Search Results for: prisoners/page/39/ministers have been procrastinating on the issue, fearing that it will prove unpopular with the electorate.
9 January 2012 by Rachit Buch
Mr Abdullah Manuwar and Secretary of State for the Home Department IA26/543/2010 – Read decision
We have posted on this blog previously on some of the poor reporting of human rights cases. Alarm bells were ringing as the Sunday Telegraph reported student Abdullah Munawar’s appeal on human rights grounds against a refusal to grant him leave to stay in the UK, citing his playing cricket as a reason he had a private life under Article 8 of the ECHR.
However, considering the judgment, the Telegraph article makes a valid point on the limits provided by human rights on immigration decisions, and shows that not all journalism critical of the Human Rights Act is inaccurate.
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2 February 2015 by Rosalind English
BB, PP, U and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] EWCA Civ 9 (23 January 2015) – read judgment
This was an appeal by Algerian nationals who had been found by the Special Immigration and Appeals Commission (SIAC) to constitute a threat to UK national security, against deportation to Algeria.
The appellants had resisted attempts by various home secretaries to deport them via protracted litigation over several years. Despite several findings by the SIAC that their human rights would not be infringed in Algeria, doubts remained, particularly with regard to the period of up to twelve days of initial detention in Algeria, known as “garde a vue” detention, in a barracks run by the Algerian security services (DRS). The purpose of such detention was to interrogate prisoners to obtain evidence for future proceedings. SIAC had wholly accepted the evidence of an innocent British citizen (AB) detained there in a case of mistaken identity as “punitive in the extreme”, but determined that his treatment showed a lack of care over the detainee’s welfare rather than a breach of his human rights. It had conceded that the treatment of the appellants might well be no better, not least because DRS officers considered such treatment to be consistent with respect for human dignity.
The appellants submitted that, in the light of this, SIAC’s conclusion that their treatment would not violate Article 3 of the Convention was legally unsustainable; that SIAC had erred in law in its findings that the Algerian government’s assurances were capable of independent verification; and that the SIAC had also erred in law in maintaining, without any open evidence in support, that the DRS had been present during discussions about those assurances and had subscribed to them.
The Court of Appeal upheld the appeals.
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2 December 2013 by Celia Rooney
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular winter wonderland 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, equality issues dominate the headlines, while elsewhere judicial heavyweights throw their views into the ring on the institutional question of who should have the final say on issues involving human rights.
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9 July 2010 by Adam Wagner
Babar Ahmad, Haroon Rashid Aswat, Syed Tahla Ahsan and Mustafa Kamal Mustafa (Abu Hamza) v United Kingdom – 24027/07 [2010] ECHR 1067 (6 July 2010) – Read judgment
The European Court of Human Rights has delayed the extradition of four men, including the notorious Mustafa Kamal Mustafa (Abu Hamza), from the United Kingdom to the United States due to concerns that long prison sentences and harsh conditions in a “supermax” prison could violate their human rights.
In this admissibility application, the four men mounted a wide-ranging attack on the US Justice system to the Strasbourg court, in terms usually reserved for lawless rogue states. The men claimed their extradition would put them at risk of harsh treatment, extraordinary rendition and the death penalty, amongst other draconian penalties. They said that the trial of non-US citizens on terrorism charges would lead to a “flagrant denial of justice”.
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15 February 2016 by Hannah Lynes
Photo credit: The Telegraph
In the news
The Prime Minister has this week set out his “agenda for a revolution in the prison system”. His speech outlines plans for governors to be given greater autonomy, prisoners to be provided with better opportunities for work and education, and the making of “alternative provision” for people struggling with severe mental health problems.
Commentators have reacted with cautious optimism. David Cameron is “absolutely right to point to the waste of money, time and lives that characterises today’s prison system,” writes Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform. His speech could herald “a seismic shift in policy.”
Christopher Stacey in the Justice Gap welcomes in particular the Prime Minister’s expression of support for the ‘Ban the Box’ campaign, which calls on employers to remove the tick box from application forms and ask about criminal convictions later in the recruitment process. The policy would give people with convictions “a chance to enter work – significantly reducing their likelihood of re-offending”.
