Search Results for: prisoner voting/page/38/ministers have been procrastinating on the issue, fearing that it will prove unpopular with the electorate.
18 August 2025 by Guest Contributor
Shvidler v Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs and Dalston Projects Ltd and others v Secretary of State for Transport [2025] UKSC 30
By Talia Zybutz
Introduction
These appeals – Shvidler v Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs and Dalston Projects Ltd v Secretary of State for Transport – were a test case for the operation of the UK’s sanctions regime introduced in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Supreme Court confirmed that while the court’s task is to assess proportionality for itself, a wide margin of appreciation will be afforded to the executive in judging how best to respond to and restrain Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
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30 November 2022 by Ruby Turok-Squire
In the News…
The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that the Scottish parliament does not have the power to pass legislation that would allow for a second referendum on Scottish independence. Such legislation, the Supreme Court found, would touch on ‘reserved matters’, that is, matters affecting the United Kingdom as a whole. The Scottish government unsuccessfully argued that a referendum would be advisory, and as it would not have immediate impact on the existence of the UK, would not touch on reserved matters. Sturgeon, while respecting the ruling, commented that it confirmed that the UK can no longer be pictured as a voluntary partnership and noted that the next general election could serve as a ‘de facto referendum’.
Nurses are preparing to strike for the first time on the 15th and 20th of December. The issues in question include low pay and unsafe staffing levels. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has reported that experienced nurses are 20% worse off in real terms than in 2010, due to many pay increases below the rate of inflation, and that 25,000 nursing staff have left the Nursing and Midwifery Council register since last year. If ministers continue to refuse to engage in formal negotiations with the RCN, the strikes will go ahead across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and are expected to have a severe impact on care.
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19 December 2013 by Adam Wagner
1 Crown Office Row’s Philippa Whipple QC and Matthew Hill were counsel to the Detainee Inquiry. They are not the writers of this post.
On 6 July 2010, in the first innocent days of the Coalition Government, former appeal judge Sir Peter Gibson was asked by the Prime Minister to enquire into “whether Britain was implicated in the improper treatment of detainees, held by other countries, that may have occurred in the aftermath of 9/11.” Almost 3 1/2 years later, the Detainee Inquiry has produced a report (it was originally presented to the Government on 27 June 2012 but there have been heavy negotiations about sensitive material in the public version).
The report makes clear at the outset that it “does not, and cannot, make findings as to what happened”. Why so? Because the Inquiry was scrapped before it heard evidence from any witnesses, so it couldn’t test any conclusions reached purely on the basis of documentary evidence. The reason given at the time by Sir Peter was that “it is not practical for the Inquiry to continue for an indefinite period to wait for the conclusion of the police investigations“. The “investigations” are those into claims of collusion by the intelligence services with torture in Libya (see this Q&A for more).
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23 August 2011 by Melina Padron
Immanuel Kant
Welcome back to the human rights roundup, a regular bulletin of all the law we haven’t quite managed to feature in full blog posts. The full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here.
by Melinda Padron
In the news:
First, we welcome to the legal blogosphere RightsNI, a new blog relating to human rights issues in Northern Ireland. Human Rights in Ireland wrote a short introduction to the new blog which can be found here.
The UK riots
Now back to August’s hot topic. Last week blogger Charon QC quoted Immanuel Kant: “All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.” Recognising the value of reason in the context of the riots, Charon QC posted several links to various articles which reflect on the events in the midst of all the confusion.
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26 May 2014 by David Hart KC
Bancoult v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs [2014] EWCA Civ 708 – read judgment
Rosalind English (here) has summarised this unsuccessful appeal against the rejection of the Chagossians’ claims by the Divisional Court, and I have posted on this litigation arising out of the removal and subsequent exclusion of the population from the Chagos Archipelago in the British Indian Ocean Territory: see here, here, here and here. The photograph is from 1971 – the last coconut harvest for the Chagossians.
There were three remaining grounds alleged against the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in this judicial review
(i) its decision in favour of a Marine Protected Area was actuated by an improper motive, namely an intention to prevent Chagossians and their descendants from resettling in the BIOT;
(ii) the consultation paper which preceded the decision failed to disclose that the MPA proposal, in so far as it prohibited all fishing, would adversely affect the traditional and historical rights of Chagossians to fish in the waters of their homeland, as both Mauritian citizens and as the native population of the Chagos Islands; and
(iii) it was in breach of the obligations imposed on the United Kingdom under article 4(3) of the Treaty of the European Union.
I want to look at (i), the improper purpose grounds, and (iii) the TEU/TFEU grounds, because in both respects the CA took a different course than the Divisional Court, even though the outcome was the same.
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4 March 2013 by David Hart KC
Evans, R (o.t.a of) Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government [2013] EWCA Civ 114 – read judgment
There have been important pronouncements over the years by the Aarhus Compliance Committee (ACC) about whether the UK planning system complies with the UNECE Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (the Aarhus Convention). See my post here for the most important ones, and more are likely to follow shortly (see here). The interest in this domestic planning case is in how the Court of Appeal dealt with those pronouncements, where there is domestic case law going the other way.
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25 June 2012 by Wessen Jazrawi
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your weekly buffet 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.
The news this week has been dominated by issues relating to Article 8 and the right to die. First, we had Tony Nicklinson, a man suffering from locked-in syndrome, and then there was the case of E, a woman suffering from anorexia who was being looked after in a community hospital under a palliative care regime whose purpose was to allow her to die. In other news, just when you (or rather, I) thought the fat lady had sung for Julian Assange, there was another twist in the tale as he requested asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy.
by Wessen Jazrawi
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19 October 2015 by Laura Profumo
Laura Profumo delves into the latest human rights happenings.
