Search Results for: prisoner voting/page/20/ministers have been procrastinating on the issue, fearing that it will prove unpopular with the electorate.
3 August 2011 by Adam Wagner
G v E & Ors [2011] EWCA Civ 939 – Read judgment – 1COR’s Guy Mansfield QC appeared for the Respondent. He is not the author of this post.
Bahta & Ors, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for the Home Department & Ors [2011] EWCA Civ 895 – Read judgment
The general rule in civil law cases is that the loser pays the winner’s legal costs, even if the case settles before trial. As with all general rules, there are plenty of exceptions, and many relate to public authorities. Two of those exceptions have just been chipped away at by the Court of Appeal.
Two important judgments increasing the likelihood that local authorities will have to pay out costs emerged the usual last-minute glut before the court term ended on Friday. The first concerned costs in the Court of Protection when an authority has unlawfully deprived a person of their liberty. The second was about costs in immigration judicial review claims which had settled following consent orders.
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20 October 2012 by Alasdair Henderson
Black & Morgan v. Wilkinson (unreported, 18 October 2012, Slough County Court) – Read judgment
The Christian owner of a B&B in Berkshire was found to have discriminated against a gay couple by refusing to allow them stay in a double-bedded room because of her belief that all sexual activity outside of marriage is wrong.
Although a county court judgment, this case has been splashed all over the headlines, partly because of BNP leader Nick Griffin’s comments on Twitter (about which see more below) but also because it is so factually similar to the high-profile case of Bull v. Hall and Preddy which is currently before the Supreme Court (see our analysis of the Court of Appeal judgment here). This judgment has also come along at a time when the European Court of Human Rights’ decision is awaited in the four conjoined cases of Ladele, Eweida, Macfarlane and Chaplin, all of which involve issues of religious freedom and two of which involve the same potential conflict between the right not to be discriminated against on grounds of sexual orientation and the right to religious freedom (see our posts here, here and here). Moreover, Recorder Moulder’s comprehensive and careful judgment has helpfully been made available online (see link above), so it can be considered in detail.
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23 December 2015 by Jim Duffy
Photo credit: Guardian
It has been a fascinating year in which to edit this Blog. Political and social challenges – from continued government cuts to the alarming rise of Islamic State – have presented new human rights conundrums that have, as ever, slowly percolated to the doors of the country’s highest courts. And all this during the year of an astonishing General Election result and amid continually shifting sands around the future of the Human Rights Act.
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12 October 2013 by Adam Wagner
“Human Right to Make a Killing”, screamed the Daily Mail last week, publishing details from a “damning dossier” which showed “Judges in Strasbourg paid out £4.4m to some of Britain’s worst criminals”.
The figures were taken from the response to a Parliamentary question put by Conservative MP Philip Davies. You can hear me debating him about the issue on BBC Radio 5 Live by clicking here – from 1:41:15 – watch out for the ‘human rights gravy train’ steaming into the debate around half way through.
Here is the full table if you are interested in the facts, which the Mail, Telegraph and no doubt others were clearly not.
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27 July 2018 by Guest Contributor
This article was originally published by the UK Constitutional Law Association, and can be found here.
There is an old joke, in which a man is driving through the countryside, lost. He stops his car in a small village to ask a local for directions. The local responds by saying: ‘you want to get where? Oh, to get there, I wouldn’t start from here.’
It’s a joke my children wouldn’t get, from another era, from an age before satnav and Google maps. Perhaps it should be retired. But it remains of contemporary relevance at least as a way of understanding the recent judgment of Richard v BBC. This is because it highlights the issue of framing: the way one perceives an issue dictates, to some extent, the way one attempts to deal with it. Framing is well known in journalism, as the way a journalist perceives an event – frames it – influences the way she will report on it. It also can be helpful in law. The way an advocate persuades a tribunal to perceive an event – frames it – dictates, to some extent, the conclusion the tribunal will reach. Every advocate knows that to get to a particular destination, it’s important to get the judge or jury to start from the right place.
Reading the 454 paragraphs of Mann J’s clear prose in Richard v BBC, we are left with little doubt how he framed the case. A well-beloved celebrity, Sir Cliff Richard, was unfairly accused of a horrendous crime, and was investigated, as was only right, by the police. But the police told the BBC this private information, which they shouldn’t have done, because they were pressurised into doing so by the BBC. The BBC prepared a report, dispatched a helicopter to shoot video through Sir Cliff’s windows of policemen searching his flat, and then published this to the world. This harmed Sir Cliff, who sued the police for informing the BBC, and the BBC for informing the world. Justice was done to Sir Cliff when Mann J resolved the dilemmas with which he was presented in favour of Sir Cliff.