Sentencing reform was, however, “notably absent” from the speech. Ellie Butt in the Huffington Post contends that this seriously undermines Cameron’s policy proposals. With the current prison population standing at 85,634, it is “a nonsense to believe we can really make prisons places of education, hard work and rehabilitation without tackling the sheer number of people inside them.”
Legal blogger Jack of Kent is in agreement that “the most significant thing about the speech was that the Prime Minister was giving it”. Yet he suggests that a move in right wing thought against custodial sentences as the default punishment for crime “may be having an influence on Michael Gove.” If such a speech is indeed “the political price Michael Gove has extracted from David Cameron for support on the EU referendum issue”, then it is “a good bargain”.
In other news
A police regulator has found that UK police forces continue to disobey rules to prevent the abuse of stop and search powers. Home Secretary Teresa May has described the failings as ‘unacceptable’, and has taken action to suspend 13 of the worst offending forces from the scheme. The Guardian reports.
Law Society Gazette: The Attorney General has suggested that in disputes over freedom of information, politicians may sometimes be better placed than the courts to make decisions on matters of public interest. The speech can be read in full here.
The Guardian: Police should no longer operate on a presumption that alleged victims of sexual assault are to be believed, according to Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe. Investigators should instead test the evidence “with an open mind, supporting the complainant through the process”.
The death of Justice Antonin Scalia at the weekend marks the end of an era for the United States Supreme Court. It also creates the potential for something of a constitutional crisis in America, coming only eleven months before the end of the Obama presidency and prompting calls from some Republicans for his replacement to be selected by the next Commander-in-Chief. Scalia’s visit to the UK last summer featured plenty of the examples of the acerbic turns of phrase the world had come to expect from the Court’s most divisive figure. You can read Jim Duffy’s account of Justice Scalia’s appearance at the Federalist Society here.
In the courts
Dallas v UK
The applicant in this case had been found guilty of contempt of court for conducting Internet research while serving on a jury. A complaint was brought under article 7 ECHR (no punishment without law) that the common law offence of contempt of court had not been sufficiently clear.
The Court held that the judgment rendered in the applicant’s case could be considered, at most, a step in the gradual clarification of the rules of criminal liability for contempt of court through judicial interpretation. The law was both accessible and foreseeable. There had accordingly been no violation of article 7 of the Convention.
UK HRB Posts
Cavalier with our Constitution: a Charter too far – Marina Wheeler
Watery rights and wrongs – and causation too – David Hart QC
Press restrictions may continue after trial in the interests of national security – HH Keith Hollis
It’s time to overhaul the Investigatory Powers Bill – Cian C. Murphy and Natasha Simonsen
Hannah Lynes
Events
If you would like your event to be mentioned on the Blog, please email Jim Duffy at jim.duffy@1cor.com
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1 July 2024 by Emilia Cieslak
In UK news
Julian Assange has been released from HM Prison Belmarsh after accepting a plea deal with American prosecutors. Assange pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, for communicating with whistleblower Chelsea Manning and receiving and publishing classified information regarding Guantanamo Bay, the Afghan and Iraq war, and US diplomatic cables. After being released from Belmarsh, he travelled to the North Mariana Islands to enter his plea, before travelling on to Australia now a free man. NGOs and media figures have voiced concerns that Assange’s guilty plea will have a chilling effect on journalists.
The Grantham Research Institute based at LSE has published a report charting the rise of climate litigation. The report found that in 2023, 230 new cases were filed against governments and companies challenging their response to the climate crisis. The report describes how these cases are reaching new domestic jurisdictions and anticipates that more cases are likely to be filed after the success of KlimaSeniorinnen and ors v. Switzerland at the ECtHR. In the UK, the Supreme Court recently held that the grant of planning permission for oil production in Surrey was unlawful as it failed to assess the greenhouse gas emissions that would inevitably arise after the oil was burnt. The Supreme Court emphasised the importance of public participation in environmental decision-making, leading some to speculate that the judgment could spur on new legal challenges to climate policy. See Rosalind English’s post on this ruling in the UKHRB here.
