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UK Human Rights Blog - 1 Crown Office Row
Search Results for: prisoners/page/38/ministers have been procrastinating on the issue, fearing that it will prove unpopular with the electorate.
Food production is becoming a chosen territory for some of the fiercest current battles about freedom of information in this country. In 2009 the Channel 4 broadcast of a film about the pork factory business was effectively shut down by the threat of libel action; in the last week the Guardian reported that libel lawyers Carter and Ruck have written to the Soil Association threatening legal action if they failed to withdraw allegations underlying their objection to a planning application for one of the country’s largest pig units.
Update (15 January 2011): Nocton Dairies Ltd has withdrawn its planning application for a 3,700-cow mega-dairy in Lincolnshire.
Pig production company Midland Pig Producers (MPP) is seeking planning approval for 30 acres of land in Foston, Derbyshire, to develop a pig unit containing 2,500 sows and up to 25,000 pigs. The Soil Association formally objected to the plans because of the ‘increased disease risk and poor welfare conditions” of intensive units.
The application to South Derbyshire district council was in fact withdrawn after it was ruled that it needed to go to the county council instead. This is because the proposed inclusion of an anaerobic digestion unit on the site brings in waste matters which concerns the jurisdiction of the county council rather than the district planners. MPP expects to reapply in the next few weeks. Continue reading →
The Colston Four have been acquitted of criminal damage by a jury for their role in pulling down the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol and pushing it into Bristol Harbour during a Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020. Under the Criminal Damage Act 1971, a defendant will have a defence to criminal damage if they can prove they had a ‘lawful excuse’ for their actions. In this case, the four defendants put forward three lawful excuses. First, they argued that they had been acting to prevent the crime of public indecency which was being committed in the retention of the statue after 30 years of petitions to remove it, given the serious offence and distress it caused. Relatedly, they contended that Bristol County Council had committed misconduct in failing to take it down, but this was withdrawn from the jury by HHJ Peter Blair QC as there was insufficient evidence. Second, they argued that they genuinely believed the statue was the property of Bristol citizens, and that those citizens would consent to the statue being pulled down. Finally, they contended that a conviction would be a disproportionate interference with their rights under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (to freedom of expression and assembly). The verdict has been criticised by some as a politically motivated decision which has no proper basis in law, and a petition to retry the protesters has received over 13,000 signatures. Supporters of the Colston four maintain on the other hand that their excuses have a real foundation in the law, and that therefore it had been open to the jury to find the defendants not guilty.
The approach of juries in protest cases has come under further scrutiny in light of the new proposal in the Police Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Bill to increase the maximum sentence for the damage of memorials to 10 years imprisonment, irrespective of the cost of the damage. The increase in sentence means that all cases would necessarily be tried by a jury, which some legal commentators have suggested makes it more likely that perpetrators will go free.
Four defendants were acquitted by a jury in Bristol Crown Court following their trial for allegations of criminal damage on 7 June 2020 to a statue of the English merchant Edward Colston (1636-1721). The story has been widely covered elsewhere so I will limit this post to a discussion of the reference itself.
The application with which this reference was concerned was whether conviction for the damage done to the statue was a disproportionate interference with the defendants’ right to protest, under the free speech Article 10, right to gather under Article 11, and the right to freedom of conscience under Article 9.
The Attorney General has the power to refer verdicts to the Court of Appeal under section 36 of the Criminal Justice Act 1972 in the event of acquittals to correct mistakes of law so that those mistakes are not perpetuated in the courts below.
It is important to note at the outset that this reference was not directed to the jury’s verdict itself. It was to clarify the law on public protest to avoid confusion.
The Court of Appeal has provided its own press summary of their decision. In the following paragraphs I gather together the salient observations in this decision.
In a career defined as much by powerful dissenting judgments as by winning oral arguments, Ruth Bader Ginsburg blazed a trail particularly for women, but also minorities and the LGBTQI+ community, to receive equal treatment under the law. This article will follow that trail, from her early women’s rights arguments in the 1970s to her powerful dissenting judgments, which earned her the affectionate title of ‘the Notorious RBG’ in later life.
To commemorate her death last Friday at 87 years of age, this extended article will look at her extraordinary professional life.
