Search Results for: prisoners/page/24/ministers have been procrastinating on the issue, fearing that it will prove unpopular with the electorate.

Once more unto the breach

15 June 2017 by Guest Contributor

Government successfully appeals in ‘Right to Rent’ case

22 April 2020 by Samuel March

R (Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2020] EWCA Civ 542, judgment here

On 21^st April 2020, the Court of Appeal allowed the Home Office’s appeal in the ‘right to rent’ case. The decision below was covered on this blog here.

Notably, the Court of Appeal agreed with the High Court’s view that the scheme does result in landlords discriminating against tenants without British passports on the basis of their actual or perceived nationality. However, the Court held that this discrimination was justified.

When is an advert “political” for the purposes of a ban under the Communications Act?

21 November 2013 by Rosalind English

R (on the application of London Christian Radio Ltd & Christian Communications Partnerships) v Radio Advertising Clearance Centre (Respondent) & Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Interested Party) [2013] EWCA Civ 1495 – read judgment

The ban on Christian Radio’s proposed advert seeking data on the “marginalisation of Christians” in the workplace was lawful and did not constitute an interference with free speech, the Court of Appeal has ruled. When determining whether a radio or television advertisement was “political” fur the purposes of Section 321(2)(b) of the Communications Act 2003 the court should consider the text objectively; the motives of the advertiser were irrelevant.

This was an appeal against a ruling by Silber J ([2013] EWHC 1043 (Admin)) that a proposed radio advertisement was directed towards a political end, and therefore fell foul of the prohibition on political advertising which meant that it could not be given clearance for broadcast (see my previous post on this decision).
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On fairness and principle: the legacy of ZZ re-examined – Michael Rhimes

6 August 2015 by Guest Contributor

Kiani v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] EWCA Civ 776 (21 July 2015) – read judgment

In my last post on UKHRB I commented on developments in UK, ECHR and EU jurisprudence relating to procedural fairness in the context of national security.

The developments in this recent case offer some further interesting thoughts on the topic. To explain the case, and put its ramifications in a broader context, this post will be divided into three parts.  In the first I outline my original argument as set out in the earlier post. The second will explain the case itself. The third will offer five brief comments on the broader issues the cases touches upon.

In brief, the court in Kiani followed Tariq and held that AF-type disclosure (see below) was not a universal requirement of fairness; the interests of justice could require a lower standard of disclosure without violating the absolute right to a fair hearing.
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The Round Up: Instagramming claim forms, procedural unfairness, and what happens when ‘pragmatism’ meets human rights.

11 February 2018 by Conor Monighan

Conor Monighan brings us the latest updates in human rights law.

Credit: Wiki Commons

In the News:

Robinson v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire

Covered by the Blog here

There is no general immunity for police officers investigating or preventing crime. In this case, Mrs Robinson suffered injuries when two police officers fell on top of her, along with a suspected drug dealer resisting arrest. The officers had foreseen Williams would attempt to escape but had not noticed Mrs Robinson  (who was represented by 1 Crown Office Row’s academic consultant Duncan Fairgrieve).

The recorder found that, although the officers were negligent, Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire [1989] gave them immunity from negligence claims. The Court of Appeal ruled the police officers owed no duty of care, and even if they did they had not broken it. It also found most claims against the police would fail the third stage of the Caparo test (i.e. it would not be fair, just and reasonable to impose a duty of care upon the police in these situations). The Court found Williams had caused the harm, not the police, so the issue was based on omission rather than a positive act. Finally, even if officers had owed the Appellant a duty of care, they had not breached it.

Mrs Robinson appealed successfully to the Supreme Court.

It held:
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The Belhaj finale: Exclusion of closed material procedure means less scrutiny of DPP decisions — Nicholas Clapham

5 July 2018 by Guest Contributor

The rendition to Libya in 2004 of Mr Belhaj and his wife, Mrs Boudchar has given rise to a series of important cases in the domestic courts. In Belhaj and another v Straw and others) and Rahmatullah (No 1) v Ministry of Defence and another [2017] UKSC 3 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the doctrine of state immunity did not operate to bar claims against the Government arising from their detention (as discussed in these pages by Dominic Ruck Keene).

Recently the parties in the Belhaj case have reached a mediated settlement and this action is at an end. Although the settlement was concluded without admission of liability, the Prime Minster issued an apology which included the following statement:

The UK Government’s actions contributed to your detention, rendition and suffering. The UK Government shared information about you with its international partners. We should have done more to reduce the risk that you would be mistreated. We accept this was a failing on our part.

The Remaining Case

Despite the end of those proceedings, a procedural argument remained extant which concerned the applicability of closed material proceedings to judicial review in certain cases. In Belhaj and another v Director of Public Prosecutions and another [2018] UKSC 33 (4 July 2018) the Appellants sought judicial review of a decision not to prosecute a person said to be a member of the British Secret intelligence Service.

