Search Results for: prisoner voting/page/18/ministers have been procrastinating on the issue, fearing that it will prove unpopular with the electorate.
30 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
In an entertaining post which also raises the serious issue of journalistic responsibility, the Nearly Legal blog has put a Daily Mail “family law expert” on the naughty step in relation an article on a recent Supreme Court decision on the meaning of domestic violence in housing cases.
According to the respected housing law blog, the Mail article, entitled Shout at your spouse and risk losing your home: It’s just the same as domestic violence, warns woman judge, demonstrates“why the Mail is not a paper of record for case reports”. And
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16 August 2011 by Guest Contributor
A year after it was first announced, the Detainee Inquiry on 6 July published its Protocol and terms of reference. On 3 August, JUSTICaE together with 9 other NGOs wrote to the Detainee Inquiry. Among other things, we said that an Inquiry conducted on such terms would ‘plainly … not comply with Article 3 [of the ECHR]’. We also made clear that, were the Inquiry to proceed on this basis, we would not submit any evidence or attend any further meetings with the Inquiry team.
In his interesting article last week (‘Will the Detainee Inquiry be human rights compliant?’, 8 August) Matthew Flinn queried our claim that the Protocol fails to meet the requirements of article 3 ECHR. Notwithstanding the government’s own statement that it doesn’t intend for the Inquiry to comply with article 3, Flinn set out various arguments to suggest that the Protocol might nonetheless comply with article 3 in any event.
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14 February 2012 by Matthew Hill
This is the second of two blogs on the recent Supreme Court case of Rabone and another v Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust [2012] UKSC 2 . Part 1 is here.
In my previous blog on the Supreme Court’s judgment in Rabone I discussed the central feature of the case, the extension of the operational duty on the state to protect specific individuals from threats to their life, including suicide. Here, I consider the other elements of the case that Melanie Rabone’s parents had to establish in order to succeed in their claim for damages under the Human Rights Act 1998 (“HRA”).
Existence of the operational duty in Melanie’s case
Having established that the operational duty could be applied in Melanie’s case, her parents then had to establish, on the facts, that it was – by showing that there was a “real and immediate” threat to her life from which she should have been protected. Ever since the notion of an operational duty was first enunciated in Osman v United Kingdom (2000) 29 EHRR 245, it has become something of a judicial mantra that the threshold for establishing a “real and immediate” threat was high (see for example Re Officer L [2007] UKHL 36, and Savage v South Essex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust [2009] AC 681 [41] and [66],). There are good reasons for not imposing the operational duty lightly, given the enormous pressures and complexities involved in running police, prison and mental health services for the community as a whole. However, an overly-stringent test risked making the operational duty an obligation that was more hypothetical than real.
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7 March 2012 by Rosalind English
W (Algeria) (FC) and BB (Algeria) (FC) and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2012] UKSC 8 – read judgment
The court is entitled to make an order for a witness to give evidence before the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) in such a way that the identity of the witness and the substance of the evidence remains confidential. Such an order will only be granted if the court is satisfied that a witness can give evidence which appears to be capable of belief and which could be decisive or at least highly material on the issue of safety of return and it has no reason to doubt that the witness genuinely and reasonably fears that he and/or others close to him would face reprisals if his identity and the evidence that he is willing to give were disclosed to the relevant foreign state.
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16 December 2013 by Celia Rooney
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular festive trifle of human rights news and views. The full list of links can be found here. You can find previous roundups here. Links compiled by Adam Wagner, post by Celia Rooney.
This week, the Church of Scientology registered a win of sorts in the Supreme Court, while London’s biggest university said no to occupational student protests just as others were contemplating the possibility of gender-segregated talks Meanwhile, the Home Secretary puts forward her answer to modern day slavery, while the Joint Committee on Human Rights puts pressure on Chris Grayling regarding the proposed legal aid reforms.
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2 January 2013 by Adam Wagner
In March I complained that the Commission on a Bill of Rights should open up. Well, two weeks after publication of the Commission’s final report(s), two of the Liberal Democrat-appointed commissioners have given their insider perspectives of the Commission in an article in the London Review of Books.