R (o.t.a. Western Sahara Campaign UK) v. HMRC and DEFRA [2015] EWHC 2898 (Admin) Blake J, 19 October 2015 read judgment
Not primarily about migration, but a case arising out of the long-running conflict between Morocco, as occupying power, and the Western Sahara as occupied territory. For many years, the UN has recognised the Western Sahara as a non-self-governing territory which is entitled to exercise its right of self-determination. Morocco does not agree, and has done what occupying powers do, namely send in Moroccan nationals to flood the existing populations, add troops, and commit human rights abuses, according to evidence filed in the case.
You may be wondering how this North-West African problem got to London’s Administrative Court. This is because the challenge is to two EU measures concerning Morocco. The first is a preferential tariff (administered by HMRC) applicable to imports from Morocco of goods originating from the Western Sahara. The second concerns the intended application of an EU-Morocco fisheries agreement about fishing in the territorial waters of Western Sahara.
Updated | It all started with the reporting of an injunction, supposedly obtained by former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive, “preventing him being identified as a banker”. A mildly interesting story, made marginally more so by the fact that the injunction had been breached by an MP during a Parliamentary debate.
But there is more to the story. As bloggers Anna Raccoon, Charon QC and Obiter J have reported, on a Parliamentary debate on Thursday the same Liberal Democrat MP, John Hemming, revealed the details of a number of other (what he called) “hyper” injunctions. The common feature was that courts had ordered not only that the parties to litigation were to be prevented from revealing details of their cases to the public, but also to their MPs.
Hayward v. Zurich[2016] UKSC 48 27 July 2016 read judgment
and Versloot Dredging BV v HDI Gerling Industrie Versicherung AG [2016] UKSC, 20 July 2016 read judgment
Twin doses of dishonesty in the Supreme Court, last month. Both raised dilemmas for the SC trying to steer a principled way (in different circumstances) towards determining the cost of lying.
In the first, Mr Hayward claimed over £400,000 from his employers for a back injury at work. The Zurich smelt a rat and alleged exaggeration in its defence but felt ultimately they could not sufficiently prove it in court. So in 2003 they settled the claim by paying Mr Hayward just under £135,000. In 2005, his neighbours told insurers that they thought he had been dishonest. So the Zurich started proceedings to set the compromise aside and to get its money back. Mr Hayward sought to strike it out, saying “a deal was a deal”, without success. So he then faced a trial of Zurich’s claim, at the end of which Zurich was successful. But the saga was not over. He now faced a retrial of his original claim, in which he repeated the lies he had come out previously. The judge was thoroughly unconvinced, and gave him £14,700. It was that result which was eventually appealed to the Supreme Court.
The second claim concerned marine insurers of a ship who sought to repudiate a claim on the policy because the insured owners had told a lie in presenting the claim, even though the lie proved to be irrelevant to the insurer’s liability. Owners claimed over €3,200,000 for the loss of a vessel. They said that the crew had informed them that the bilge alarm had sounded at noon that day, but could not be investigated because of heavy weather. This was a lie told by the owners to strengthen the claim. But it turned out to be irrelevant to the result, because of the judge’s finding that the vessel’s loss had been caused by a peril of the seas.
Both lower courts found that this lie was a “fraudulent device”, which meant the insurers did not have to pay out under the policy.
So what did the Supreme Court do with these two claims about lying?
The European Convention 1950 guarantees the right to a fair trial. Everyone knows that. At article 6.1 the Convention says:
Right to a fair trial
1. In the determination of his civil rights and obligations or of any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law….
What everyone does not know is what is a ‘civil right’. And in the present context – namely divorce of civil partnership dissolution – do you have a right to query the assertion of your spouse or civil partner that your marriage or civil partnership has irretrievably broken down?
The Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020 simplifies the divorce and civil partnership dissolution process by changing the law to make irretrievable breakdown – as now – the only ground for divorce or dissolution. But to prove that, there was no longer any need to establish one or more facts: adultery (marriage only), unreasonable behaviour or living apart for varying periods. One, or both, parties can file a statement of irretrievable breakdown. The procedure for this is likely – no commencement date has been confirmed – to be in force from 6 April 2022. All so far so civilised.
