Search Results for: prisoner voting/page/43/ministers have been procrastinating on the issue, fearing that it will prove unpopular with the electorate.
26 July 2016 by Charlotte Bellamy
Photo Credit: Steve Parsons/PA
In the News
In a new report on the much-delayed Counter-Extremism Bill, the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) has concluded that the proposed legislation is confusing, unnecessary, and likely to be counter-productive.
Though first announced by the Government in the Queen’s Speech in May 2015, the Bill itself has yet to appear. The JCHR report is a result of what was in effect a pre-legislative scrutiny inquiry into the Government’s proposals, due to the Committee’s concerns that it would be likely to raise significant human rights concerns, specifically where Articles 9 (freedom of religion), 10 (freedom of expression) and 11 (freedom of association) are concerned.
Five key problems which the report has identified are:
- No clear definition of extremism – The Counter-Extremism Strategy, launched in October 2015 (previously covered here) defines extremism as the “vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of those of different faiths and beliefs”. This is currently too vague to be workable as a legislative definition. There is neither a consensus on the meaning of “extremism” nor “British values”. The extent to which a lack of mutual respect and tolerance towards different faiths and beliefs will be unlawful is likely to be particularly contentious.
- Discrimination and religious freedom – The difficulty here is twofold. Measures which impact on those expressing religious conservatism would either operate indiscriminately against any religious conservatism which had no intention of inciting violence (including, for example, Islam, Orthodox Judaism, Evangelical Christianity), or would operate discriminately, specifically targeting Muslims and alienating the Muslim community.
- The “escalator” approach – In trying to tackle extremism by placing restrictions on religious conservatism, the Government has wrongly assumed that violent jihadism necessarily follows from religious conservatism. Yet there is no proof that the two are correlated. The focus should rather be on extremism which leads to violence. Placing restrictions on religious conservatism amounts to suppressing views with which the Government disagree.
- Conflicting duties on universities – Universities are under a duty to promote free speech under Section 202 of the Education Reform Act 1988, which provides that University Commissioners have a duty to ensure that academic staff have “freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions.” It is unclear how “controversial or unpopular opinions” will be differentiated from “vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values”, and therefore what will count as extremism.
- The civil order regime – in the Queen’s speech in May 2016, a “new civil order regime” was mentioned, though with little detail. There is concern that ill-defined civil orders, breach of which would be a criminal offence, should not be used by the Government to avoid having to make a criminal case to a higher standard of proof, especially where a proper definition of the prohibited behaviour is lacking. It is likely that these orders may interfere with freedom of religion, expression and association.
The Committee concluded that the Government should not legislate, least of all in areas which impinge on human rights, unless there is a clear gap in the existing legal framework for terrorism and public order offences. In their view, the Government has not been able to demonstrate that such a gap exists, and there is a danger that any new legislation would be counter-productive.
Other news
- Turkey has told the Council of Europe that it wants to temporarily derogate from the human rights protections under the ECHR, due to the state of emergency in the country declared by President Erdogan last week. Emma Sinclair-Webb, Senior Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch, writes that it is unclear whether the current situation meets the required “threat to the life of the nation” criterion for derogation, provided for under Article 15. Even if this criterion is met, derogation from certain Convention rights is not permitted, including the prohibition on torture and inhuman and degrading treatment (Article 3), the right to life (Article 2); prohibition on slavery (Article 4(1)). Though Turkey has pointed to France’s state of emergency powers (extended after the Nice attack) to justify its own derogation, a state of emergency imposed where there are clear signs that the government is ready to crack down more broadly is an “alarming prospect”. Amnesty International has gathered evidence that detainees in Turkey are being subjected to beatings, torture, including rape, in official and unofficial detention centres in the country. Amnesty calls on Turkish authorities to allow international monitors to visit these places of detention.
