Search Results for: justice and security bill

10 cases that defined 2020

24 December 2020 by Jonathan Metzer

This time last year I wrote that 2019 had been “perhaps the most tumultuous period in British politics for decades”. Little did I know what 2020 would have in store.

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused loss, suffering and anxiety across not only the UK but almost all of the globe. At the UK Human Rights Blog, we feel deep gratitude to the doctors, nurses, carers and essential workers who have kept society going in what has been a deeply difficult year for so many of us.

In light of this, it is perhaps harder to summon the usual festive spirit that graces the approach of the holiday period — particularly as so many of us will be separated from our loved ones. And yet, perhaps it makes holding onto some spirit of joy all the more necessary.

Writing the article summing up the legal developments of the year is one of the highlights for me as commissioning editor of this blog. Let us embark together on a tour of what the courts had to say over the last 12 months. As ever, it has been a very interesting year.

Government back in court over foreign torture allegations

20 April 2010 by Adam Wagner

The case of The Queen on the application of Evans v Secretary Of State For Defence is continuing today in the Royal Courts of Justice in London, before Lord Justice Richards and Mr Justice Cranston.

Maya Evans, an activist, is brining a judicial review against the Ministry of Defence  in respect of the British Army’s detainee transfer policy in Afghanistan. It is alleged that British forces knew of the torture risks when handing over prisoners to the Afghan security services.

This is the latest in a series of cases where the Government have been criticised in the courts for defence policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007, the House of Lords (the old Supreme Court) in Al-Skeini effectively opened the door to such claims by foreign nationals by holding that the Human Rights Act applies outside of the UK.

The most notable recent example is the Binyam Mohamed case, where the Court of Appeal heavily criticised the security services. Similar issues in relation to secret evidence appear to have arisen in Evans, with The Guardian reporting:

So concerned is the Ministry of Defence about the challenge to the practice, that it is insisting that evidence it had passed to her lawyers must now be suppressed.

As a result, skeleton argument from her lawyers – a document consisting of an outline of the case – includes a number of passages blacked out at the insistence of the MoD.

Following one long excised passage, the document revealed in court today reads: “The lessons from these shocking events is … investigation by the NDS [Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security] is obviously incapable of providing any satisfaction of the UK’s human rights obligations.”

Read more:

• Our posts on the Binyam Mohamed litigation can be found here, here, and here
• Our case comment on R (Mazin Mumaa Galteth Al Skeini and others) v Secretary of State for Defence

The Round-Up: NI Change in Abortion Laws, and the Lord’s Prayer Ban

30 November 2015 by Laura Profumo

Laura Profumo considers the latest human rights headlines.

In the News

The High Court in Belfast today ruled that abortion legislation in Northern Ireland is in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHCR) brought the case to extend abortion to cases of serious foetal malformation, rape and incest.

The Abortion Act 1967 does not extend to Northern Ireland: abortion is only allowed there if a woman’s life is at risk, or if there is a permanent risk to her mental or physical health. In this judicial review, it was held that the grounds for abortion should be extended, though it is still to be determined whether new legislation will be required to give effect to the ruling.

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UN Committee “seriously concerned” about the impact of austerity on human rights

30 June 2016 by Hannah Noyce

The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) has published a damning report on the UK’s implementation of economic, social and cultural rights. The report is available here (under “Concluding Observations”).

The CESCR monitors the implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), an international treaty to which the UK is a party. State parties are required to submit regular reports to the Committee outlining the legislative, judicial, policy and other measures they have taken to implement the rights set out in the treaty. The Committee may also take into account evidence from “Civil Society Organisations” (Amnesty International and Just Fair were among those who made submissions in respect of the UK). The Committee then addresses its concerns and recommendations to the State party in the form of “concluding observations”.

The Committee’s last report on the UK was back in 2009, so this was its first opportunity to review the austerity measures put in place since 2010.

It’s fair to say that the UK did not come off well. With regard to austerity, the Committee was:

“…seriously concerned about the disproportionate adverse impact that austerity measures, introduced since 2010, are having on the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights by disadvantaged and marginalized individuals and groups.”