Access to environmental justice is as topical asever. Delegates at the recent conference of the United Kingdom Environmental Law Association (UKELA), held in late June at UEA in Norwich (yards from the Climatic Research Unit much in the news) argued that the current regime in this country is unsatisfactory – because of the cost, but also, and less predictably, because of a lack of basic fairness.
One QC who specialises in planning law pointed to the fact that a developer who is dissatisfied with a planning decision can appeal it, but an affected third party (often a disgruntled resident) cannot. He commented off the record that in his experience both as an advocate and as a decision-maker, decisions were affected by the knowledge that developers could readily challenge refusals, whereas third parties could not challenge grants other than by way of judicial review.
R (on the application of Hoang Anh Minh) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] EWHC 1725 (Admin) – read judgment
This case concerned the proper approach to establishing whether there are “reasonable grounds” for believing that a person has been a victim of trafficking under the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (“the Trafficking Convention”). It also touched on the scope of the state’s positive obligations under Article 4 ECHR (which protects citizens of Council of Europe Countries from subjected to slavery, servitude, or forced or compulsory labour).
Background
The claimant arrived in the UK from Vietnam via Russia, where he claimed he had been forced to work in a factory for several years before being released. On arrival here he claimed asylum, which was refused.
In parallel with asylum proceedings, however, his case was referred to the Home Office’s competent authority to determine whether he was entitled to protection and assistance under the Trafficking Convention. The question in this context was different from that in the asylum claim – the competent authority was required to consider whether there were “reasonable grounds” to consider that the Claimant had been a victim of trafficking.
The competent authority gave an emphatic “no” to that question, by way of three decisions (an initial decision and two further decisions which reconsidered the first) which were in effect treated as a single decision for the purposes of the claim. The Claimant challenged those decisions by way of judicial review. Continue reading →
Whyte and Mackay Ltd v. Blyth & Blyth Consulting Engineers Ltd, Outer House, Court of Session, Lord Malcolm, 9 April 2013 read judgment
One to read if you have any interest in summary justice in civil litigation – not simply for those who can tell their rebar from their roof tile.
The first instance Scottish judge refused to order enforcement of a £3m adjudication – a form of interim justice -in complex professional negligence proceedings, because to do so would have involved a violation of A1P1 – the right to property. But he ruled against a similar submission based on Article 6 – the right to a fair trial.
Laura Profumo considers the latest human rights headlines.
In the News
The High Court in Belfast today ruled that abortion legislation in Northern Ireland is in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHCR) brought the case to extend abortion to cases of serious foetal malformation, rape and incest.
The Abortion Act 1967 does not extend to Northern Ireland: abortion is only allowed there if a woman’s life is at risk, or if there is a permanent risk to her mental or physical health. In this judicial review, it was held that the grounds for abortion should be extended, though it is still to be determined whether new legislation will be required to give effect to the ruling.
the repeated detention of the claimants – foreign nationals with limited leave to remain – when they returned to the UK from travelling abroad, so that they could be questioned about their NHS debts, was unlawful;
the policy pursuant to which the claimants were detained (the “Policy”) was unlawful because it contained a positive statement of law which was wrong or, alternatively, because it failed to provide a full account of the legal position;
the Policy was unlawful because it was unpublished; and
the Secretary of State for the Home Department (“SSHD”) was in breach of the public sector equality duty (“PSED”) under s.149 of the Equality Act 2010.
In reality, the facts carried the day. This was true not only in relation to the unlawful detention issue, but also on some other points – for example, the SSHD failed to evidence any public interest in not publishing the Policy or any consideration given to the equality impacts of the exercise of the relevant powers of detention. Insofar as there are lessons to be learned, they are likely to be found in the criticisms levelled at the evidence (or lack thereof) provided by the SSHD.
Gradwick v IC and the Cabinet Office (EA/2010/0030) – Read decision
The Panopticon Blog has highlighted an interesting recent case in the General Regulatory Tribunal which may prove to be useful in the many different situations where documents are disclosed in redacted form.
