Search Results for: environmental/page/49/Freedom of information - right of access) [2015] UKUT 159 (AAC) (30 March 2015)
11 March 2013 by Rosalind English
A newsflash on the eve of the May 2010 elections was instantly eclipsed by the news of the coalition-bartering in the days that followed. But it concerned one of the most important scientific discoveries of the year, if not the century.
Evolutionary biologists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany had finished sequencing the Neanderthal genome. In the publication of their results the team pointed up the similarity between the four billion pairs of Neanderthal DNA and stretches of the human genome, suggesting that humans and their ancient hominid cousins must have interbred some time after modern Homo Sapiens left Africa, meaning that elements of Neanderthal genome is present in non-African modern humans. The study found that 2.5 percent of the genome of an average human living outside Africa today is made up of Neanderthal DNA.
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28 February 2026 by Jasper Gold
How should the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) respond when a person with anorexia, which has had a “severe and debilitating impact on her physical and mental health” for a long time, applies for legal aid to assist her with making an application to the Home Office for permission for her medical team to treat her with psilocybin (the main psychoactive component in various mushrooms commonly referred to as magic mushrooms)?
In R (EB) v Director of Legal Aid Casework [2026] EWHC 402, the High Court considered a challenge to the LAA’s refusal of legal aid for exactly that purpose. The Claimant had been a participant in a clinical trial at Imperial College London (a global leader in psychedelic research, and had found the treatment highly effective with no side effects ([4]). Psilocybin, though, is a controlled drug, and cannot be used even medically without authorisation from the Home Secretary under Section 5 of the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001 (the Regulations), which is far from straightforward.
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22 January 2013 by Guest Contributor
Supreme Court Live in action
Following yesterday’s welcome announcement that the UK Supreme Court (UKSC) is uploading judgment summaries to YouTube (see Adam’s post), there has been some speculation as to whether the UKSC will take the next step in its embrace of digital technology and upload full hearings of trials. But could taking this step result in falling foul of the UK’s copyright law?
There are several issues to consider here. Firstly: who owns the recording? Secondly: what rights do the individuals involved in the recording have? And finally: what defences (if any) apply?
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4 August 2013 by Sarina Kidd
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular heat wave 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 Sarina Kidd.
A fairly quiet week in terms of volume, but nevertheless some notable issues. Of note are plans to restrict judicial review, the ‘bedroom tax’ judgment, and a key decision in the ongoing debate on assisted suicide.
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6 November 2019 by Guest Contributor
Child rights in 2019
The Children Act 1989 (CA 1989) received Royal Assent on 23
November 1989 (30 years ago); and it was in force from October 1991. It was a
major reform of children law which required everyone – parents, children (when
of ‘understanding’), judges, social workers, health professionals and lawyers –
to learn a new set of legal concepts and attitudes. But what about children’s
rights? And what has happened to the law’s regard for those rights since 1989?
The Act required courts to consider a child’s ‘wishes and
feelings’ when that child’s welfare was in issue in a court. In parallel with
this, United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 Art 12.1 –
though not formally part of the Act – says:
States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.
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23 January 2011 by Guest Contributor
Last week, the European Court of Human Rights decided in the case of Haas v. Switzerland (judgment in French only) that the right to private life is not violated when a state refuses to help a person who wishes to commit suicide by enabling that person to obtain a lethal substance.
The applicant in the case, Ernst Haas, had for two decades been suffering from a serious bipolar affective disorder (more commonly known as manic depression). During that time he attempted to commit suicide twice. Later, he tried to obtain a medical prescription for a small amount of sodium pentobarbital, which would have allowed him to end his life without ain or suffering. Not a single psychiatrist, of the around 170 (sic!) he approached, was willing to give him such a prescription. This would have been necessary, under Swiss law, which allowed for assisted suicide if it was not done for selfish motives (in the opposite case, the person assisting could be prosecuted under the criminal code).
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15 February 2012 by Rosalind English
There are those who think that the Strasbourg Court sometimes talks through its fundament. Others are of the view that the sun shines out of it.
This may of course have something to do with the Court’s jurisdictional basis, whose proper name is the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Be that as it may, over the years the Court has become increasingly inclined to describe so many rules, principles, aspects of people’s relationships with each other and sundry other understandings and agreements of civil society as “fundamental” that the word has ceased to resonate with its original meaning as basic, essential, primary, central, or even foundational.
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29 June 2013 by Matthew Flinn
Hollingsworth v Perry – No. 12–144 – Read judgment
United States v Windsor – No. 12–307 – Read judgment
In rulings that have the potential to influence the jurisprudence of courts around the world, the Supreme Court of the United States has handed down two landmark decisions pertaining to the issue of same-sex marriage.
The right of gay and lesbian couples to wed remains one of the most controversial and debated civil rights issues of our time. However, the ground has been shifting with increasing rapidity in recent years and months. The direction of change is clear. There are now fifteen countries which permit or will permit same-sex marriages, including most recently Uruguay, New Zealand and France. With bills steadily progressing through the Parliamentary process, there is a strong possibility that England, Wales and Scotland may soon be added to the list.
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7 September 2013 by Rosalind English
CM, Re Judicial Review [2013] CSOH 143 – read judgment
The Scottish Court of Session has ruled that the prohibition of smoking and possession of tobacco products by patients at a mental hospital was unlawful. Whilst being careful to emphasise that this ruling did not spell out a specific right to smoke, the Court considered that the ban infringed the patients’ right to respect for home under Article 8.