In international news
This week saw multiple international courts react to Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine. International Criminal Court (ICC) judges have issued arrest warrants against Russian officials Sergei Kuzhugetovich Shoigu (former Minister of Defence) and Valery Vasilyevich Gerasimov (Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces and First Deputy Minister of Defence). The ICC judges found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that they bear individual criminal responsibility for crimes including directing attacks at civilian objectives, causing excessive incidental harm to civilians or damage to civilian objects and inhumane acts. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found that Russia is responsible for a wide variety of human rights abuses in Crimea, a Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia in 2014. The judgment deals with events that took place before the full scale invasion in 2022, and chronicles a systematic campaign of repression against Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar civil society. This includes the transfer of political prisoners to Russia and restrictions on Ukrainian language and culture. The ECtHR unanimously found breaches of articles 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, articles 1 and 2 of Protocol 1, articles 2 of Protocol 4, and articles 14 and 18.
The ICC has allowed the UK government to present legal arguments that it does not have jurisdiction over Israeli nationals, likely delaying the court’s decision whether or not to issue arrest warrants against PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant (Minister of Defence). The NGO Forbidden Stories has collaborated with Israeli +972 magazine to document the alleged targeting of journalists within Gaza, as over 100 journalists have been killed since October 2023. The UN has published another famine alert for Gaza stating that 96% of the population faces acute food insecurity at “crisis” level or higher.
In the courts
The Court of Appeal has held that the National Crime Agency (NCA) misdirected itself in law when deciding not to investigate whether imported cotton products from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) were the product of forced labour or other human rights abuses committed by China. The Uyghurs are a Turkic Muslim minority subject to intense repression in China, which some argue amounts to a genocide (this is disputed by the UK government). The court recognised that there is a consensus regarding widespread exploitation and abuse within China’s cotton production and that 85% of Chinese cotton comes from XUAR. The court held that the NCA was wrong to state that it could not start an investigation unless a specific consignment of cotton produced through human rights abuses was identified. Furthermore, the NCA was wrong to state that providing “adequate consideration” for goods could prevent goods imported into the UK from constituting criminal property.
The US Supreme Court has struck down the Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the most influential precedents in US administrative law. The “Chevron doctrine” was a rule of statutory interpretation; it stated that where Congress did not directly address the meaning of a statute, a court was required to defer to the administrative agencies’ interpretation as long as it was reasonable. In the leading judgment, Judge Roberts stated that it is the role of the courts to “decide legal questions by applying their own judgment” and “it thus remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether the law means what the agency says”. Therefore, this case represents a big shift in the balance of power from the executive to the judiciary.
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12 February 2012 by Matthew Hill
Rabone and another v Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust [2012] UKSC 2 – Read judgment (On appeal from [2010] EWCA Civ 698 and [2009] EWHC 1827 )
At first sight, Article 2 – the ‘right to life’ – seems to be a prohibition on extra-judicial executions and state-sponsored death squads. It does, of course have a role to play in that respect (and one that is not limited to those countries whose signature of the Convention is viewed with scepticism from Western Europe).
But through a combination of logic, inventive legal argument and what can either be characterised as the incremental development of a new area of law, or the expansionist tendencies of Strasbourg judges, the scope of Article 2 has broadened significantly, and can be cited in cases concerning prison administration and coronial procedural law.
In Rabone, the Supreme Court extended the obligations that the Article places on the state and its servants still further, beyond even the existing decisions from Strasbourg. They held that – in the specific circumstances of this tragic case – an NHS Trust had violated the positive duty that it had, under Article 2, to protect a voluntary patient from the risk of suicide.
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13 September 2021 by William Craig Cohen
In the news:
Hundreds of people attended the funeral services for Sophie and Lee Martyn on Monday, killed last month by Jake Davison, who was active on ‘incel’ or ‘involuntary celibate’ forums (though not describing himself as one). Over 50 people, including the five gunned down by Davison in Plymouth have now been killed by incels across the Anglophone world, who blame women for their own perceived lack of sexual and social status. Incel ideology has been linked to the far right, with obsessions over male appearance and phrenology. Biological determinism defines their beliefs in their inability to find sexual partners, which, when poured into online melting-pots already occupied by anti-feminists and white supremacists, can enflame similar senses of entitlement and injustice that may consume disaffected and reclusive (generally white) men.
