Search Results for: prisoners/page/42/[2001] EWCA Civ 1546
26 April 2013 by Guest Contributor
The Guardian reports that Prime Minister Cameron is considering denouncing the ECHR on a temporary basis in order to facilitate the deportation of Abu Qatada. As tennis legend John McEnroe might have put it ‘you cannot be serious!’ In order to remove one man from the jurisdiction the government is contemplating removing the protection of human rights for all. One suspects that this announcement by Downing Street was little more than ‘dog-whistle’ politics with the local elections looming next week. But what if the government is really serious? Two quick thoughts come to mind.
Firstly, the UK is on the face of it able to denounce the ECHR under the terms of Article 58, though see below. But even after a denunciation the ECHR will remain fully applicable for six months. Presumably the government would wait for the six months to expire. It would then seek within domestic law to remove Qatada. As this would also require the suspension or repeal of the Human Rights Act 1998 this would require an Act of Parliament. No doubt a political and constitutional storm would break as a result. This would of course not be the end of the matter because the decision would be judicially reviewable, no doubt under an enhanced form of anxious scrutiny. How further forth would the government be then?
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7 July 2013 by Sarina Kidd
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular Wimbledon Tennis Championship of human rights news and views. The full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here. Links compiled by Adam Wagner, post by Sarina Kidd.
This week, Chris Grayling made a concession, the closed material procedure for evidence in civil trials came into effect, and to Theresa May’s delight, Abu Qatada finally left the country.
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22 April 2011 by Adam Wagner
When the prime minister criticises judges, he tends to speak from his gut. The prospect of prisoners being given the vote by European judges makes him feel “physically sick”. And now, he is “a little uneasy” about the rise of “a sort of privacy law without Parliament saying so“.
David Cameron’s use of visceral language may reflect what many in the general public (as well as PR man Max Clifford) are feeling about the issue of wide-ranging injunctions granted by courts, seemingly all the time, to prevent salacious details of celebrities’ private lives being revealed. The latest involves a former big brother contestant’s alleged affair with a married Premier League footballer.
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21 October 2014 by Rosalind English
The news last week was that the Foreign Secretary has proposed a revival of a fourteenth century statute in order to prosecute British jihadists who travel to Iraq or Syria to fight. Cries of foul are coming from the usual quarters, and there’s even a protest that the Strasbourg Court would object, which, given the current controversy surrounding that tribunal, may be a good reason in itself for such a move.
In the current froth over the Convention versus “home grown” human rights, there is much talk of the Magna Carta. So may be of interest to some that in the opinion of one of the greatest legal scholars in history, Edward Coke, the Statute of Treason had a legal importance second only to that of the “Great Charter of the Liberties of England”, piloted by feudal barons to limit King John’s power in 1215.
Politics aside, how would this work? On the face of it, a law which has been on the statute books for centuries, and is found to be applicable to a current state of affairs, is an equum donatum whose dental health should not be examined too closely. Although the last person to be convicted under the 1351 Treason Act – the Nazi propagandist William Joyce (otherwise known as Lord Haw Haw)- was hanged, now any British citizen convicted of the offence could be given a life sentence.
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29 April 2013 by Sarina Kidd
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular potpourri 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.
This week, in order to deport Abu Qatada, there have been mumblings of a temporary departure from the ECHR. Furthermore, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling’s legal services reforms lead to a strike in the North, and the recent ECHR decision to allow the UK’s ban on political advertising continues to generate discourse.
by Sarina Kidd
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20 April 2012 by Guest Contributor
The Abu Qatada deadline debacle has once again thrust the European Court of Human Rights – and in particular, its relationship with the UK – into unwanted controversy just as European representatives gathered in Brighton to debate the Court’s future. This new fracas over the deportation of Abu Qatada has acted as a lightning rod for well-rehearsed criticisms of the Strasbourg Court – that it is a ‘meddling pseudo-judiciary’ and the enforcer of a villains’ charter.
A new report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission by researchers at London Metropolitan University and LSE, including myself, addresses these critiques as part of a broad analysis of the relationship between the UK and Strasbourg.
Among those interviewed for the report were the President of the European Court, Sir Nicolas Bratza; the outgoing Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg; and, in the UK, Baroness Hale, Sir John Laws and Jack Straw, along with two members of the Commission on a Bill of Rights, Lord Lester QC and Anthony Speaight QC. The report also conducts a thematic analysis of case law, as well as examining wider literature and the voluminous statistics produced by the Court.
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20 August 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
With the Olympics over now, there’s been a bit more activity in the legal blogosphere this week. Probably the biggest news is the guidance from the Senior Presiding Judge that may stifle judicial blogging altogether – the guidance requires that a blogging judge be unidentifiable as a judge . In other news, the Free Movement blog features a series of three posts this week discussing the July 2012 changes to the Immigration Rules; locked-in syndrome sufferer Tony Nicklinson loses his High Court case and yet another twist in the tale of Julian Assange emerges.