- A clause in the contracts of Deliveroo workers say that they are not allowed to take their grievances to an employment tribunal, and that if they do they must indemnify the company against all costs and expenses it incurs. Michael Newman, partner at Leigh Day, has said that the clause is likely to be unenforceable as they attempt to exclude or limit established employment rights, and imposed penalties. Deliveroo say that their contracts reflect the fact that riders are allowed to work flexibly on a freelance basis. Deliveroo joins several other companies in the spotlight for their use of self-employed workers, who do not receive the same rights as employees. A group of drivers are currently taking legal action against Uber, arguing that they should be entitled to the living wage, sick pay, and pensions. Uber is arguing that drivers are “partners”, not employees. It has also recently emerged that some workers for parcel firm Hermes have claimed that they earn as little as £5.50 an hour over some periods.
In the Courts
Foulon and Bouvet v France – Mr Didier Foulon and his daughter Emilie were the applicants in the first case. Mr Foulon is a French National and his daughter Emilie was born in Bombay, India. In the second case the applicants were Mr Philippe Bouvet, a French National, and his twin sons Adrien and Romain Bouvet, who were also born in Bombay. In both cases the applicants were unable to obtain recognition under French law of their biological affiliation. The French authorities were refusing to transcribe birth certificates issued in India, due to their use of Gestational Surrogacy Agreements (GPA) in India, which are unlawful in France. The Court de Cassation in both cases provided reasons for the refusal to transcribe the certificates, partly on the basis of fraude à la loi (evasion of the law) due to the conclusion of the unlawful GPA agreements. A violation of Article 8 was found (right to respect for private life) with respect to Emilie Foulon and Adrien and Romain Bouvet.
Shahanov and Palfreeman v Bulgaria – This case concerned the disciplinary punishments given to prisoners for complaining to the prison authorities about prison officers. Mr Nikolay Shahanov, a Bulgarian national, and Mr Jock Palfreeman, an Australian national, are serving a life sentence and a sentence of 20 years respectively in Bulgarian prisons. Mr Shahanov had made two written complaints to the Minster of Justice, in which he accused two prison officers of favouritism towards a prisoner because they were related. Mr Palfreeman had written to the governor of the prison alleging that unnamed prison officers were rude to two journalists who had visited him in prison and had stolen other visitors’ effects from lockers during their visit. Both were found guilty of making defamatory statements and false allegations about prison officers. Mr Shahanov was placed in solitary confinement for ten days and Mr Palfreeman was not allowed to receive food parcels for three months. A violation of Article 10 (freedom of expression) was found in respect of both applicants.
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17 June 2012 by Adam Wagner
The current Government often complains about a “democratic deficit” in the courts. It seems that “unelected judges” are making important decisions on social policy without any kind of democratic mandate, particularly in controversial human rights cases.
I agree that there is a democratic deficit in the courts. But it isn’t about elections. It is about access.
The Government seeks to solve the problem by involving Parliament more in the judicial process, the latest and most striking example being the Home Office’s attempt to codify Article 8 ECHR, the right to private and family life, in immigration cases. The Home Office wants fundamentally to alter the role of the courts, hoping that it will “shift from reviewing the proportionality of individual administrative decisions to reviewing the proportionality of the rules” (see para 39). The argument is that since judges are unaccountable, those who are accountable must be more central in the decisions they make, particularly in sensitive areas such as immigration.
This is attempt to take power away from judges. But why?
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27 October 2013 by Adam Wagner
Yesterday saw another poor piece of human rights reporting from the Telegraph, again from Home Affairs Correspondent David Barrett. Strasbourg human rights court threatens key counter-terrorism powers. It is a typical piece of hall-of-mirrors reporting; all of the basic elements are there but presented in a distorted and inaccurate way.
The piece is about the case of Sabure Malik, a British investment banker who was stopped by police in 2010 at Heathrow on his way back from an organised package tour to undertake the Hajj. Full details of his case, which is supported by Liberty, are in the Euoprean Court of Human Rights’ admissibility decision here. It was granted permission to proceed in May 2013, well before the David Miranda controversy which took place in August.