Although the matter was then settled before judgment, the Court decided that this issue required authoritative determination in light of its importance.

The allegation was broadly one of connivance in the Appellant’s abduction, ‘rendition’ and maltreatment (although Her Majesty’s Government neither confirmed nor denied such involvement during the proceedings). The Crown Prosecution Service decision was made on the basis of 28,000 documents, none of which were disclosed to the Appellants due to their security classification.

The issue for the Court was whether this material could be received during judicial review proceedings using the closed material procedure by which the material is disclosed to the court and a special advocate but not the Appellants.

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Belfast court dismisses Brexit challenge

30 October 2016 by Rosalind English

McCord, Re Judicial Review [2016] NIQB 85 (28 October 2016) – read judgment

A challenge to the legality of the UK’s departure proceedings from the EU has been rejected by the High Court in Northern Ireland. In a judgment which will be of considerable interest to the government defending a similar challenge in England, Maguire J concluded that the UK government does not require parliamentary approval to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty. This is, par excellence, an area for the exercise of the government’s treaty making powers under the Royal Prerogative.

See our previous post on Article 50 and a summary of the arguments in the English proceedings.

This ruling was made in response to two separate challenges. One was brought by a group of politicians, including members of the Northern Ireland assembly, the other by Raymond McCord, a civil rights campaigner whose son was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in 1997. They argued that the 1997 peace deal (“the Good Friday Agreement”) gave Northern Ireland sovereignty over its constitutional future and therefore a veto over leaving the EU. Like the English challengers, they also argued that Article 50 could only be invoked after a vote in Parliament.

At centre stage in the English case is the means by which Article 50 TEU is to be triggered and the question of the displacement of prerogative executive power by statute.  While this issue was also raised in the challenge before the Northern Ireland court, Maguire J also had before him a range of specifically Northern Irish constitutional provisions which were said to have a similar impact on the means of triggering Article 50. To avoid duplication of the central issues which the English court will deal with, this judgment concerned itself with the impact of Northern Ireland constitutional provisions in respect of notice under Article 50.

However, the judge had some clear views on the role of prerogative powers in the Brexit procedure, which, whilst respecting the outcome of the English proceedings, he did not hesitate to set out.
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Hot Water for Baroness Hale

17 November 2016 by Dominic Ruck Keene

After the lynch mob of outrage stirred up by the recent Divisional Court ruling on Article 50, it is a brave judge indeed who would say anything in public about the question of whether and how Parliament (i.e. the legislature) needs to approve the notification of the European Council under Article 50 of the UK’s intention to leave the EU.

Baroness Hale was therefore perhaps pushing the envelope of bold courage to make a speech in Malaysia on 7 November and refer to that precise issue before the Supreme Court have heard the case.

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The spanner of “human dignity” in the wheels of modern medicine

22 April 2013 by Rosalind English

International Stem Cell Corporation v Comptroller General of Patents 17 April 2013  [2013] EWHC 807 (Ch) – read judgment

The EU bans the patenting of human embryos for commercial purposes. This ban is implemented in national law via the 1977 Patents Act. But what precisely is a “human embryo” for the purposes of the Biotech Directive? Or, put another way, must the process involving embryonic stem cells be capable of developing into a human being, before the ban can bite?

Stem cells – not just the embryonic variety – are vital to current medical research. This is because they have the capacity to differentiate into almost any type of adult cell, thus opening the door to a wide variety of new therapies and other medical applications. In theory, stem cells can be grown in the lab and developed into healthy adult cells to correct cardiovascular disorders , diabetes and a range of degenerative brain diseases and spinal cord injuries. One of the first triumphs of stem cell therapy is the ability of retinal pigment epithelium cells, cultured from embryonic stem cells (ESCs), to reverse the effects of age related macular degeneration. Other potential applications include the treatment of burns, strokes, eye disease, spinal cord injuries and certain forms of cancer.

But the concept of ESCs  is fraught with emotion and controversy and scientists have worked, with varying degrees of success, at finding stem cells elsewhere, either in adult tissue, or by creating stem cells from non-viable embryos.
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No hunting on my land, please: but only if my objections are based on conscience

23 October 2012 by Rosalind English

Chabauty v France 4 October 2012 – read judgment

I have posted previously on cases involving the ethical objection of landowners to being forced to allow hunting over their property.