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29 April 2021 by Caroline Cross
R (Lawal) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (2021), Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber), Unreported, JR/626/2020 (V) — read judgment
The death of an immigration detainee, as with all prisoners, is rightly subject to legal scrutiny. This is because detainees are completely under the state’s control. Article 2 ECHR requires that the state carry out an effective investigation into all deaths in detention where there is a reasonable suspicion that the death was unnatural. A coroner is required to hold an inquest into all deaths in custody, and specifically a jury inquest where there is reason to suspect the death is violent or unnatural.
In this case, a two-judge panel of the Upper Tribunal (President of the Upper Tribunal, Mr Justice Lane, and Upper Tribunal Judge Canavan) found that the respondent Home Secretary had breached her Article 2 procedural obligations in respect of deaths in immigration detention. In particular, she had failed to ensure that crucial witness evidence was secured for use at an inquest and had failed to halt the deportation of a relevant witness.
The facts
Mr Oscar Lucky Okwurime (‘OO’) was a Nigerian national. On 12 September 2019 he was found dead in his room at Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre, aged 36. The applicant in these proceedings, Ahmed Lawal, was also a Nigerian national and a good friend of the deceased. He was detained on the same wing at the time of the death.
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5 October 2011 by Rosalind English
Schrödinger would be rolling in his grave. The nation is abuzz with talk of a cat. A cat that is simultaneously there or not there. The speakers at yesterday’s seminar at Inner Temple hall on Strasbourg and the UK: Dialogue or Conflict, felt it incumbent to start each of their talks with a Cat Joke. But behind all this mirth about a supposedly “ridiculous” Article 8 decision, lie three serious points, some of which were touched on during the seminar though perhaps not with the detail they deserved.
First, it is not the cat that has toxified the debate about Article 8 and the vexed question of deportation. The right to respect under Article 8 is not only to family ties – however absurdly extended – but to private life itself. Article 8 also protects the right to establish and develop relationships with other human beings and the outside world and can sometimes embrace aspects of an individual’s social identity, (Niemietz v Germany (1992)). Therefore if a court wants to prevent the what it perceives as the unjust deportation of the individual before it, it has a much wider constellation of interests to turn to than the family circle, whether or not that involves companion animals. Some might even take the view that attachment to such an animal may evince a more genuine emotional tie than many that have been advanced to claim the protection of Article 8.
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26 August 2024 by Emilia Cieslak
In UK news
The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, has published a report which found that black children are four times more likely to be strip searched compared to national population figures. The report analysed a dataset of all the strip searches conducted by all 44 police forces in England and Wales from January 2018 to June 2023. The report found that in almost half (45%) of the strip searches an appropriate adult was not confirmed to be present and the youngest child searched was eight years old. The majority (88%) of searches were conducted on suspicion of drugs and in 47% of cases the search resulted in “no further action”. The Commissioner argues that this calls into question their necessity and that strip searches should only be carried out on children where there is a clear and immediate risk of harm to themselves or others.
The UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racism (CERD) has recommended that the UK government “implement comprehensive measures to curb racist hate speech and xenophobic rhetoric, including on the part of political and public figures”. The CERD highlighted the riots which occurred in the UK in August 2024, after the Southport stabbings in which three young girls were killed and emphasised the role of social media disinformation regarding the perpetrator’s identity in stoking the riots. The government has responded to the disorder by activating Operation Early Dawn. This is an emergency action to manage the transfer of prisoners as hundreds of people have been charged for involvement in the riots. Under Operation Early Dawn, defendants will only be summoned to a magistrates court when a cell in the prison estate becomes available, and until then, if they are remanded in custody, they will be held in police station cells.
The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has announced new measures to significantly increase the removal of failed asylum seekers. These measures include recruiting 100 specialist intelligence officers to the National Crime Agency to disrupt human smuggling gangs, new measures to target employers who hire illegal workers, and increasing capacity at the Campsfield and Haslar Immigration Removal Centres.
In international news
The Ukrainian Parliament (Verkhovna Rada) has passed legislation to ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) making Ukraine a state party. The Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has stated that the move shows Ukraine’s “unwavering commitment to strengthening international justice” and to work effectively with the ICC to “ensure comprehensive accountability for all Russian atrocities committed in the course of Russian aggression”. The ratification of the Rome Statute is also a requirement for Ukraine to join the European Union, as set out in the Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine. The ICC has so far issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin, Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, former Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu, and Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces and First Deputy Minister of Defence Valery Gerasimov.