I’ll take this shortly.
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27 October 2013 by Adam Wagner
Just a quick post to tell you about three things I have coming up which you might be interested in:
1. This Wednesday 30 October from 10:30am I am giving evidence to the Joint Select Committee on the Draft Voting Eligibility (Prisoners) Bill, along with Joshua Rozenberg – full details here. The hearing will be broadcast live online. I will be talking about how media reporting and public perceptions of the European Court of Human Rights has affected the prisoner voting debate.
2. Then, also on Wed 30 Oct, in the evening, I’m taking part in a panel debate with BPP Fresh Perspectives on Law, which will explore the aftermath of the revelations about the NSA and GCHQ’s communications surveillance programmes. Also speaking: Paul Bernal, Lecturer in Internet and Media Law, University of East Angli; Ben Hayes, Statewatch and Alex Lawson, Lecturer, BPP Law School. Places are free but you have to sign up here.
3. Finally, on Wednesday 20 November I am joining lots of excellent lawyers in a charity mentoring event, raising money for Anna Verrico’s cancer treatment. Tickets are £10, a great cause, all details here.
And that is all.
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2 June 2010 by Adam Wagner
Increasing powers
The European Court of Human Rights underwent something of a revolution yesterday with the long-delayed introduction of reforms to its rules. The changes will help the court clear its enormous backlog of cases, but also give it significant new powers to punish states which fail to implement its rulings. The UK may be one of the first on the receiving end of these new powers in relation to prisoner voting rights.
The Strasbourg-based European Court, which interprets and applies the European Convention on Human Rights, celebrated its fiftieth birthday last year. But it has recently been showing its age, creaking under the weight of its backlog of cases, running to an astonishing 119,300 waiting to be heard in 2009.
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9 April 2013 by Guest Contributor
‘Working Together to Safeguard Children’ is the lead piece of statutory guidance on… well, working together to safeguard children. Originally published in 1999, a new edition was published in 2006 following the changes brought about following the death of Victoria Climbié. And the next edition in 2010 incorporated recommendations of the second Laming Report which followed the death of Baby P. It had grown longer over time, as we all learned lessons from Haringey; but its growing length was causing concern.
A new version was published last month. The new version was published the week after judgment was handed down in AB & Anor, R (on the application of) v The London Borough of Haringey [2013] EWHC 416 (Admin) (13 March 2013) (my firm represented the Claimants).
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26 March 2020 by Richard Mumford
The following post was written on the morning of 26 of March 2020. Today, 27th of March, the Chief Coroner brought out Guidance 35 on hearings during the pandemic (no. 35), with the proviso that all these issues will be kept under review.
On the 26th of March the Chief Coroner published Guidance Note 34 (“GN34”) on COVID-19 which can be found here. The Guidance Note addresses many of the issues relating to the impact of COVID-19 on the coronial service. We set out below some answers to questions those involved with the coronial system may currently have in mind, taken from the Guidance Note and other sources (“GN34#(No.)” refers to paragraph numbers in the Guidance Note).
1) Are Coroners’ Courts conducting hearings at the moment?
GN34#10 provides that “no physical hearing should take place unless it is urgent and essential business and that it is safe for those involved for the hearing to take place. A particular concern is to ensure social distancing in court and in the court building.”
It is also noted that
All hearings that can possibly take place remotely (via whatever means) should do so, and other hearings should continue only if suitable arrangements can be made to ensure distancing although the Chief Coroner accepts that in many jurisdictions this may be difficult. Hearings which must continue should be those considered essential business
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23 February 2012 by Maria Roche
News of the deaths of Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik and the serious injuries of photographer Paul Conroy and Edith Bouvier, a freelance journalist reporting for Le Figaro, from a mortar shell that hit the building in Homs, Syria that they were using as makeshift media centre has saddened and shocked reporters and readers. So does a sobering list of more than fifteen of their professional colleagues who have also died reporting the Arab Spring. Worse still are reports that the journalists may have been deliberately targeted by the Syrian government forces. It is a reminder that journalists are offered too little protection by international law.
