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The question of how to determine whether or not the deportation of a foreign national convicted of criminal offending is a disproportionate interference in the family life that they may share with their partner or child has been explored in a series of cases, including the leading decisions of KO (Nigeria) (Appellant) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] UKSC 53 and HA (Iraq) [2020] EWCA Civ 1176 and has been discussed in detail on this blog here, here and here.
The government’s proposed reforms to legal aid will have a catastrophic effect on those who have suffered as a result of negligent medical treatment.
When Kenneth Clarke informed Parliament on Monday that
Legal aid will still routinely be available in civil and family cases where people’s life or liberty is at stake, or where there is risk of serious physical harm or the immediate loss of their home.
he clearly did not mean that the destruction of a person’s life or the suffering of seriously physical harm through the mismanagement of their medical treatment was to be included within this. If he had meant that he would have proposed at the same time that clinical negligence would continue to be funded by legal aid.
Human rights challenges to deportation and extradition seem to be constantly in the public eye. Gary McKinnon’s battle against extradition has caught the public, as has the now notorious “Pathway Students” terrorist deportation case. An examination of three recent decisions highlights the various ways in which the courts approach the human rights arguments in such cases.
There have been a steady stream of high-profile deportation and extradition decisions in the past few weeks, none more controversial than the “Pathway students” case, where two suspected terrorists were saved from deportation to Pakistan as they were thought to be at risk of torture or death upon their return. The Daily Telegraph reports that the Human Rights Act is being invoked in a growing number of asylum and immigration case, although it does not say whether the number of successful uses of the Act has increased.
Unison (No.2), R (on the application of) v The Lord Chancellor – read judgment [2014] EWHC 4198 (Admin)
The Divisional Court (Lord Justice Elias and Mr Justice Foskett) has dismissed Unison’s second-generation attempt to challenge by judicial review the legality of the Employment Tribunal fees system but gave permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal. The “striking” reduction in claims (79 per cent fewer) presented to Employment Tribunals, Lord Justice Elias accepted, was evidence that the system was “extremely onerous” for people in the position of the hypothetical claimants construed by Unison in their legal argument but “not so burdensome as to render the right illusory” (paragraph 53).
Noting the potential infringement of Article 6 rights, Lord Justice Elias was not convinced that the evidence available to the Court surmounted the high threshold set by the European Union case law on effectiveness (paragraphs 23-51; & 60-64); particularly where hypothetical rather than real examples deprived the Lord Chancellor of an opportunity to redress any alleged deficiencies in the scheme (see paragraphs 62-64). Continue reading →
R (o.t.a Guardian Newspapers) v. City of Westminster Magistrates Court, USA as Interested Party, 3 April 2012, Court of Appeal: read judgment
No, not a case about secret trials, but about the way in which newspapers can get hold of court papers in open oral hearings. And, as we shall see, it led to a ringing endorsement of the principle of open justice from the Court of Appeal, leading to production of the documents to the Guardian.
Bribery allegations against a London solicitor and a former executive of a Halliburton company, and extradition sought by the USA and keenly challenged by the defendants. Some lack of clarity as to why the Serious Fraud Office was not prosecuting the defendants. All in all, a tasty morsel for the Guardian to get its teeth into. It was allowed into the hearing, but then not allowed critical documents provided to the courts, including the written arguments submitted by the USA and the defendants, affidavits supporting the extradition, and various other letters and documents put before the court.
In a recent report entitled “It Still Happens Here”, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) and the anti-slavery charity Justice and Care have found a rise in incidents of domestic slavery, and warned that the problem is likely to intensify in the aftermath of the coronavirus crisis.
The family courts were opened up to media scrutiny by the Justice Secretary Jack Straw at the end of April 2009. One year on, the Times legal editor reports that not only have family courts remained closed, but media access is even more restricted than before the reforms.
In a week where promoting open justice has been high on the Court of Appeal’s agenda in cases involving terrorism, Frances Gibb writes that the family courts are still sealed shut: “After a flurry of interest, the media have stopped reporting family cases in all but rare high-profile disputes because a restrictive reporting regime makes coverage meaningless.”