In the News:
In an “exclusive” last weekend, The Independent revealed that the government is planning to “fast-track” a British Bill of Rights into UK law. The report claimed a 12-week consultation will run from late this year, which will seek to clarify that the UK will not pull out of the ECHR. In an “unusual but not unique” move, a Bill will then proceed straight to the House of Commons, without a preliminary Green or White Paper. With the EU referendum due in 2017, ministers are anxious to extricate the ECHR question from that of EU membership, making the Bill law before the in/out campaigns begin. Yet the Bill’s Parliamentary passage will be far from seamless. A cabinet minister has cautioned that the short timescale is “aspirational”, as the Bill could be “really clogged up in the House of Lords”. The upper chamber, where the Conservatives fail to command a majority, hosts some “seasoned lawyers”, who are fearful of the fallout with Strasbourg. It is understood that Gove will visit Scotland before the consultation is published, to convince the SNP to back the proposal. Yet it is not yet clear whether Gove will visit Northern Ireland and Wales as well, where he must also secure support. If the Bill is to reach the statute books before the MPs’ summer recess, it will need to be propounded in the next Queen’s speech, due in May 2016.
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24 February 2014 by Guest Contributor
As the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill has its Second Reading in the House of Commons today (Monday 24 February), Angela Patrick, Director of Human Rights at JUSTICE considers the Government’s proposals for the future of judicial review.
For law students who slept their way through their first latin 101 lessons in ‘ultra vires’, public law and judicial review may have seemed very detached from the realities of everyday life; less relevant to the man on the Clapham Omnibus than the rigours of a good criminal defence or protection from eviction offered by landlord and tenant law.
The Lord Chancellor may be hoping that the public and Parliamentarians are similarly unfocused.
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22 April 2012 by Sam Murrant
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your weekly bulletin 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.
In the news
This week saw the final Brighton Declaration, containing the Council of Europe states’ proposals for reform of the European Court of Human Rights, published, in extremely important news for the future of the Court. Other hot topics this week include perennial gems such as the deportation of terrorist suspects, the right to liberty, fears over the democratic legitimacy of judicial “lawmaking” and cameras in court.
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2 March 2020 by Rosalind English
In the news
National concern about coronavirus rose further this week, as the tally of UK cases rose to 36. The government has said that it will publish an emergency ‘battle plan’ for tackling the virus, based on existing contingency plans for responding to a pandemic flu outbreak. This will include ministers responsible for coronavirus in each department, as well as a public information campaign run from the Cabinet Office; if the virus spreads further, it could also include banning big events, closing schools, and advising against use of public transport. When questioned yesterday on whether cities will be isolated, as in China, Health Secretary Matt Hancock was emphatic that no tactics are “off the table” in the government’s coronavirus strategy.
The Johnson government is facing major setbacks elsewhere this week.
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2 October 2012 by Rosalind English
Child Poverty Action Group, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2012] EWHC 2579 (Admin) (17 July 2012) – read judgment
The High Court has ruled that the government acted unlawfully by removing the Child Poverty Commission, an advisory body set up under the Child Poverty Act 2010 . They had also acted beyond their powers by preparing a child poverty strategy without having requested and having regard to the advice of that Commission. But government is free to formulate new policy and as such there was nothing irrational about the strategy itself.
There is of necessity a great deal of statutory construction in this judgment which makes for dry reading. But the ruling is an important reassessment of the principles of judicial review that have taken root since the power of the courts to intervene in government decision making was reinforced in Anisminic Ltd v Foreign Compensation Commission [1969] 2 A.C. 147. This ruling, as every law student knows, established that a public body acts unlawfully, both in the narrow sense of acting outside its jurisdiction, and where such jurisdiction was wrongly exercised. This means that courts may intervene not just where a governmental act is unlawful under an express provision of the statute but also where the decision or policy, although authorised by statute, has been made in breach of a rule of public law.
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4 November 2022 by Marina Wheeler QC
The storm raging around small boats arriving on the south coast has been brewing for some time. In early summer the focus was a policy to send arrivals to Rwanda. Intervention by the European Court of Human Rights effectively suspended flights while a domestic ruling on the policy’s legality is awaited. Meanwhile, in Dover a migrant processing centre has been firebombed, another is dangerously overcrowded, and the new Home Secretary raises tensions by speaking of an “invasion”.
Amidst this swirl is an eye-catching Divisional Court Decision about a secret and unlawful Home Office policy to seize and download data from the mobile phones of all those arriving in small boats. The substantive Judgment in R (HM, MA and KH) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWHC 695 (Admin) was delivered on 25 March 2022, followed by an Order distilling the Court’s conclusions on 18 October 2022.
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5 June 2012 by Adam Wagner
Updated | In stark contrast to the pageantry surrounding the Royal Jubilee, here is a somewhat sombre update on the Justice and Security Bill, which was published on 28 May 2012 and is currently receiving its second reading in the House of Lords. The Bill aims to introduce Close Material Procedures, that is secret hearings, into civil trials.
Three key documents were published shortly after the Bill, presenting the Government’s case in response to the forceful criticism which the initial proposals generated. First is the Government’s response to the Joint Committee on Human Rights’ scathing report on the proposals. Secondly, the Government’s response to the 90 submissions received in response to the Justice and Security Green Paper consultation. Thirdly, a summary of European Convention on Human Rights issues relating to the Bill, also published by the Government.
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11 March 2013 by Daniel Isenberg
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.
The suggestion that a future Conservative government might withdraw from the ECHR and repeal the Human Rights Act dominated this week’s headlines, with much commentary noting that such measures are likely to have only minimal practical effects on our courts. Lord Neuberger also used his first interview as President of the Supreme Court to speak his mind on a number of issues of human rights concerns; and the Justice and Security Bill continues its passage through Parliament.
by Daniel Isenberg
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