Nothing in Helena Kennedy QC and Philippe Sands QC’s article is particularly surprising. The Commissioners emerge as a dysfunctional group of seasoned advocates on two sides of a case, with no presiding judge to rein them in or decide who was right. The report itself, with its bewildering array of separate papers and minority reports, demonstrated how little common ground there was between the commissioners.
I recommend reading the article in full, but here are a few interesting tidbits. Of course, some caution is necessary as the other members of the Commission (particularly the Conservative ones) may remember things differently.
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30 September 2019 by Charlotte Gilmartin
A person who undergoes the physical and biological process of carrying a pregnancy and giving birth, irrespective of gender? This was the ruling of the Rt. Hon. Sir Andrew McFarlane P, President of the Family Division, on 25th September in TT, R(on the application of) v The Registrar General for England and Wales [2019] EWHC 2384 (Fam) . He decided that the Claimant, (known as “TT”), who was legally recognised as male at the time of giving birth to his child, (“YY”), is correctly registered as “mother” on YY’s birth certificate.
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14 May 2025 by Leo Kirby
Chamberlain J has provided new guidance on when the court may order a rolled-up hearing. The procedural point arose in the context of an ongoing piece of strategic litigation, and resulted in an interlocutory judgment in R (Al-Haq) v SSBT [2025] EWHC 173 (Admin).
Al-Haq is an independent Palestinian human rights organisation. It brought a judicial review claim to challenge various decisions of the UK government in the licensing of exports of military and dual-use goods destined for Israel for potential use in Gaza. The decisions were taken by the Secretary of State for Business and Trade. Oxfam, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were granted permission to intervene.
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20 July 2013 by Rosalind English
SS (Malaysia) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2013] EWCA Civ 888 – read judgment
This case concerns a hitherto little-explored aspect of the right to a private and family life: a parent’s opportunity to teach their offspring about their own religious faith.
This is also a subset of the right under Article 9 to practise one’s own religion. This question was raised in EM(Lebanon) (FC) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2008] UKHL 64 but was only tangential to the main issue, which was the relationship between the appellant mother and her son as opposed to the father whose entitlement to custody would have been secured under Islamic law.
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22 October 2020 by Guest Contributor
This article is a condensed version of a piece in the Edinburgh Law Review, Jan 2021 Issue.
Questions around government responsibility for food systems, churning away during the Brexit debates, long ignored, sometimes derided, are meeting stark realities in the coronavirus pandemic. This week we are back to free school meals (FSM).
This summer when the government proposed that it would be stopping the provision of free school meals in England over the summer holidays, it was met with public outcry. When the government U-turned on the decision it was attributed to a successful online campaign led by footballer Marcus Rashford. On 10 October he was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.
In the background human rights lawyers Jamie Burton of Doughty Street Chambers and Dan Rosenberg of Simpson Millar acting on behalf of the Good Law Project and Sustain had issued a judicial review pre-action protocol to the Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson MP (hereinafter SSE).
When the government reversed the decision on free school meals, the legal proceedings were halted and as a result potentially significant legal precedent was lost. This comment sets out the human rights case against the government in respect of not providing free school meals in England that may be of renewed and wider relevance in the future. (Education is a devolved matter and therefore the UK government powers in this area do not extend to Scotland and Wales.)
It is also noted that yesterday an Opposition motion in the House of Commons to extend provision of Free School Meals to Easter 2021 was voted down by 322-261. Marcus Rashford has issued a tweet in response. The issue has not gone away.
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13 August 2010 by Adam Wagner
DNA home-testing is likely to be an increasingly high-profile and controversial issue in the coming years, both from a moral and legal perspective.
I posted last week on the moral maze which surrounds DNA home testing, in light of new guidance for direct-to-consumer genetic tests published by the Human Genetics Commission.
The guidance has been greeted with mixed reactions. GeneWatch UK, a not-for-profit organisation which investigates how genetic science and technologies impact on society, have condemned the guidelines, lamenting that there will be “no independent scrutiny of companies’ performance or the claims they make about people’s risk of developing diseases in the future” . The focus of their criticisms are that the HGC represents the interests of the genetic testing companies over those of the general public.
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27 November 2018 by Hannah Noyce
Khan v MNX [2017] EWHC 2990 (QB) – read judgment.
