Search Results for: environmental/page/37/Freedom of information - right of access) [2015] UKUT 159 (AAC) (30 March 2015)

An inquest after a murder: Coroner’s decision not to resume is upheld despite Article 2 challenge

21 July 2025 by Richard Mumford

At the heart of the case of R (Bailey) v HM Senior Coroner for East London [2025] EWHC 1637 (Admin), a tragedy: the murder of a 14-year-old boy, Jaden Bailey, and the profound grief of his mother. Jaden had been drawn into criminal activity, first in Nottinghamshire, then London. In October 2018 he had been found at a “cuckoo house” in Bournemouth, in possession of cocaine, a mobile phone and £325 in cash. He was brought back to London by the Metropolitan Police, following which an action plan was prepared by the Children’s Social Care Department of the London Borough of Waltham Forest. In November 2018 Jaden was permanently excluded from school after a Snapchat video showed him in possession of an imitation firearm, for which he was arrested and charged, pleading guilty. On 8 January 2019 Jaden was riding a moped in Leyton when he was hit by a car; the occupants of the car got out and stabbed Jaden. He died at the scene.

Ratcliffe climate change protesters acquitted on appeal

20 July 2011 by David Hart KC

Barkshire & others v. R.     Read Judgment

The remaining Ratcliffe on Soar climate change prosecution reached the Court of Appeal on Tuesday, and led to appeals being allowed today. We have covered this trial, here and here, most recently on the collapse of a second prosecution after the revelation of activities by an undercover police officer.

The Court of Appeal was very concerned by the lack of disclosure given by the prosecution concerning the undercover police officer, and it was this which ultimately led to the convictions being quashed. But the judgment is not all good news for climate change protesters, as we shall see.

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Covid, the Cabinet and a tussle over disclosure: R (Cabinet Office) v The Chair of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry

26 July 2023 by Gareth Rhys

Introduction

In a decision that may come as little surprise to those working in the fields of inquiries and public law, the Divisional Court consisting of Dingemans LJ and Garnham J dismissed the Cabinet Office’s application for judicial review of a notice issued by Baroness Hallett, the Chair of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry (“the Inquiry”) requesting the production of WhatsApp messages.

The issues for determination related to the scope of the powers of the Chair under the Inquiries Act 2005 to seek and obtain material in the course of her investigations pursuant to the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference. The Cabinet Office sought to argue that some of the material sought by the Chair was “unambiguously irrelevant” to the Terms of Reference. The Chair’s position was that all documents she requested were of “potential relevance” to her lines of investigation. The Divisional Court gave permission to apply (i.e. met the threshold for review and the claim raised an important issue as to the interpretation of the Inquiries Act 2005) but went on to dismiss the substantive claim.

Press regulation on a sinking ship

28 March 2012 by Rosalind English

Cairns v Modi [2012] EWHC 756 – read judgment 

It was coincidental that this cricket libel case and Lady Justice Arden’s speech on media intrusion and human rights “Striking the Balance” came out on the same day.

Non-followers of cricket and non-followers of Twitter are equally bemused by the vastly frothed story about  match-fixing allegations, but this was the first social networking libel to hit the law reports in this country.  Despite this, the case has all the trappings of an old fashioned defamation case –  strong public figures, ready to come forward to defend their reputation/publication; a long lead time between publication and identification of the libel, protracted cross examination, sheaves of evidence going to both justification and claimant. The claimant is a famous New Zealand cricketer with a reputation to defend. Nothing new there. The novelty was that the defendant, one time chairman of the hugely popular Indian Premier cricket league, posted a line on his Twitter profile implying that the claimant had cheated by fixing matches. It was serendipitous that the author of the tweet, Mr Modi, is both a well known figure, resident in England, and ready to come forward. The justification defence fell apart and the claimant was awarded £75,000, with another £15K for aggravated damages. End of story. Or is it?
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The Round up: UAE pardons British spy suspect, Interpol gets a new president, Court of Appeal overturns damages in haemophilia/autism case

26 November 2018 by Thomas Hayes

New Interpol President Kim Jong-Yang – credit The Guardian

From Strasbourg to the Strand, this week saw a plethora of judgements delivered in cases with notably interesting facts. However, arguably the most widely reported legal news concerned two stories, neither involving judgements in the UK courts. The case of six-year-old girl sexually assaulted by other pupils at a primary school made headlines after a local authority, whilst not admitting liability, settled her claim following a round table meeting in March this year. The High Court has now approved this settlement to make it binding on the parties (a necessary move when one party is a child to prevent them seeking further damages when they attain a majority) in litigation which some consider may contribute to legal precedent. More on that here. Meanwhile, the case of Matthew Hedges, a British academic jailed for life in the UAE on spying charges widely considered unfounded, appears to be resolved.  Reports this morning indicate Mr Hedges has been unconditionally pardoned and is likely to be released imminently. This case raised profound questions about the rule of law and reliability of the judiciary in a Middle East country considered one of the West’s closest and most reliable partners.
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High Court defends freedom of expression for news websites