It is clear from the many tributes to her that Ms Colvin was an extraordinary person: a woman of verve, replete with humanity, she was fearless in the face of carefully assessed and weighed risk. In 2001 after losing an eye in a grenade attack by a Sri Lankan government soldier whilst reporting on the Tamil Tigers, she wrote:
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16 November 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated | One of the many points of interest from yesterday’s announcement that legal aid is to be cut by £350m per year was the underlying justification, put by Ken Clarke in his announcement, that England and Wales spend more on legal aid than other countries.
The Justice Secretary said that “we currently have one of the most expensive legal aid systems in the world“. But where does this often-quoted statistic arise from?
In its consultation document, the MoJ quotes (at para 3.43) a report commissioned from the University of York into comparative international legal aid systems. The report, Efficiency and quality of justice European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ); International comparison of publicly funded legal services and justice systems, was produced in October 2009 by Roger Bowles and Amanda Perry. It investigated the legal aid systems in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand and Sweden and compared these to the system in England and Wales.
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10 April 2017 by Poppy Rimington-Pounder
Chemical attacks in the northern Syrian province of Idlib have left at least 80 dead and 100 more injured. It has been reported that in a raid last Tuesday morning Syrian government planes exposed countless civilians in the town of Khan Sheikhun to toxic gas, suspected to be sarin. While Syrian President Bashar al-Assad denies claims that he is the author of these attacks, outrage has erupted across the world, which culminated in US President Donald Trump commencing airstrikes on Syria.
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12 October 2015 by Hannah Lynes
This week’s Round-up is brought to you by Hannah Lynes.
In the news
- Call from legal community for urgent action on refugee crisis
More than 300 lawyers have signed a statement denouncing the Government’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis as “deeply inadequate”.
The document, whose signatories include former President of the Supreme Court, Lord Phillips, three former Law Lords and over 100 Queen’s Counsel, describes Prime Minister David Cameron’s offer to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees over 5 years as “too low, too slow and too narrow.”
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6 July 2015 by Laura Profumo
Photo credit: Guardian
Laura Profumo brings you the latest human rights happenings.
In the News:
In a critical, though arguably overdue, decision, the Court of Appeal has suspended the fast-track immigration appeals system. The process, under which rejected asylum seekers are detained and given only seven days to appeal, was held “structurally unfair” by the High Court, before being halted altogether by last week’s appeal. The ruling was welcomed by the appellant charity, Detention Action, as meaning “asylum seekers can no longer be detained…simply for claiming asylum”. Previously, the fast-track deadlines could be imposed on any asylum seeker from any country, if the Home Office considered their case could be decided quickly. This marks the third time courts have found the system to be unlawful, yet the suspension will now stay in force until a government appeal is mounted. The decision deals a major blow to a system which is “inefficient, bureaucratic, demeaning and dehumanising”, writes immigration expert Colin Yeo. Whilst there is “no doubt” a replacement fast track will soon be found, in the meantime “let us savour the respite” from such crude expediency.
In other news, the spotlight remains on America, in the euphoric wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v Hodges. The final paragraph of Justice Kennedy’s judgment, in its stirring clarity, is set to make legal history. Yet not everyone is “enveloped in a warm and fuzzy feeling”, writes UKHRB’s own Jim Duffy. Justice Scalia, the firebrand conservative, “pulled no punches” in his dissent, citing the majority opinion as “egotistic” and a “threat to American democracy”. Scalia’s arrival in London last week further stoked the Obergefell debate. Speaking at a Federalist Society event, Scalia held his colleagues had wrongly used the due process clause to distill a substantive, rather than procedural, right. Defending his position as a constitutional originalist, Scalia maintained the meaning of the Constitution as fixed, rather than the “wonderfully seductive judicial theory” of living constitutions, in which “we can have all sorts of new things, like same sex marriage”. When asked about the proposed Bill of Rights, the Justice’s response was particularly biting: “You can’t do any worse than the situation you’re in now”.