The General Regulatory Tribunal (‘the Tribunal’) regulates information rights, amongst other things. Simply, the Tribunal held that if parts of documents disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 are to be redacted (blacked out), it is not good enough to transcribe a new document with the offending parts removed. This is because, as the Tribunal said:
In 2015, the Court of Appeal found that the fast-track procedure rules for appeals against the refusal of some types of asylum claim (the FTR) was “structurally unfair, unjust and ultra vires” (R (Detention Action) v First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) [2015] EWCA Civ 840; [2015] 1 WLR 5341, known as DA6). The Court of Appeal quashed the FTR because this structural unfairness “created a risk that the applicants would have inadequate time to obtain advice, marshall their evidence and properly present their cases”, which “created an unacceptable risk of unfairness in a significant number of cases”.
Six years later, the question in R (on the application of TN (Vietnam)) v Secretary of State for the Home Department[2021] UKSC 41 was straightforward: where a decision had been taken under the FTR, should it also be quashed, or must the person who was subject to the decision demonstrate that the decision itself was unfair, rather than merely issuing from an unfair system?
The High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court all answered unequivocally that structural unfairness was not enough to quash an individual decision. Unfairness on the facts had to be found, or the decision would stand.
Background and Decisions Below
TN had, as the court acknowledged, a complicated procedural history, involving a number of applications for asylum, all of which (of those which had been determined at the time of trial) had been rejected. In hearings in those applications, TN had been represented by counsel. However, successive decisionmakers found TN’s claim not to be credible, and on 22 August 2014, the First-tier Tribunal (FTT) rejected her appeal. It was this rejection, decided as it was by a tribunal following the procedural rules in the FTR, which TN sought to challenge in this case.
One reason TN’s evidence was not believed was that it was inconsistent, giving different dates at different times for her mother’s death, and changing the basis of her application for asylum without explaining fully the reasons for the changes. This raised a question plainly discussed, but in the end not legally consequential, of the approach taken to evidence of trafficking, given that trafficking victims frequently change their stories, partly because they will often not know (in terms) that this is what they are (see paragraphs [22]-[24]).
In a detailed judgment, Ouseley J rejected TN’s application, upholding the Tribunal’s decision. His judgment involved a detailed review of the history of TN’s case, after which he concluded that the Tribunal’s decision was not tainted by the structural unfairness of the FTR.
In the Court of Appeal, Singh LJ gave the leading judgment (with whom Sharp and Peter Jackson LLJ agreed), holding that the “fundamental reason” that the application had to fail was that there was “a conceptual distinction between holding that the procedural rules were ultra vires and the question whether the procedure in an individual appeal decision was unfair”.
The legal lens through which this fundamental conceptual distinction found expression was the principle of jurisdiction. Singh LJ considered two bases on which the FTT could fail to have jurisdiction, rejecting both. First, he held that the ultra vires nature of the FTR did not divest the FTT of jurisdiction in the “pure and narrow sense” of having “the legal authority to decide a question”. The Tribunal’s jurisdiction was not created by the FTR but rather by statute; the FTR was “merely a rule which regulates procedure and form”.
The second basis on which the Tribunal might have lost jurisdiction was in the “post-Anisminic understanding of jurisdiction … that a body has acted in a way which is unlawful, including (for this purpose) in a way which is procedurally unfair”. This too was rejected: the Tribunal had not acted in such a way; even though the FTR had created a structural risk that it might, that risk had not eventuated.
Singh LJ went on to set out four factors which the court should take into account when the fairness of an individual decision made under the FTR was challenged on the basis of unfairness. These were, paraphrasing: (1) a high degree of fairness is required in the context of asylum applications; (2) the FTR created an unacceptable risk of unfairness in a significant number of cases; (3) there is no presumption that the procedure in any one case was fair or unfair and what is necessary is a causal link between the risk of unfairness created by the FTR and what happened in a particular case; and (4) the finality of litigation is important, and as such delay is relevant, as are questions as to what steps were taken, and how quickly, to adduce evidence later relied on.
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Food production is becoming a chosen territory for some of the fiercest current battles about freedom of information in this country. In 2009 the Channel 4 broadcast of a film about the pork factory business was effectively shut down by the threat of libel action; in the last week the Guardian reported that libel lawyers Carter and Ruck have written to the Soil Association threatening legal action if they failed to withdraw allegations underlying their objection to a planning application for one of the country’s largest pig units.
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