The petitioner, a patient in a high security psychiatric hospital, sought judicial review of the policy adopted by the State Hospitals Board to ban smoking not just inside the hospital but also in the hospital grounds. He claimed that the ban amounted to a breach of his right to respect for private life and home under Article 8, both as a stand‑alone claim and in combination with Article 14 (enjoyment of Convention rights without discrimination). He also argued that the ban constituted an unlawful and discriminatory infringement of his right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions under Article 1 Protocol 1.
The petitioner further based his position on compassionate grounds, pointing out that there are few diversions available in the State Hospital; that he derived pleasure from smoking; and that as an individual with relatively few liberties the removal of his ability to smoke had had a disproportionately large impact on him.
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8 May 2012 by Adam Wagner
Remember the far right? They are back. The ultra-nationalist Golden Dawn party has just won 7% in the Greek elections. Although it rejects “neo-Nazi” labels, its symbolism and style clearly channel fascist parties of the past. It has a Swastika-like logo and inflammatory anti-immigration policies. And for those who thought ultra-nationalism was confined to the history books, this YouTube video of leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos‘s victory speech will be particularly unsettling. To members of the audience who stayed after a black-shirted thug screamed at them to stand up for the leader’s entrance, Mr Michaloliakos made the ominous promise that “a “new golden dawn of Hellenism is rising” and for those “who betray this homeland the time has come to fear”.
The recent successes of far right parties in Europe, which have benefited from recession protest votes and anti-immigration populism, is indeed something to fear. But it also presents an opportunity to reflect on the importance of international human rights standards.
In the ongoing debate over the role of a European system of human rights law, lip service is often paid to the origins of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in post-war Europe. The rise of Fascism had killed tens of millions. The Nuremberg trials, an early experiment for international justice, had been a success. A Europe-wide system of rights protection seemed sensible. It still does.
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11 January 2013 by Adam Wagner
On 29 December 2012 The Daily Telegraph published an article under the headline Christians have no right to refuse to work on Sundays.
This has now been shown to be nonsense. The judgment in Mba v London Borough of Merton was released yesterday and is analysed here. Mr Justice Langstaff made entirely clear that the judgment only applies to the individual worker who brought the appeal, not more generally. Here is some inaccurate reporting from David Barrett (remember this by him?), Telegraph Home Affairs correspondent:
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14 October 2013 by Rosalind English
Cossey, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for Justice [2013] EWHC 3029 (Admin) – read judgment
The High Court has dismissed an “absolutely meritless” claim by a prisoner that, in serving the non-tariff part of his sentence, he should be afforded all the Convention rights enjoyed by prisoners on remand or those serving time for civil offences such as contempt of court. As he had been deprived of the full panoply of rights, he said, he was a victim of discrimination contrary to Article 14.
This, said Mostyn J, was
The sort of claim that gives the Convention, incorporated into our domestic law by the Human Rights Act 1998, a bad name and which furnishes its critics with ammunition to shoot it down.
Were the key architect of the Convention, Lord Kilmuir, alive today, continued the judge, “he would be amazed to be told that a claim for violation of Article 14 was being advanced on the facts of this case.”
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20 August 2012 by Rosalind English
Updated – Tony Nicklinson, one of the two claimants in this case, died on 22 August 2012.
This is Richard Dawkin’s battle cry in response to the recent High Court rejection of the challenge by locked-in sufferers to the murder and manslaughter laws in this country that have condemned them to an unknowable future of suffering.
As explained in my previous posts, Nicklinson, who suffered a catastrophic stroke in 2005, argued for an extension to the common law defence of ‘necessity’ for murder because the alternative – forcing him to stay alive – is worse. His lawyers also submitted that the government is in breach of his Article 8 right to ‘privacy, dignity and autonomy’, a right he cannot exercise independently because of severe disability.
The court rejected the “bold” submission, stating that there was no precedent anywhere in the world and such socially controversial changes were only for Parliament.
But the courts can’t keep ducking away from the problem, because Parliament is never going to address this issue. Why? Because, as Dawkins points out, once again, religion turns out to be the major culprit. Every attempt in the House of Lords “to do something about the right to seek professional (or even amateur) assistance in dying when you are too incapacitated to kill yourself” has crashed and burned, despite huge public support for reform in this area.
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8 July 2011 by Martin Downs
R (on the application of G) v The Governors of X School [2011] UKSC 30 – Read judgment
On 4 October 2007 the parents of a 15 year old boy complained that he had been kissed by his 22 year old school sessional music teaching assistant (G).
After an (inconclusive) Police investigation, the school held a disciplinary hearing and dismissed G. They also referred his case to the Secretary of State with a view to him being barred from working with children. The Claimant appealed to the school governors. He also sought to be represented by his solicitor. In this he was successful on judicial review and at the Court of Appeal.
The question for the Supreme Court was, did Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights (the right to a fair trial) mean that G was entitled to be legally represented at the hearing before the school governors?
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21 May 2017 by Rosalind English
Paradiso and Campanelli v Italy (Application no. 25358/12), 24 January 2017 – read judgment
The Strasbourg Court ruled earlier this year that the prohibition on commercial surrogacy arrangements did not justify the Italian authorities’ actions in removing a 9 month old child from its non-biological parents and taking him into social care. Although they found no right to family life applied in the circumstances, there was a right to private life which the Italian authorities had breached.
The majority judgment as well as the dissenting and partially concurring opinions summarised below reveal very different approaches to the concept of family life across the Strasbourg bench.
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