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29 September 2015 by Laura Profumo
Laura Profumo brings you the latest human rights happenings.
In the News:
Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, announced last week that it was “inconceivable” that the SNP would support the Conservative plans to scrap the Human Rights Act. Talking to an audience in Glasgow on Wednesday, Sturgeon pledged her unequivocal commitment to block the HRA-repeal. Sturgeon warned that human rights remained a “devolved issue”, meaning that Scottish opposition might well hamper Gove’s forthcoming efforts. Many find sympathy with Sturgeon’s stance. Sturgeon values the HRA as a “careful model” which incorporates human rights protection into UK law, without upsetting our constitutional bedrock, writes Alex Cisneros in The Justice Gap.
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23 April 2010 by Adam Wagner
Lord Phillips
Lord Phillips, the head of the Supreme Court, spoke to lawyers this week on the future of the Human Rights Act 1998, which the Conservative Party have threatened to repeal. He said that now that the Act is in place, it would be very difficult to imagine a court ignoring the rights enshrined by it, even if it were repealed.
We will post the full speech if and when it becomes available. In the mean time, Afua Hirsch writing in the Guardian summarises his argument (reproduced after the page break below).
On a second-hand reading, it does seem somewhat hopeful to assume, as Lord Phillips appears to, that if the Act were repealed courts would still place rights in anything like the central position they have been since the its passing, largely through momentum. Lawyers tend to concentrate on points which win cases, rather than on first principles, and whilst human rights were a relevant consideration before the Act’s passing (judgments of the European Court of Human Rights were persuasive but not binding), they amounted to little more that.
That said, the Conservative party have pledged to replace the Act with something similar, a Bill of Rights. It is not yet clear what form it will take, but it is highly likely that the European Convention on Human Rights will be the starting point for its drafting, and it is likely to be a recalibration rather than a replacement. As such, human rights are most probably “here to stay”, but we should not overestimate the constitutional power of judges, or underestimate the power of Parliament to set the legal agenda.
Update 27/04/10
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18 December 2019 by Thomas Hayes
This week sees Baroness Hale sitting for the final time as President of the Supreme Court. Photo credit: The Guardian.
A brief delay to the publication of this article has helpfully afforded this blogger the opportunity to move beyond the political events of last Thursday and instead focus on much more interesting legal matters (more on those later).
However, it would be remiss not to recognise the consequences of last week’s election, which saw the Prime Minister return newly empowered by a sizeable Conservative majority. At the time of writing, proposals were being made to put the legislation required to withdraw from the European Union back to MPs as early as this Friday.
Sneaking in at page 17 of the Conservative manifesto (one page after a commitment to extend the water rebate in the South West) came the party’s offering on law and order. This included commitments to increase the number of police, enhance the use of “fair and proportionate” stop and search, as well as promote longer sentences and the greater use of electronic tags. The manifesto was however silent on some matters which have drawn attention of late, including court closures, legal aid cuts, and previous suggestions from ministers that the Human Rights Act might be amended to protect soldiers from prosecution for acts performed during their time in service. With such a significant majority however, the Government will be in a position to pursue its chosen agenda with enthusiasm, and so these and other mooted at policies, such as reform of the judicial review process, may not be as fanciful as previously thought.
Moving gratefully on from politics, today saw the first day in the case of XX v Whittington Hospital NHS Trust (appealing [2018] EWCA Civ 2832), which also serves as Baroness Hale’s final case as President of the Supreme Court before her replacement on January 11thby Lord Reed. The case provides an interesting example of a scenario in which factual matters combined with absent or inadequate law require the court to consider matters of a deeply public policy nature.
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