to the Commission, the appellants wished to adduce evidence from witnesses with inside knowledge of the position in Algeria that those assertions would not be honoured, and that torture and ill-treatment of the returnees was likely. The witnesses were not prepared to give evidence in the appeals unless their identity and evidence would remain forever confidential to the Commission and the parties to the appeal. The Court of Appeal held that despite the breadth of the Commission’s powers under Rule 39(1) of the SIAC (Procedure) Rules 2003, it was not open to it to give such guarantees. The Supreme Court overturned that ruling, declaring that SIAC could give an absolute and irrevocable guarantee of total confidentiality to a witness who was prepared to testify that the deportee was likely to be subjected to torture or ill-treatment upon return despite contrary assurances from the authorities in the country of return.
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27 November 2018 by Hannah Noyce
Khan v MNX [2017] EWHC 2990 (QB) – read judgment.
The Court of Appeal has held that a mother who consults a doctor in order to avoid the birth of a child with one disability may not recover damages for the costs associated with a different disability.
The Facts
The respondent, M, was concerned that she may be a carrier of haemophilia and consulted her GP, who arranged blood tests. Those tests, however, could only detect whether she herself had haemophilia, and not whether she was a carrier. She then saw the appellant, another GP, who told her that the results of the tests were normal. This led her to believe, incorrectly, that any child she had would not have haemophilia. The appellant admitted that she had been negligent.
M went on to have a son, FGN, who has haemophilia. Had she known that she was a carrier before she became pregnant, she would have undergone foetal testing, which would have revealed the condition, and she would have had a termination. Therefore, but for the negligence, FGN would never have been born.
FGN has also developed autism, which is unrelated to his haemophilia.
The claim sought the costs attributable to the haemophilia and to the autism.
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4 January 2016 by Hannah Lynes
The first round=up of 2016 is brought to you by Hannah Lynes.
In the news
The interior ministry of Saudi Arabia has confirmed this week that it has executed 47 people in a single day. Included among those put to death was prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, who had been a vocal supporter of the 2011 anti-government protests in the country’s Eastern Province.
The execution of Sheikh Nimr has provoked demonstrations across Iran, Bahrain, Iraq and Shia-majority areas in Saudi Arabia. A spokesperson for the Iranian foreign ministry has said that the Saudi Government would pay “a heavy price” for its actions, while the US state department has expressed concern that the execution “risks exacerbating sectarian tensions at a time when they urgently need to be reduced.”
International human rights organisation Reprieve has noted with alarm that “the Saudi Government is continuing to target those who have called for domestic reform in the kingdom”, with at least four of those executed having been convicted of offences related to political protest. The organisation said it had “real concerns” that protestors Ali al-Nimr (Sheikh Nimr’s nephew), Dawoud al-Marhoon, and Abdullah al-Zaher, sentenced to death as children, would be “next in line”.
A statement released by the UK foreign office has emphasised that “the UK opposes the death penalty in all circumstances and in every country.” But despite the much-criticised record of Saudi Arabia on human rights, it recently emerged that Britain had entered into a vote-trading deal with the kingdom to ensure the election of both states to the UN human rights council.
The UK Government has also come under pressure to discontinue its supply of weapons to Saudi Arabia, in circumstances where its bombing campaign in Yemen has led to thousands of civilian deaths. In a legal opinion commissioned by Amnesty International, lawyers from Matrix Chambers concluded that authorisation of the transfer of weapons to the state would “constitute a breach by the UK of its obligations under domestic, European and international law.”
In other news:
The Guardian: A gay British man has avoided extradition to Dubai on charges of theft. A judge at Westminster magistrates court ruled that the UAE had failed to provide adequate assurances that the trial and treatment of Mr Halliday, given his circumstances, would meet the required human rights standards.
The Telegraph: Lord Lester of Herne Hill QC has expressed concern that the Government is undermining freedom of information laws, and is “obsessively secretive”about things that should be in the public domain. The latest releases by the National Archives included only 14 files for the years 1987 and 1988, whereas last year more than 500 files were released.
The Law Society and the Bar Council have issued a joint call for legally privileged communications data to be protected by express provisions in the investigatory powers bill. Current proposals have been criticised as threatening a common law right traceable back to the 16th Century. The Law Society Gazette reports.
The Independent: Senior civil servant Sir Jeremy Heywood is understood to be opposed to the implementation of any major reforms to the Freedom of Information Act. A Government commission is considering proposals to introduce charges for information requests and stricter rules for the obtaining of information.
In the Courts:
This case concerned an allegation of inconsistent case-law amounting to a breach of Article 6 ECHR (the right to a fair trial). The applicants complained about the rejection of their civil claims against Serbia by domestic courts, and the simultaneous acceptance by the same courts of other claims which were based on similar facts and concerned identical legal issues.
The Court reiterated the principle that an assessment of whether conflicting decisions of different domestic courts were in breach of Article 6 consisted in establishing whether “profound and long-standing differences” existed in the relevant case-law. The Serbian judiciary had, generally speaking, harmonised their case-law on the matter, and the rejection of the applicants’ cases was exceptional. The possibility of conflicting court decisions was an inherent trait of any judicial system based on a network of trial and appeal courts with authority over a certain area. That in itself, however, could not be considered to be in breach of the Convention. The Court therefore found no violation of Article 6.
Events
If you would like your event to be mentioned on the Blog, please email Jim Duffy at jim.duffy@1cor.com
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19 June 2011 by David Hart KC
Gaunt, R (ota) v. Ofcom [2011] EWCA Civ 692 read judgment
No prizes for guessing which redtop hosted an article so titled. Its author, given his past, felt very strongly about Redbridge Council seeking to ban foster parents from smoking; hence his article dubbed them as “health and safety Nazis”. So he went on and interviewed a councillor on Talksport, had a go at him – and then completely “lost it”. He promptly lost his job, and got rapped over the knuckles by Ofcom for being in breach of the Broadcasting Code. This case is about his unsuccessful attempt to overturn the latter on Article 10 grounds – interference with freedom of speech.
Somewhat ambitious appeal, this. Para. 2.1 of the Broadcasting Code seeks to protect members of the public from harmful and/or offensive materials. Para 2.3 says that broadcasters must ensure that material which may cause offence is justified by the context. Such material may include, among other material, offensive language.
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BSkyB and another, R(on the application of) v Chelmsford Crown Court [2012] EWHC 1295 (Admin) – read judgment
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