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Othman (Abu Qatada) v United Kingdom – read judgment| updated (7/2/2012): Abu Qatada is expected to be released from Long Lartin maximum security jail within days. the special immigration appeals commission (Siac) ruled on Monday that Qatada should be freed, despite the Home Office saying he continued to pose a risk to national security.
Angus McCullough QC appeared for Abu Qatada as his Special Advocate in the domestic proceedings before SIAC, the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords. He is not the author of this post.
The Strasbourg Court has ruled today that whilst diplomatic assurances may protect a suspected terrorist from torture, he cannot be deported to Jordan while there remains a real risk that evidence obtained by torture will be used against him.
The following summary is based on the Court’s press release.
The applicant, Omar Othman (Abu Qatada), is a Jordanian national, currently detained in Long Lartin prison. He is suspected of having links with al-Qaeda.He arrived in the United Kingdom in September 1993 and made a successful application for asylum, in particular on the basis that he had been detained and tortured by the Jordanian authorities in 1988 and 1990-1. He was recognised as a refugee in 1994, being granted leave to remain until June 1998.
While his subsequent application for indefinite leave to remain was pending, he was detained in October 2002 under the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act. When that Act was repealed in March 2005, he was released on bail and made subject to a control order under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. While his appeal against the control order was still pending, in August 2005 he was served with a notice of intention to deport him to Jordan. Continue reading →
The Justice and Security Bill, which proposes to introduce secret ‘Closed Material Procedure’ (CMP) hearings into civil trials, has been published. Here are some useful resources for picking your way through the controversy:
You can access all of the UK Human Rights Blog coverage of the secret trials proposals here, including our exclusive on the Special Advocates’ opposition to the proposals, which became the most damaging aspect of the case against the Green Paper.
A substantial majority of Special Advocates has felt driven to decline to accept new appointments to the role. This is a result of the Government’s continuing failure to provide proper support for the controversial system for secret evidence and closed proceedings, avoidably heightening the unfairness that is inherent in such cases. Special Advocates are the security-cleared lawyers appointed to represent the interests of those excluded from closed proceedings and they are central to the functioning of the system.
2012 has been a busy year on the UK human rights front, never short of controversy, hyperbole and even some interesting points of legal principle along the way.
Here are some of the biggest stories from April to June 2012. The first part of this post, January to March, is here. Feel free to comment on my choices, and add your own if you think something is missing.
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular Royal Variety Show of human rights news. The full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here.
This week, there was a flurry of comment and critique on the Ministry of Justice’s paper, ‘Transforming Legal Aid’, human rights abuses both past and present are in the spotlight and there have been some notable decisions from the courts.
Hammerton v. the United Kingdom, Application no. 6287/10 – read judgment.
The European Court of Human Rights has held that the detention of an individual following his breach of a civil contact order, where he had no legal representation, did not violate his rights under Article 5, ECHR (Right to Liberty and Security of Person). However, the decision not to provide compensation to the individual following a failure to provide him with a lawyer during domestic proceedings resulted in a violation of Article 6 (Right to a Fair Trial).
Figures published by the Ministry of Justice showed that the backlog of crown court cases had risen to yet another record high: by 31 March this year, there were almost 60,000 outstanding cases, a rise of 45 per cent on the previous year. In the magistrates’ courts, that figure stood at 400,000, a rise of 21 per cent.
Waiting times have hiked accordingly: the average crown court case it now taking just under a year, 363 days, to be heard. Some trials are already being scheduled for 2023.
These latest figures follow the Ministry of Justice’s End-to-End Rape Review Report on Findings and Actions, covered on last week’s round-up, which revealed that processing times for rape complainants were particularly egregious, averaging around a thousand days between the commission of an offence and the conclusion of a trial.
Several MPs were quick to diagnose root causes of the criminal justice system’s dismal condition. Shadow justice secretary David Lammy complained that ‘the Conservatives are forcing victims of rape, domestic abuse and violent assault to wait months and years for justice if they get it at all’, blaming the compounded effect of ‘the government’s decade of court closures, combined with its incompetent response to the pandemic’. Liberal Democrat MP Wera Hobhouse also pointed to pre-coronavirus underfunding, warning that ‘ministers must not use Covid as an excuse for this backlog, or to undermine the fundamental right to trial by jury.’
There has been much in the press recently about the UK Government being minded to opt out, and/or in, of EU criminal justice measures. The implications of this decision will be significant to the UK’s ability to investigate and prosecute crime. So what does it all mean?
Opting out of what?
The UK managed to negotiate the quite remarkable article 10 to protocol 36 of the Lisbon Treaty which allows for the UK to exercise a power that no other member state of the Union holds. The Lisbon Treaty finally incorporates EU criminal justice measures (which are referred to as the area of police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters) into the main body of treaty law.
In order to do so, it allowed a transitional period of five years (which expires in December 2014), at the end of which, all measures adopted under the earlier treaty provisions (in what was known as the third pillar) are ‘Lisbonised.’ What this means is they become directives rather than framework decisions (and various other equivalents). The difference between the two is that directives are enforceable before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and decisions are not.
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular smorgasbord of human rights news. The full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here.
This week, the accession of the EU to the ECtHR moves towards finalisation, the Iron Lady continues to cause debate and discussion even in death, Legal Aid Reforms bring both praise and consternation and as the Supreme Court swears in new judges, people ask, ‘Where are all the women?’
Marines A & Ors v Guardian News and Media & Other Media [2013] EWCA Crim 2367 – read judgment
On 15 September 2011 a patrol of Royal Marine Commandos were involved in an incident, which resulted in one of them, referred to as “Soldier A”, shooting dead an armed but seriously wounded Taliban fighter. Evidence of the shooting emerged later and five members of the patrol were eventually charged with murder. The charges against two of them were later dropped but the three remaining marines were tried for murder before the Court Martial. On 8 November 2013, Soldier A was found guilty of murder.