In 2018, Amia Srinivasan posed the question in The London Review of Books:
how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.
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26 September 2011 by Melina Padron
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
Reiterating the last roundup’s call, if you know an individual, campaign group or NGO which deserves to have its local or national human rights work recognised, nominations for The Liberty Human Rights Award close on 30th September 2011, so there’s still time to get nominating!
In the news
Dale farm evictions
Last week residents at the UK’s largest illegal travellers’ site, at Dale Farm in Essex, won a court injunction delaying their planned eviction. A High Court decision on an injunction halting the eviction of residents from the UK’s largest illegal travellers’ site will take place today.
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30 April 2012 by Isabel McArdle
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has launched the Human Rights and Democracy- The 2011 Foreign & Commonwealth Office Report, which aims to provide “a comprehensive look at the human rights work of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) around the world in 2011“. The report makes for essential reading for anyone with an interest in human rights at the global level.
The report contains a section devoted to the Arab Spring, which it describes as being “about citizens demanding their legitimate human rights and dignity” and having “no single cause“. The report also comments on the role of human rights protection in safeguarding Britain’s national security and promoting Britain’s prosperity.
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1 January 2013 by Adam Wagner
Happy new year! I hope that none of your new year’s eves were ruined by worrying when the next instalment of my year in review would arrive in your inboxes. Anyway, here we go with July to September.
If you need to catch up:
Now on to Part 3…
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3 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
Stephen Kinzer, a New York Times journalist and author, has written a scathing article on the efforts of international human rights groups on Guardian.co.uk. The article has generated controversy but in fact keys into a long-standing debate with important implications for the future of the international human rights movement.
The Kinzer article has predictably generated significant debate, with over 300 reader comments so far. Many of the commenters are critical, as is to be expected.
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5 October 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated Al-Saadoon and Mufdhi v the United Kingdom – 61498/08 [2010] ECHR 282 – Read judgment / court press release
The European Court of Human Rights has declared that a decision in the cases of two Iraqi murder suspects in UK custody in Iraq is now final and will not be reconsidered. The court has effectively prohibited the death penalty under the European Convention on Human Rights, despite Article 2 (the right to life) appearing to expressly allow it.
The judgment is an important restatement of the prohibition against the death penalty which has been agreed to by all Council of Europe states. However, the reasoning of the court in prohibiting it under the European Convention, founded on the men’s “mental suffering caused by the fear of execution amounting to inhuman treatment”, rather than a prohibition against states carrying out the death penalty itself, may generate difficulties in future cases relating to inhuman and degrading treatment.
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31 March 2013 by Sarina Kidd
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 focus this week has been on the continuing Abu Qatada saga. The Home Secretary lost her appeal and for the time being, Abu Qatada will remain in the country. In other news, the Justice and Security Bill edges towards the finish line, discussion continues on whether the UK will be able to remain in the EU if they leave the ECHR and people are split on the proposed press regulation measures.
by Sarina Kidd
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3 May 2021 by Byul Ryan-Im
In the news:
People aged 42 and over are now able to book their Covid-19 vaccines, joining the more than 33.8 million people in the UK who have received their first dose. The news comes as the Joint Committee on Human Rights called for a review of all fixed penalty notices (FPNs) for lockdown breaches and called the system “muddled, discriminatory and unfair”. The committee chair, Harriet Harman MP, said the “lack of legal clarity” meant an unfair system which “disproportionately hits the less well-off and criminalises the poor over the better off”. The report highlighted concerns about FPN validity, an inadequate review and appeals process, the size of penalties and the criminalisation of those unable to pay. A CPS review found that 27% of coronavirus-related prosecutions that reached open court in February were incorrectly charged. The lack of an adequate means to seek review of an FPN, other than through criminal prosecution, significantly increases the risk that human rights breaches will not be remedied, according to the committee. The importance of ECHR Articles 7 and 8 (no punishment without law and right to family and private life, respectively) was highlighted in particular.
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