The Justice Secretary’s 2009 reforms were the outcome of years of campaigning by the media and pressure groups to open up the secretive family courts. The arguments had centred on the conflict between the privacy of those involved in proceedings versus the public benefit of open justice; a balancing exercise which all public authorities are now familiar with by virtue of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to privacy). It is an often quoted principle of English law that justice must not just be done but be seen to be done, and it seemed that that the family courts were moving onto that side of the balance.
In the heady days of late April 2009, Camilla Cavendish, who had campaigned for the changes predicted that “more than 200,000 hearings involving sensitive and traumatic cases, and with decisions that will have a huge impact on the lives of children and their families, will now be open to media scrutiny.”
The Lord Chief Justice has emphasised in two Court of Appeal judgments that the jury-less trials must be a last resort and take place only in truly extreme cases. His comments are clearly aimed at putting the breakers on an accelerating trend of requests for jury-less trials in prosecutions of serious crime, following the ground-breaking but controversial ‘Heathrow heist’ trial.
The Criminal Justice Act 2003 limited for the first time the right to trial by jury in the Crown Court, where trials for serious crimes take place. Section 44 provides for the option of judge-only trials if there is a “real and present danger” of jury tampering.
As MPs and Peers consider the Civil Legal Aid (Remuneration)(Amendment)(No 3) Regulations and the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill, Angela Patrick, Director of Human Rights Policy at JUSTICE considers the Lord Chancellor’s view that proposed judicial review changes do not restrict access to judicial review remedies or restrict the rule of law.
Tomorrow (Thursday), MPs will consider a series of detailed amendments to the Government’s proposed changes to judicial review in the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill. The proposed changes to legal aid for judicial review are not up for debate. The Regulations, which will restrict legal aid to only those cases granted permission, are already made and due to come into force on 22 April. There will be no debate on those changes, unless MPs and Peers demand one.
Calderdale Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust v Sandip Singh Atwal [2018] EWHC 961 (QB) — read judgment
In a landmark case an NHS trust has successfully brought contempt proceedings against a DJ who grossly exaggerated the effect of his injuries in an attempt to claim over £800,000 in damages for clinical negligence. He faces a potential jail sentence.
Background
In June 2008 Sandip Singh Atwal attended the A&E department of Huddersfield Royal Infirmary with injuries to his hands and lip sustained after being attacked with a baseball bat. In 2011 Mr Atwal sued Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation trust for negligence, alleging a failure to treat his injuries appropriately. The trust admitted liability, offering Mr Atwal £30,000 to settle the case. Mr Atwal did not accept the offer and in 2014 made a claim for £837,109. The claim including substantial sums for future loss of earnings and care, on the basis that he was unable to work and was grossly incapacitated as a result of his injuries.
The trust were suspicious of Mr Atwal’s claimed disabilities, which were out of all proportion to his injuries and were inconsistent with entries in his contemporaneous medical records. In 2015 they commissioned covert video surveillance of Mr Atwal and investigated his social media postings. The footage showed him working as a courier, lifting heavy items without visible signs of discomfort and dancing in a music video for a single he had released. This led the trust to plead fraudulent exaggeration and to seek to strike out the whole of the special damages claim as an abuse of process. In 2016, shortly before the assessment of damages hearing, Mr Atwal accepted the trust’s offer of £30,000. However the whole £30,000 in compensation was swallowed up in paying the trust’s costs. In fact, Mr Atwal owed a further £5,000 to the trust after eight years of litigation.
Contempt Proceedings
In November 2016 the trust made an application to bring committal proceedings against Mr Atwal for contempt of court, claiming that he had pursued a fraudulent claim for damages for clinical negligence by grossly exaggerating the continuing effect of his injuries. It alleged two forms of contempt:
Fraser v Her Majesty’s Advocate [2011] UKSC 24 (25 May 2011) – Read judgment
The Supreme Court has had to consider (for the second time in a month) the ticklish question of what constitutes a “miscarriage of justice”.