Indeed, Mann J seems to have resolved all the dilemmas with which he was faced in favour of Sir Cliff. Many of these findings might be challenged, and some are supported by stronger reasoning than others. The BBC has indicated that it is considering appealing. This blog concentrates on one finding that can be challenged, as it is one that potentially has the most impact on public interest journalism. This is Mann J’s conclusion in paragraph 248 that a person under police investigation has a prima faciereasonable expectation of privacy in respect of that fact. The blog argues that, while an understandable conclusion given Mann J’s framing of Sir Cliff’s case, this finding erects a significant and substantial hurdle for those undertaking public interest journalism. That is a problem.
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24 June 2012 by Karwan Eskerie
XX v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2012] EWCA Civ 742 – Read judgment
The Court of Appeal recently issued its judgment in XX v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2012] EWCA Civ 742, an appeal from a decision of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (“SIAC”) upholding the Secretary of State’s decision to deport an Ethiopian national on grounds of national security.
XX, who had indefinite leave to remain, had been assessed to have attended terrorist training camps and to have regularly associated with terrorists in the UK. SIAC was satisfied on the facts that XX posed a threat to the national security of the UK and determined that the deportation would not breach Articles 3, 5 and 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. XX appealed on the ground that in finding no incompatibility with the Convention, SIAC had erred in law.
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21 December 2010 by David Hart KC
Smartsource v Information Commissioner + 19 other parties [2010] UKUT 415 (AAC) 23rd November 2010 – read judgment
Ibsen’s Enemy of the People has Dr Stockmann complaining to his Norwegian municipality about contamination of its water supply. We think that these sorts of disputes are part of a modern problem, so it is striking to find Ibsen being invoked, judicially, in this far from 19th century fight about environmental information.
The question was the less than dramatic one as to whether information about water and wastewater billing etc was environmental information, and that in turn involved deciding whether water companies and sewage undertakers were “public authorities”. Ibsen might not have found that answer too difficult to provide: what local authorities used to do in the 19th century and much of the 20th century, here, in Norway, and elsewhere, included supplying you with clean water and taking away your foul water.
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25 February 2014 by Celia Rooney
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular high water mark 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 detention of David Miranda (pictured) was declared lawful by the High Court, while, in other news, the Court of Appeal has thrown in its lot to the saga of the whole-life tariff and the Supreme Court considered the thorny issue of religion and law.
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14 July 2016 by Gideon Barth
R (on the application of Public Law Project) v Lord Chancellor [2016] UKSC 39
Supreme Court bins the Government’s residence test for legal aid as ultra vires: just as the latest non-lawyer assumes the role of Lord Chancellor, the reforms made by the first non-lawyer to assume that role continue to fade away.
In April 2013, the Government announced it would introduce a residence test for civil legal aid funding under the provisions of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (“LASPO”) 2012. If you were not lawfully resident in the UK (or a Crown Dependency or British Overseas Territory) at the time of your application for legal aid, or for the last 12 months, you would not be eligible for legal aid.
The Public Law Project (“PLP”) challenged this residence test on two grounds: (i) the secondary legislation was ultra vires; and, (ii) the test was unjustifiably discriminatory, and has now been successful before the Supreme Court in doing so.
After a topsy-turvy trip through the courts, the case ended up before the Supreme Court who, in an apparently unprecedented step, announced it had decided the case after day one of the two-day hearing, and did not need to hear the discrimination issue. The judgment, written by Lord Neuberger, with whom the other six justices agreed, has now been handed down.
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16 November 2018 by Jonathan Metzer
On 14th November 2018 the Supreme Court gave judgment in the case of Rhuppiah v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] UKSC 58. The effect of this decision is that:
(a) A claimant at the Immigration Tribunal who relies on their private (not family) life under Article 8 will be entitled to have only “little weight” placed on that private life if they have been in the UK without indefinite leave to remain, unless there are “particularly strong features of the private life in question”; and
(b) A claimant who is financially dependent on other people but not on the state should not have that fact held against them when assessing the public interest in their removal.
Whilst the result was a victory for the individual claimant in this case, the wider consequences of this decision will be to clarify and tighten the law in a way that will make it even harder than it already was for claimants to succeed on the basis of their private life in the UK.
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21 July 2010 by Adam Wagner
The deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats has said that gay couples are likely to gain full rights to marriage under the current Parliament. This would represent a revolution for gay rights, but there is still a long way to go before same-sex couples achieve full rights to marriage as they are arguably entitled to under human rights law.