12 April 2010 by Isabel McArdle

SAMUEL KINGSFORD BUDU v THE BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION [2010] EWHC 616 (QB), 23 March 2010

Read judgment

A claim for libel in respect of three articles in a news website’s archive has been struck out in the Hight Court by Mrs Justice Sharp. When read in context, the articles were incapable of bearing the alleged defamatory meaning, the publisher had attached Loutchansky notices to them, and it would be a disproportionate interference with the publisher’s rights under ECHR Article 10 to allow the claim to proceed where it had been brought after four years had passed since the publication of the articles.

Summary

The Claimant brought proceedings in respect of three archived articles published by the BBC in mid 2004. They related to the decision of Cambridgeshire Constabulary to withdraw an oral job offer made to the Claimant after subsequently investigating the legality of his immigration status. Within weeks of first being published, the articles became accessible only in the archive, via search engines. The action related to the articles in the archive and the related Google snippets.

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No right for prisoner to wear Easter lily

10 February 2011 by Guest Contributor

The recent critics of Strasbourg judicial activism will, doubtless, be pleased by the Court’s latest Article 10 decision.  Free speech campaigners may have more mixed views.

In the case of Donaldson v United Kingdom ([2011] ECHR 210) the Fourth Section held that the application of a serving Republican prisoner alleging a violation of his rights under Article 10 (freedom of speech) and Article 14 (discrimination) was inadmissible.

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We need to think about Kevin

29 May 2012 by Rosalind English

Monsters are born, not made: the latest round in the debate about criminal responsibility questions the very  existence of intuitive morality.

US neuroscientist Sam Harris claims in a new book that free will is such a misleading illusion that we need to rethink our criminal justice system on the basis of discoveries coming from the neurological wards and MRI scans of the human brain in action.

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously demonstrated in the 1980s that activity in the brain’s motor regions can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Subjects were hooked up to an EEG machine and were asked to move their left or right hand at a time of their choosing. They watched a specially designed clock to notice what time it was when they were finally committed to moving left or right hand. Libet measured the electrical potentials of their brains and discovered that nearly half a second before they were aware of what they were going to do, he was aware of their intentions. Libet’s findings have been borne out more recently in direct recordings of the cortex from neurological patients. With contemporary brain scanning technology, other scientists in 2008 were able to predict with 60% accuracy whether subjects would press a button with their left or right hand up to 10 seconds before the subject became aware of having made that choice (long before the preparatory motor activity detected by Libet).
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Brain-damaged claimant fails in Article 8 claim against Council

2 July 2013 by David Hart KC

Bedford v. Bedfordshire County Council, 21 June 2013, Jay J – read judgment

On 29 May 2004, Bradley Bedford, then aged 13, was beaten senseless by one AH, then 15, whom he had the misfortune to encounter entirely by chance near the seaside in Torbay. AH was in a children’s home there which was contracted to the Defendant Council; AH was a “looked after” child under section 20 of the Children Act 1989. Bradley sued the Council for failing to protect him. His claim was limited to one under the Human Rights Act, and Article 8 ECHR in particular.

Jay J dismissed the claim on the grounds that (a) it was brought too late; (b) there was not a real and immediate risk of harm to Bradley of which the Council should have been aware; (c) even if there was, the local authority took reasonable steps to eliminate or substantially reduce any risk. All these rulings are of some interest.

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When human rights hit the private law of damages for death

24 July 2012 by David Hart KC

Swift v. Secretary of State for Justice [2012] EWHC 2000 (QB) Eady J, read judgment

This decision involves the intersection of Articles 8 (family) and 14 (discrimination) of the ECHR with the law governing who can recover damages for the death of a relative. This law is the Fatal Accidents Act 1976 (for the text see [10] of the judgment – embarrassingly, the one freely available on the internet is out of date). One does not to think for very long before realising that the FAA is underpinned by an idea that one ought to respect the rights of the family, and to pay the family when one has negligently caused the death of a family member. But like all such laws, there is the problem of where to stop – where does the family stop for these purposes?