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Article 11 and the Met’s “pay to protest” proposal

8 March 2015 by Hannah Noyce

Photo credit: The Guardian

A number of campaigning groups were recently informed by the Metropolitan Police that Scotland Yard would no longer provide traffic management at their planned demonstrations. Instead, these groups would be required to devise their own road closure plans and to pay a private security firm to carry out the task.

One of the groups, the organisers of the Million Women Rise rally, estimated that this would cost them around £10,000. The groups refused, arguing that this would amount to a breach of their right to protest.

The Met ultimately backed down – but what if it hadn’t? What is the legal position?

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Freedom of information: Redact, but don’t rewrite

11 August 2010 by Adam Wagner

Redaction in Al Rawi

Gradwick v IC and the Cabinet Office (EA/2010/0030) – Read decision

The Panopticon Blog has highlighted an interesting recent case in the General Regulatory Tribunal which may prove to be useful in the many different situations where documents are disclosed in redacted form.

The General Regulatory Tribunal (‘the Tribunal’) regulates information rights, amongst other things. Simply, the Tribunal held that if parts of documents disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 are to be redacted (blacked out), it is not good enough to transcribe a new document with the offending parts removed. This is because, as the Tribunal said:

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Wikileaks founder emerges from hiding

25 June 2010 by Rosalind English

Wikileaks founder  Julian Assange, who has been on the run from the US authorities after being linked to a serious US national security breach, has come out of hiding in Belgium.

Wrongs and rights, more wrangles

28 April 2011 by Rosalind English

[Updated] When blogging about the Great Strasbourg Debate, Adam Wagner recently reflected that he and I are”good cop, bad cop”. No prizes for guessing who plays which role.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here are a few pensées on the recent news that the Daily Telegraph is backing a reform campaign (see Adam’s post on this). Or rather, let’s start with Charles Darwin, who observed that the human animal is capable of continual extension in the objects of his “social instincts and sympathies” from the time when he had regard only for himself and his kin:

… later, he came to regard more and more ‘not only the welfare, but the happiness of all his fellowmen’, [then] ‘his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, extending to men of all races, to the imbecile, maimed, and other useless members of society, and finally to the lower animals.

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Budget benefits cuts and the human right to money

22 June 2010 by Adam Wagner

George Osborne is to announce the Government’s emergency budget today. Although the Government has been seeking to emphasise measures which will soften the blow to the poor, the fact remains that these are the biggest cuts in decades and that many will end up worse off, particularly if wages decrease and unemployment increases.

Update: The full budget can be downloaded here. The section on benefits starts at page 33.

The Government is to cut benefits by £11bn by 2014-15. The huge cost of benefits (“spending on social security and tax credits has increased by 45 per cent, around £60 billion, in real terms over the past 10 years.), the Chancellor told Parliament, were one of the reasons why there isn’t any more money in the Government coffers. The Health in Pregnancy grant will be abolished from 2011 and Sure Start will be limited. Child Benefit is to be frozen for the next three years. Disability Living Allowance will be restricted by a new medical check from 2013.  The Chancellor has said he will “increase the incentives to work” and will reassess benefits on the basis of the Consumer Price Index rather than the Retail Price Index. Housing benefit will be limited significantly and maximum limits on what can be claimed are to be introduced for the first time.

Rosalind English posted two weeks ago on whether budget cuts will lead to revised calls for “socio-economic” human rights; a concept which is as old as the European Convention on Human Rights and just as controversial. We will now revisit that post.

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Foreign nationals who pose a threat to national security may not be deported to Algeria because of human rights – Court of Appeal

2 February 2015 by Rosalind English

BB, PP, U and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] EWCA Civ 9 (23 January 2015) – read judgment

This was an appeal by Algerian nationals who had been found by the Special Immigration and Appeals Commission (SIAC) to constitute a threat to UK national security, against deportation to Algeria.

The appellants had resisted attempts by various home secretaries to deport them via protracted litigation over several years. Despite several findings by the SIAC that their human rights would not be infringed in Algeria, doubts remained, particularly with regard to the period of up to twelve days of initial detention in Algeria, known as “garde a vue” detention, in a barracks run by the Algerian security services (DRS). The purpose of such detention was to interrogate prisoners to obtain evidence for future proceedings. SIAC had wholly accepted the evidence of an innocent British citizen (AB) detained there in a case of mistaken identity as “punitive in the extreme”, but determined that his treatment showed a lack of care over the detainee’s welfare rather than a breach of his human rights. It had conceded that the treatment of the appellants might well be no better, not least because DRS officers considered such treatment to be consistent with respect for human dignity.