The Court of Appeal has held that a mother who consults a doctor in order to avoid the birth of a child with one disability may not recover damages for the costs associated with a different disability.
The Facts
The respondent, M, was concerned that she may be a carrier of haemophilia and consulted her GP, who arranged blood tests. Those tests, however, could only detect whether she herself had haemophilia, and not whether she was a carrier. She then saw the appellant, another GP, who told her that the results of the tests were normal. This led her to believe, incorrectly, that any child she had would not have haemophilia. The appellant admitted that she had been negligent.
M went on to have a son, FGN, who has haemophilia. Had she known that she was a carrier before she became pregnant, she would have undergone foetal testing, which would have revealed the condition, and she would have had a termination. Therefore, but for the negligence, FGN would never have been born.
FGN has also developed autism, which is unrelated to his haemophilia.
The claim sought the costs attributable to the haemophilia and to the autism.
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27 February 2020 by Guest Contributor
This article was first published here on the UK Labour Law Blog on 19th February 2020 and is reproduced with the author’s kind permission.
There are several problems with the judgment in Forstater v CGD Europe and Ors (case no 2200909/2019) (“Forstater”). Some of these have been highlighted by Amir Paz-Fuch in his recent analysis on this blog, ‘Principles into Practice: Protecting Offensive Beliefs in the Workplace’. In this blog post, I look more at the specific findings of the Employment Tribunal and whether they are sustainable. I shall consider this issue in light, in particular, of the holdings of the High Court in R (Miller) v College of Policing and A’or[2020] EWHC 225 (Admin).
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9 February 2015 by Rosalind English
Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5 (CanLII) 6 February 2015 – read judgment
The Supreme Court of Canada has upheld a challenge to the constitutionality of the prohibition on assisted dying, saying that since they last ruled on this issue in the 1993 case of Rodriguez (where a “slim majority” upheld the prohibition), there had been a change in the circumstances which “fundamentally shifted the parameters” of this debate.
The Court issued a declaration of invalidity relating to those provisions in the Canadian criminal code that prohibit physician assisted dying for competent adults who seek such assistance as a result of a “grievous and irremediable” medical condition that causes “endurable and intolerable” suffering. These laws should be struck down as depriving those adults of their right to life, liberty and security of the person under Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights (The Constitution Act 1982)
Importantly, the court recognised what has long been proposed by campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic, that the prohibition deprives some individuals of life, as it has the effect of forcing people to take their own lives prematurely, for fear that they would be incapable of doing so when they reached the point where suffering was intolerable.
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30 November 2017 by Rosalind English
Updated: Brexit, Article 13, and “animal sentience” in law (28 November 2017) – Animal Law’s Expert Briefing Note
In November 2017 a vote took place in the House of Commons on a proposed amendment to the EU (Withdrawal) Bill. The Commons Library briefing paper was published on 7 December: Animal Sentience and Brexit. The amendment sought to incorporate into UK law a provision in the European treaty that stated the EU and its member States “shall, since animals are sentient beings, pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals” when formulating and implementing the EU’s policies. The vote was defeated by 313 to 295 votes.
The story of this debate has prompted a great deal of comment in newspapers and on social media, mostly critical of the UK Government’s position. The coverage reflects much of the prejudice and confusion attaching to animals reared for our use, be it for medical therapy, food or companionship. That is to be expected. But what is less excusable is that most of the coverage was based on misunderstandings of both the Treaty Article and other EU provisions relating to animals.
So may I put in a plea for anyone who is interested to read the clear and balanced account of this issue set out by the UK Centre for Animal Law in their Briefing Note, which I will attempt to summarise here. I do urge reading the original document, which is an excellent summary of the legal and factual issues involved.
A quick reminder
When the Brexit vote came in, I wrote a post under the heading of One Trade Freedom We can Do Without. Maybe not tactful timing then, but this question is now ripe for consideration, with DEFRA secretary Michael Gove promising better protections for animals raised for food, and even for companion animals such as dogs and horses, once they are no longer trapped in the imperative of free movement of goods under the EU Treaty provisions.
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In an entertaining post which also raises the serious issue of journalistic responsibility, the Nearly Legal blog has put a Daily Mail “family law expert” on the naughty step in relation an article on a recent Supreme Court decision on the meaning of domestic violence in housing cases.
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