Ms Swift had been living with Mr Winters for 6 months when he was killed at work. She was pregnant with their child. Under FAA rules, her child had a claim for financial dependency against his father’s employer – what he expected to derive from his father had his father lived – even though he was not born at the date of his father’s death. Indeed, her son recovered £105,000. But, says the FAA, Ms Swift does not have a claim. s.1(3) requires an unmarried partner to have been living with the deceased for 2 years before his death before they can become a “dependant”, and no amount of re-writing via  s.3 of the Human Rights Act  (to make the FAA  rights-compliant “so far as possible”) can make “2 years” read as “6 months” . Had she qualified as a dependant, she would have had a claim for about £400,000.

So Ms Swift’s claim was against the Secretary of State for a declaration that the FAA was incompatible with her Article 8 and 14 rights.

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Supreme Court revises confiscation order via A1P1

18 June 2014 by David Hart KC

R v Ahmad and others [2014] UKSC 36, 18 June 2014 – read judgment

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Immigration removal and an Article 2 inquest

29 April 2021 by Caroline Cross

R (Lawal) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (2021), Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber), Unreported, JR/626/2020 (V) — read judgment

The death of an immigration detainee, as with all prisoners, is rightly subject to legal scrutiny. This is because detainees are completely under the state’s control. Article 2 ECHR requires that the state carry out an effective investigation into all deaths in detention where there is a reasonable suspicion that the death was unnatural. A coroner is required to hold an inquest into all deaths in custody, and specifically a jury inquest where there is reason to suspect the death is violent or unnatural.

In this case, a two-judge panel of the Upper Tribunal (President of the Upper Tribunal, Mr Justice Lane, and Upper Tribunal Judge Canavan) found that the respondent Home Secretary had breached her Article 2 procedural obligations in respect of deaths in immigration detention. In particular, she had failed to ensure that crucial witness evidence was secured for use at an inquest and had failed to halt the deportation of a relevant witness.

The facts

Mr Oscar Lucky Okwurime (‘OO’) was a Nigerian national. On 12 September 2019 he was found dead in his room at Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre, aged 36. The applicant in these proceedings, Ahmed Lawal, was also a Nigerian national and a good friend of the deceased. He was detained on the same wing at the time of the death.

Immigrants Go Home, the Third Source & Judicial Review Standing Changes – The Human Rights Roundup

29 July 2013 by Daniel Isenberg

Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular social media storm of human rights news and views. The full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here. Links compiled by Adam Wagner, post by Daniel Isenberg.

With the judges winding down for their end of term break, this is not such a busy week of news; so instead a good opportunity to think over the role of the European Convention on Human Rights.  Various immigration stories keeping the commentators busy, if not making the headlines; and keep up-to-date in public law with the latest from the ALBA conference.

Reminder: there is a Rally for Legal Aid  tomorrow, Tuesday 30 July, 4:30-6:30 at the Old Bailey. Full details here.

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Will mediation save the justice system?

12 November 2010 by Adam Wagner

Much has been made of the benefits of mediation and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in recent weeks, both as a means of reducing the bitterness of family justice proceedings and also of saving money in the court system by keeping people out of it.

But is mediation a knight in shining armour or a trendy buzzword used as an excuse to keep people out of the expensive court system? The debate is often heard but rarely goes beyond anecdotal evidence. Lord Neuberger, our highly active Master of the Rolls, has given an excellent speech on the topic, entitled Has mediation had its day?, which presents the evidence on both sides, including references to a number of research studies.

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Joint Committee on Human Rights calls for control order scheme to be discontinued

31 March 2010 by Angus McCullough KC

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights (‘the Joint Committee’) has released its report on the Annual Renewal of Control Order Legislation 2010, in which it heavily criticised the control order scheme. The scheme, introduced in 2005, allows courts to put terror suspects under restrictions resembling house arrest by placing them under curfews of up to 16 hours a day and, typically, constraints on their movements and communications. There were 12 suspects subject to control orders in December 2009.

Whereas the Joint Committee has previously criticised the scheme, this is the first time that it has recommended for it to be discontinued. The committee said:

We have serious concerns about the control order system. Evidence shows the devastating impact of control orders on the subject of the orders, their families and their communities. In addition detailed information is now available about the cost of control orders which raises questions about whether the cost the system is out of all proportion to the supposed public benefit. We find it hard to believe that the annual cost of surveillance of the small number of individuals subject to control orders would exceed the amount currently being paid to lawyers in the ongoing litigation about control orders. Finally, we believe that because the Government has ignored our previous recommendations for reform, the system gives rise to unnecessary breaches of individuals’ rights to liberty and due process.

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