Simon Hughes MP has told Yoost.com, a question and answer website, that Liberal Democrat MPs would be consulted on the rights of gay couples. He said “I don’t know the answer because we haven’t had the discussion“, but that
I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t all be able to support what Nick Clegg said, which is that it would be appropriate in Britain in 2010-11 for there to be the ability to have civil marriage for straight people and gay people equally.
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11 April 2011 by David Hart KC
A little cluster of cases has recently been decided which bear on the nature and extent to which environmental information is accessible to the public. They involve Somerset oilseed rape, pesticide residues in Dutch lettuces, and Scottish mobile phone masts. And we visit some German apiarists to consider the implications of such information being or not being provided. So hold on to your hat.
In G.M. Freeze v. DEFRA (8 March 2011), the aptly-named appellant wanted to obtain the six-digit National Grid reference for a field in Somerset. The farmer had sown some supposedly conventional oilseed rape seed in which there was, unbeknownst to him and the seed manufacturer, some genetically-modified seed at a concentration of 5 plants per 10,000. The crop thus grown then cross-pollinated with the neighbouring field of oilseed rape, contaminating the latter to 1 part per 10,000.
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15 May 2012 by Guest Contributor
De Almeida, R (on the application of) v Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea [2012] EWHC 1082 (Admin) – Read judgment
This was a judicial review of RBK&C’s refusal to provide support under s.21 and s.29 National Assistance Act 1948 and indeed to carry out an assessment under s.47 of the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990.
Mr De A is a Portuguese national. He lived in the UK from 1998 to 2001 and from 2008 to date. He worked during the first period and for a year after his return. Mr De A had contracted HIV and AIDS. His health deteriorated so that he was not able to work. His prognosis in October 2010 was that he had about a year to live. At the time of the first hearing in this case in November 2011, his prognosis was about 6 months.
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16 September 2010 by Adam Wagner
The UK Supreme Court Blog has posted an exclusive interview with Baroness Hale, the Supreme Court’s only female judge. The interview is worth reading in full but I would like to highlight a few of her comments which are relevant to human rights.
By way of background, Baroness Brenda Hale is the first and only woman who sits in the UK’s highest appeal court. She came to the bench after a career in academia and a post at the Law Commission. As she admits in the interview, he areas of interest – such as family law, human rights and equality law – are quite different from those of the other justices who mostly come from a commercial law background.
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25 August 2025 by hrupdateadmin
by Guest Contributor Alice Grant
Epping Forest District Council v Somani Hotels Limited [2025] EWHC 2183 (KB)
Introduction
In Epping Forest District Council v Somani Hotels Limited [2025] EWHC 2183 (KB), the High Court granted Epping Forest District Council an interim injunction preventing Home Office contractors, CTM, from using the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, to accommodate asylum seekers. The Court’s ruling has temporarily halted the government’s repurposing of the Bell, on the basis that the Council had a strong arguable case of unlawful change of use. The injunction requires occupation of the Bell by asylum seekers to cease by 12 September 2025.
Factual Background
The Bell Hotel, an 80-bed premises on the outskirts of Epping’s market town, had been commercially struggling since the Covid-19 pandemic. The Bell had a history of fluctuating uses since 2020, including temporary accommodation for the homeless and asylum seekers.
The planning enforcement team of Epping Forest District Council had repeatedly contacted the Bell from 2020–2022 to make it known that housing asylum seekers was seen as a change of use by the Council, and as such, required planning permission. Without applying for permission, Somani Hotels entered into a contract with CTM in 2025 to accommodate up to 138 asylum seekers. In April 2025, the asylum seekers occupied all hotel rooms, with security and welfare staff present on site. The premises were no longer functioning as a conventional hotel with public dining and event facilities.
The Council drew the Court’s attention to the wider impacts on the local area: protests, pressure on local services and fear of crime among residents. These fears were substantiated by a series of reported crimes involving some of the occupants at the Bell, including arrests for alleged arson, sexual assault, common assault and battery (at [20]).
The Court found that the Bell’s owners, Somani Hotels, had acted deliberately in continuing to house asylum seekers despite being aware of the Council’s view that planning permission was required (at [57]–[58]). Eyre J stressed the Defendant’s conduct was not “flagrant” or “surreptitious”; Somani Hotels had acted openly and in good faith, though with knowledge of the planning risk (at [59]–[60]). In those circumstances, the Court accepted that the Council’s pursuit of injunctive relief under s.187B of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 (‘TCPA’) was an appropriate enforcement response.
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