Quite apart from this extraordinary facts, the trial was unusual for another reason: publication of the identity of each of the defendants was prohibited at the commencement of the proceedings by an assistant Judge Advocate and later the Judge Advocate General (each of the judge’s in the court martial who considered the issue are referred to throughout as “judge”). The Court Martial Appeal Court (essentially the Court of Appeal Criminal Division sitting under a different name) was later invited to review the orders in respect of reporting restrictions. This was linked to the release of video footage and photographs relied on by the prosecution during the case.
In a significant adverse judgment for child abuse claimants, DFX v Coventry City Council [2021] EWHC 1382 (QB), Mrs Justice Lambert rejected a claim brought by a number of claimants who alleged that the defendant council’s social services negligently delayed in instigating care proceedings and that had they been removed from the family home earlier they would have avoided serial abuse at the hands of their parents.
The factual background was that save for a hiatus between June 2001 and February 2002, the defendant’s social services department had been engaged with the claimants’ family throughout the 15 years from 1995 to 2010. Between 1996 and 1999, the first and second claimants were on the child protection register and, between March and September 2002, all of the claimants were on the register. In April 2009, the defendant issued care proceedings in the Coventry County Court. Initially, the removal of the children was sought under an emergency protection order. This was not successful. An interim order was in March 2010 removing all of the children, save for the eldest (a boy, by then aged 17), into foster care. In June 2010, full care orders were made and care plans removing the eight children from the family were approved by the court.
The claimants’ case was that they each suffered abuse, including sexual abuse, and neglect whilst in the care of their parents before their removal from the family in 2010. The claimants alleged that their parents were unfit to be parents and that this should have been obvious to the social workers involved with the family. Between 1992 and 1997, the father was convicted of four offences of indecency towards teenage girls. He had learning difficulties and had limited insight into his offending. The mother also had learning difficulties and it was alleged that she demonstrated repeatedly that she was either unable or disinclined to protect the claimants from their father or from predatory men who visited the home. The risks to the children were increased by the presence in the home of the maternal grandmother who lived with the family until March 2004. She also had learning difficulties and was associated with three “risky adult” men who visited the home. The home was often squalid and the children dirty and unkempt.
For justice to be seen to be done, judgments given in open court must be accessible in two senses. They must be clearly written so that a reasonably well informed member of the public can understand what is being decided. But they must also be available to the public, and in this sense their accessibility depends on their being reported.
Lord Neuberger, President of the Supreme Court, so stated in the first BAILII annual lecture, hosted by Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP at their premises in Fleet Street last night. The full speech can be read here.
The Ministry of Justice has released its response to the comments generated by the consultation paper on judicial review that was published in December. Unsurprisingly, the Government has signalled that it intends to press ahead with most of the proposals upon which it consulted. In particular, it plans to implement the following proposals:
Time limitsThe time limit for judicial review (which at three months is already very short) will be reduced to six weeks in planning cases and thirty days in procurement cases. The Government recognizes that these timescales are so short that compliance with the Pre-Action Protocol will be impossible, so it will invite the judiciary to disapply the Protocol in such cases. Given that one of the objectives of the Pre-Action Protocol is to encourage pre-litigious resolution of disputes, it is not clear how this will promote the Government’s objective of reducing recourse to litigation.
Oral renewal of applications certified as “totally without merit” Continue reading →
The Children’s Rights Alliance for England (CRAE) v Secretary of State for Justice, G4S and Serco plc, 6 February 2013 – read judgment
The Court of Appeal dismissed this claim by a children’s NGO for an order that the Secretary of State provide information to certain children to the effect that the SoS and his contractors had unlawfully used bodily restraint upon them whilst they were “trainees” in Secure Training Centres. The facts and Foskett J’s judgment under appeal was fully analysed by Rosalind English in her post, so I shall concentrate on the two points of wider interest:
1. is there a duty on the state to tell someone of their legal rights against the state?
2. should domestic human rights case law ever go wider than its Strasbourg equivalent?
Faced with mounting criticism of his reluctance to impose restrictions on British society in the face of the Covid-19 crisis, this evening Boris Johnson ratcheted up Britain’s response by announcing a strict lockdown across the country. His address to the nation is available in full here.
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Othman (Abu Qatada) v United Kingdom – read judgment | updated (7/2/2012): Abu Qatada is expected to be released from Long Lartin maximum security jail within days. the special immigration appeals commission (Siac) ruled on Monday that Qatada should be freed, despite the Home Office saying he continued to pose a risk to national security.
The Justice and Security Bill, which proposes to introduce secret ‘Closed Material Procedure’ (CMP) hearings into civil trials, has been 
2012 has been a busy year on the UK human rights front, never short of controversy, hyperbole and even some interesting points of legal principle along the way.
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular Royal Variety Show of human rights news. The full list of links can be found 
There has been much in the press recently about the UK Government being minded to opt out, and/or in, of EU criminal justice measures. The 
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular smorgasbord of human rights news. The full list of links can be found 
Marines A & Ors v Guardian News and Media & Other Media [2013] EWCA Crim 2367 – 
For justice to be seen to be done, judgments given in open court must be accessible in two senses. They must be clearly written so that a reasonably well informed member of the public can understand what is being decided. But they must also be available to the public, and in this sense their accessibility depends on their being reported.
The Ministry of Justice has released 
The Children’s Rights Alliance for England (CRAE) v Secretary of State for Justice, G4S and Serco plc, 6 February 2013 –
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