The business is rendered more ticklish because this was a case being handled by the High Court of Justiciary, the court of last resort in all criminal matters in Scotland.
Our previous post questioned whether the finding of a miscarriage of justice entitled the individual, whose conviction is quashed, to compensation for the slur on their innocence. Here the Court scrutinises the actual diagnosis of a miscarriage of justice. They had to do so in this case because their jurisdiction depended on it. This needs some explaining.
R (L) v West London Mental Health Trust; (2) Partnership in Care (3) Secretary of State for Health [2014] EWCA Civ 47 read judgment
Jeremy Hyam of 1 Crown Office Row was for the Trust. He was not involved in the writing of this post.
L, aged 26, was in a medium security hospital for his serious mental health problems. Concerns about his animus towards another patient arose, and the Admissions Panel of Broadmoor (a high security hospital) agreed to his transfer. It did so without allowing his solicitor to attend and without giving him the gist of why his transfer was to be made.
So far, so unfair, you might think, as a breach of the common law duty to come up with a fair procedure.
But the next bit is the difficult bit. How does a court fashion a fair procedure without it becoming like a mini-court case, which may be entirely unsuitable for the issue at hand? This is the tricky job facing the Court of Appeal. And I can strongly recommend Beatson LJ’s thoughtful grappling with the problem, and his rejection of the “elaborate, detailed and rather prescriptive list of twelve requirements” devised by the judge, Stadlen J.
Note, though L eventually lost, the CA considered that proceedings were justified because of their wider public interest. Something for Parliament to deliberate upon when it debates Grayling’s proposed reforms for judicial review: see my recent post.
The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that from 1 May 2003 to 28 June 2004 the UK had jurisdiction under Article 1 (obligation to respect human rights) of the European Convention on Human Rights in respect of civilians killed during security operations carried out by UK soldiers in Basrah.
The court went on to find in Al-Skeini that there had been a failure to conduct an independent and effective investigation into the deaths of the relatives of five of the six applicants, in violation of Article 2 (right to life) of the Convention. The court awarded 17,000 euros to five of the six applicants, in addition to 50,000 euros in costs jointly.
In Al-Jedda, the court found a violation of Article 5 (1) (right to liberty and security) of the European Convention in relation to the internment of an Iraqi for more than three years (2004- 2007) in a detention centre in Basrah.
CF v The Ministry of Defence and others [2014] EWHC 3171 (QB) – read judgment
Angus McCullough QC of 1 Crown Office Row acted as Special Advocate in this case. He has nothing to do with the writing of this post.
The High Court has ruled that in a case against the state which did not directly affect the liberty of the subject, there was no irreducible minimum of disclosure of the state’s case which the court would require. The consequences of such disclosure for national security prevailed.
Factual and legal background
The claimant, Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed, had made a number of claims against various government departments, alleging complicity in unlawful and arbitrary detention and inhuman and degrading treatment and torture on the part of British authorities in Somaliland. He also sought damages for trespass, breach of the Human Rights Act 1998, and misfeasance in public office. As Irwin J said,
The remedy sought is not confined to ordinary compensation, but extends to damages for breach of the Convention and to declaratory relief, which in the context of this case, and if the Claimant succeeded, would represent an important marking of unlawful behaviour: a matter in which there is a legitimate public interest.
It is ten years since the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. Like many people, I have been thinking back to where I was on that day.
Bizarrely, given what followed, I spent 11 September 2001 only a few miles away from the United States military base in Guantanamo Bay. I was travelling through Cuba with friends, and we had reached the Eastern tip of the island, the seaside village of Baracoa. We had even visited Guantanamo Bay’s entrance the previous day; it was a tourist attraction which the Lonely Planet guide billed as the place where you could find Cuba’s only MacDonalds.
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R (L) v West London Mental Health Trust; (2) Partnership in Care (3) Secretary of State for Health [2014] EWCA Civ 47 
It is ten years since the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. Like many people, I have been thinking back to where I was on that day.
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