The appellants submitted that, in the light of this, SIAC’s conclusion that their treatment would not violate Article 3 of the Convention was legally unsustainable; that  SIAC had erred in law in its findings that the Algerian government’s assurances were capable of independent verification; and that the SIAC had also erred in law in maintaining, without any open evidence in support, that the DRS had been present during discussions about those assurances and had subscribed to them.

The Court of Appeal upheld the appeals.
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The Weekly Round Up: New UK asylum bill, judicial roles in assisted dying, ICC suspect freed in Italy, and Reporting Restrictions Orders under HRA

3 February 2025 by Benjamin Savill

In UK news

The UK Government introduced its Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill to Parliament on 30 January. The Law Society welcomed the Bill’s repeal of the controversial Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 – described by Society president Richard Atkinson as ‘one of the most damaging pieces of legislation in recent history’ – and certain provisions of the Illegal Migration Act 2023. However, a number of charities have expressed concern that the Bill’s proposed anti-people-smuggling measures – including the creation of what Home Secretary Yvette Cooper calls ‘counter-terror-style powers’ – will adversely affect legitimate asylum seekers. ‘We are very concerned that by creating new offences, many refugees themselves could also be prosecuted’, wrote the Refugee Council. ‘This would be a gross miscarriage of justice… The most effective way to break the smuggling gangs’ grip is to stop refugees from getting into the boats in the first place, which means giving them a legal way to apply for asylum in the UK.’

This week also saw the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill undergo the scrutiny of the Commons General Committee. Lord Sumption, former Justice of the Supreme Court, told the Committee that the Bill’s requirement that those applying for assisted dying would need the approval of a High Court judge as well as two doctors was ‘unnecessary and in some respects undesirable… It is not entirely clear what the judge is supposed to do … Is he there to ensure that the two doctors have done their job… or is he there to form his own view on these matters, completely independently of all those who have given certificates? If the latter, one is talking about quite a time-consuming process, involving a lot of additional evidence. It seems to me this is a protection which no other country, so far that I am aware of among those who have authorised assisted dying, have included.’ The Committee sits again on 11 February.

In international news

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is under investigation by her country’s prosecutors for releasing and repatriating Osama al-Masri, a Libyan warlord wanted by the International Criminal Court. The Court issued its arrest warrant for Al-Masri on 18 January, citing his alleged command over a network of prisons in Tripoli, and ‘crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, torture, rape and sexual violence, allegedly committed in Libya from February 2015 onwards.’ Al-Masri was arrested by the Italian authorities at a football game in Turin only a day after the warrant’s issue, before his release on 21 January ‘without prior notice or consultation of the Court.’ Meloni’s Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, who is now also under investigation, had told the Italian Senate that al-Masri’s deportation was ‘for urgent security reasons, with my expulsion order, in view of the danger posed by the subject.’ It has since been claimed that al-Masri was released on a technicality, following bureaucratic errors made in the course of the suspect’s arrest. These are said to have compelled the Italian court of appeal to refuse to validate his further detention. Al-Masri was then boarded onto a military plane and safely returned to Libya.

In the courts

The Court of Appeal has allowed an appeal brought by two freelance journalists, permitting the disclosure of the names of two family court judges behind historic care proceedings relating to the murdered schoolgirl Sara Sharif. In Louise Tickle & Anor v The BBC & Ors [2025] EWCA Civ 42, Sir Geoffrey Vos MR ruled that Mr Justice Williams had ‘no jurisdiction’ to make a Reporting Restrictions Order anonymising the judges in December last year – save a possible obligation to do so under section 6(1) of the Human Rights Act (HRA) 1998, had it been necessary to avoid an infringement of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR).

Sir Geoffrey found that there was ‘no evidential basis’ on which to believe that the threshold for the application of ECHR Articles 2 (right to life), 3 (freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment) or 8 (respect for family and private life) was reached. ‘For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying that judges are obliged to tolerate any form of abuse or threats… Nor am I saying that it would never be possible for section 6 of the HRA to allow, or even require, a court to consider… an anonymisation order in relation to judges. In my judgment, however, it is very hard to imagine how such a situation could occur.’ It would require: (1) ‘compelling evidence… as to the risks’; (2) the court to be ‘satisfied that those risks could not be adequately addressed by other security measures’; and (3) the court ‘to conclude that the risks were so grave that, exceptionally, they provided a justification for overriding the fundamental principle of open justice.’