These objections have generally found favour with the Strasbourg Court in the balancing of private and public interests under the right to property.  Mr Chabauty puts the issue into another perspective. He also complained that he was unable to have his land removed from the control of an approved municipal hunters’ association. The difference was – and this proved to be critical to the outcome of the case –  Mr Chabauty is not himself against hunting on ethical grounds. Since no conscience was underlying his Convention complaint, the Court found it not to be disproportionate for the French state to require small landowners to pool their hunting grounds. As such, there had been no violation of Article 1 Protocol 1 or Article 14.
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Hunting, animals, and the evolving landscape of rights

4 July 2012 by Rosalind English

Herrmann v Germany (Application no. 9300/07) 26 June 2012 – read judgment

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the obligation of a landowner to allow hunting on his property violated his Convention rights. Although the majority based their conclusion on his right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions,  the partially concurring and dissenting opinions and the judgment as a whole provide an interesting insight into the way freedom of conscience challenges are to be approached in a secular society where religion holds less sway than individual ethical positions on certain issues.

Background

In 2002 the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany ruled that the granting of exceptional authorisation for the slaughter of animals without previous stunning, on religious grounds, did not breach the German Basic Law Schächt-Entscheidung (BVerfGE 99, 1, 15 January 2002). The social uproar that followed the ruling led to the German constitutional legislature taking a significant step aimed at protecting animal welfare with the 2002 constitutional reform, by including Article 20a in the Basic Law:

“Mindful also of its responsibility toward future generations, the State shall protect the natural foundations of life and animals through legislation…”
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Extradition in “disarray”? – Amelia Nice

27 April 2016 by Guest Contributor

Aranyosi and Căldăraru [C-404/15 and C-659/15 PPU].

On 5 April 2016, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that the execution of a European Arrest Warrant (‘EAW’) must be deferred if there is a real risk of inhuman or degrading treatment because of the conditions of detention for the person concerned in the requesting state. If the existence of that risk cannot be discounted within a reasonable period, the authority responsible for the execution of the warrant must decide whether the surrender procedure should be deferred or brought to an end.

The cases concerned two totally unrelated and separate extradition requests: a Hungarian accusation warrant seeking the person for trial, the other a Romanian conviction warrant so the person sought could serve a prison sentence. The requested state in both cases was Germany.
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No compensation for Google data breaches

10 October 2018 by Rosalind English

Lloyd v Google LLC [2018] EWHC 2599 (QB) 8 October 2018 – read judgment

This is a novel form of action, but everything was new once (Warby J para 100)

Already today we are becoming tiny chips inside a giant data-processing system that nobody really understands. (Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, p. 36)

Do people want privacy? Because they seem to put everything on the internet. (Elon Musk, interview on Joe Rogan podcast #1169 at 1.49)

Most of us resignedly consent to the use of cookies in order to use internet sites, vaguely aware that these collect information about our browsing habits in order to target us with advertisements. It’s annoying, but does it do us any harm? That is the question that came up before Warby J in a preliminary application for a representative claim last week.
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The Mau Mau litigation: fear is not a personal injury

7 August 2018 by Matt Donmall

Kimathi & Ors v Foreign and Commonwealth Office [2018] EWHC 1305 (QB) – read judgment.

Stewart J has recently dismissed the first test case in this group litigation, in which over 40,000 Kenyans bring claims for damages against the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, alleging abuse during the Kenyan Emergency of the 1950s and early 1960s, in Kimathi & Others v The Foreign and Commonwealth Office [2018] EWHC 2066 (QB). Jo Moore discusses this in her blog post of 6 August 2018.

Earlier this year however he considered, as a preliminary matter, whether fear, caused either by the tort of negligence or trespass, amounts to personal injury so that the Court has the discretionary power to exclude the 3-year limitation period which arises under section 11 of the 1980 Act. Stewart J concluded that “despite the comprehensive and innovative submissions of the Claimants” (para 37), which included arguments on human rights grounds, fear did not amount to a personal injury.
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Guest Post: Assisted Suicide on the NHS would breach the ECHR 

1 November 2024 by Guest Contributor

In this guest post, Rajiv Shah argues that the provision of assisted suicide in the England and Wales via the NHS would constitute a substantive breach of the negative obligation imposed on the State under Article 2 of the ECHR.

Introduction

Article 2 of the ECHR protects the right to life. That article contains two distinct substantive obligations: “the general obligation to protect by law the right to life, and the prohibition of intentional deprivation of life, delimited by a list of exceptions.” (Boso v Italy, at [1])

That first obligation is a positive one and requires States to take steps to protect life from third parties and even from individuals themselves. The precise content of that obligation is necessarily nebulous and the Court affords States a margin of appreciation in deciding what that obligation requires, and how it is to be fulfilled. So, in two recent Chamber decisions – Mortier v Belgium and Karsai v Hungary – the Strasbourg Court held that this positive obligation does not require States to forbid assisted suicide and euthanasia, but that if it does want to allow it, it must create legal safeguards to ensure that the decision of individuals to end their own life/or be killed by third parties is freely taken.