The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, has expressed concern after video footage was leaked of an Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) soldier sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee. The Special Rapporteur has urged that “all alleged crimes committed within the context of this terrible war must be investigated transparently and impartially, and those responsible held accountable by civilian courts of law”. The Israeli NGO B’tselem has published a report based on the testimonies of 55 Palestinian detainees who described systematic abuses including violence, sexual assault, and denial of medical treatment. As of July 2024, there are 9,623 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, 4,781 of which are held in “administrative detention” which means they are held without charge.
In the courts
The UK government has lost an appeal against the decision that it cannot restrict the movement of asylum seekers who inadvertently arrived at the Diego Garcia military base. In October 2021, 47 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers, including a number of children, were rescued at sea by the Royal Navy and brought to the military base which is classified as a British overseas territory. Since then they have been restricted to a small area of the island due to the “operational, security, health and safety risks” if they were granted freedom of movement. The court rejected the government’s grounds of appeal, inter alia, that the judge acted unreasonably in failing to place adequate weight on the authorities security concerns. This long-standing litigation has been followed and reported by Joshua Rozenberg KC (hon), and his commentary is available here.
The Federal Court of Australia has determined that Australian case law has consistently held that sex is “changeable and not necessarily binary”. Ms Roxanne Tickle, a trans woman, sued Giggle for Girls, a social media app for communication between women, alleging unlawful gender discrimination when she was barred from having an account on the app. The court held that the claim of indirect gender discrimination succeeds, as to gain access to the app users had to send a selfie and the reviewer determined that Ms Tickle did not have the appearance of a cisgender woman.
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5 March 2018 by Eleanor Leydon
Photo credit: Guardian
In the News
UK charity Migrants Rights Net have been granted permission to proceed with their challenge to the data-sharing agreement between the Home Office, the Department of Health and NHS Digital. The agreement has meant that the Home Office may require the NHS to hand over patients’ personal non-clinical information, such as last known address, for immigration enforcement purposes.
Currently, the Home Office makes thousands of requests per year, of which only around 3% are refused. A joint response from Home Office and health ministers suggested that opponents of the agreement had downplayed the need for immigration enforcement, and that it was reasonable to expect government officers to exercise their powers to share this kind of data, which ‘lies at the lower end of the privacy spectrum.’ However, critics of the agreement argue that it compromises the fundamental principle of patient confidentiality, fails to consider the public interest, and results in a discrepancy in operating standards between NHS Digital and the rest of the NHS. The good news for Migrants Rights Net was twofold: the challenge will proceed to a full hearing with a cost-capping order of £15,000.
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22 May 2011 by Adam Wagner
I asked in a recent post whether journalists need to attend court hearings to report accurately. The post arose from judgment in a family court case involving a mother’s abuse of her baby. The judge took the unusual step of criticising the Sunday Telegraph’s Christopher Booker’s reporting, which he called “unbalanced, inaccurate and just plain wrong“. That criticism was then supported by the most senior family judge in a different judgment.
Christopher Booker has now responded to my post, although somewhat obliquely. He writes:
I was again attacked last week by a prominent legal blogger, for reporting on cases where the system appears to be going tragically wrong, without having sat for days in court to hear “both sides of the story”.
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20 April 2020 by Rosalind English
In this latest episode we consider the probable attitude of the judiciary to any challenges regarding the government’s responsibility for providing sufficient PPE, the risk imposed on individuals, such as prisoners and mental health patients in detention during lockdown, their obligations under Articles 2 and 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as Article 11. How are we as a society, and the government, going to regard the question of “judicial activism” in this unprecedented situation in a post-pandemic UK?
Here are the statutes, statutory instruments and cases referred to in the course of my interview with Dominic Ruck-Keene and Darragh Coffey:
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2 June 2011 by Matthew Flinn
Kambadzi v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] UKSC 23 – Read judgment
The Supreme Court has decided by a majority that a failure to review the detention of an immigration detainee, in accordance with immigration policy, meant that his detention was unlawful.
Immigration law always has the potential to be a political tinderbox, particularly in tough economic times when unemployment rates are high. Indeed, persistent governmental rhetoric about taking net migration “back to the levels of the 1990s” and “protecting the public” might seem to suggest that “tough on immigration” is the new “tough on crime”. The issues can be particularly acute in relation to foreign national prisoners (“FNPs”). This was demonstrated in 2006 when the Home Secretary Charles Clarke was urged to resign when it was discovered that about 1,000 FNPs had been released without being considered for deportation.
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15 April 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.
This week, the accession of the EU to the ECtHR moves towards finalisation, the Iron Lady continues to cause debate and discussion even in death, Legal Aid Reforms bring both praise and consternation and as the Supreme Court swears in new judges, people ask, ‘Where are all the women?’
by Sarina Kidd
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