Secret Justice – The Insiders’ View

27 June 2021 by Angus McCullough KC

A collective submission made by special advocates (security-cleared barristers who appear in secret proceedings) has been cleared for publication.  This document is a response to the review being performed by Sir Duncan Ouseley, looking into the operation of closed material procedures (CMPs) under the Justice and Security Act 2013.  It gives an unprecedented insight into the workings and challenges of these procedures, which enable the State to rely on secret material not shown to the other side in court proceedings.

I have acted as a special advocate since 2002, and am one of the 33 special advocates who have subscribed to the submission. Together, we have experience of every case in which the procedures under the 2013 Act have been invoked, across the UK. I believe that the submission is an important contribution to the public understanding of CMPs, which are generally shielded from any scrutiny.  The conduct of the Review itself is not only a safeguard which Parliament had imposed in the face of controversy and concerns at the time the proposals that led to the Act were being debated.  It is also a prime opportunity for open discussion and debate in relation to these procedures.  Sir Duncan Ouseley is a retired High Court Judge with extensive experience of CMPs so is eminently well placed to be undertaking this task.

In January 2020 I posted a piece on this blog, entitled “Secret Justice”:  An Oxymoron and the Overdue Review.  This sets out the background to these secret procedures, which I will not repeat here.  In that piece I raised concern at the continuing failure by the Government to implement the review that Parliament had required to be performed “as soon as reasonably practicable” five years after the relevant procedures under the Justice and Security Act 2013 (JSA) came into force.  That 5 year anniversary had come and gone in June 2018, and in January 2020 there was still no sign of the Government complying with the law in section 13 of the JSA.  It was to be another year before the review was finally announced in February 2021.  On 7 April 2021 the ‘Call for Evidence’ was issued on behalf of the reviewer, just short of three years after the end of the period that was to be reviewed.

Radical cleric European human rights claim rejected

8 February 2011 by Adam Wagner

Mustafa Kamal MUSTAFA (ABU HAMZA) (No. 1) v the United Kingdom – 31411/07 [2011] ECHR 211 (18 January 2011) – Read judgment

The European Court of Human Rights has rejected radical preacher Abu Hamza’s claim that his 2005-6 trial, at which he was convicted of soliciting to murder, inciting racial hatred and terrorism charges, was unfair. He claimed that a virulent media campaign against him and the events of 9/11 made it impossible for the jury to be impartial.

Abu Hamza has lived in the UK since 1979. from 1997-2003 was Imam at the Finsbury Park Mosque, London. Between 1996 and 2000 he delivered a number of sermons and speeches which later formed the basis for charges of soliciting to murder, using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent to stir up racial hatred, possessing a document or recording with the same intent.

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Why be nice? Human rights under pressure

16 February 2011 by Rosalind English

The latest episode in the soap concerning our relationship with Strasbourg may end in a fizzle rather than a cliffhanger, but it has provoked some useful soul-searching about the vision of the good embodied in the ECHR, and its monopoly on the right to govern social life.

Derogating from the ECHR or even pulling out of Strasbourg altogether have ceased to be taboo subjects for discussion, but the fear seems to be that the consequence of such defection would mean reversion to selfish nationalism. Is this a bad thing?

This question is not as facetious as it seems and answering it is central to the long term maintenance of a set of principles by which states agree to live.
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Deprivation of liberty best interests test compatible with human rights law [updated]

23 July 2010 by Isabel McArdle

G v E and others [2010] EWCA Civ 822 – Read judgment

This post was written with the kind help of Jaime Lindsey

The Court of Appeal has held that a person who lacks mental capacity can be detained if the Court of Protection considers that it is in their best interests, without having to meet additional conditions under Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

This case was a challenge to the decision of Jonathan Baker J in the Court of Protection and raises issues about the relationship between ECHR Article 5 (right to liberty and security) and the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA). It reinforces the point that it is for the Court to decide what is in an incapacitated patient’s best interests, and that Article 5 imposes no further requirements.

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