Search Results for: prisoners/page/62/[2001] EWCA Civ 1546

Are Christians really marginalised in this country?

7 September 2012 by Rosalind English

We will have to wait some time before Strasbourg hands down its judgment in the religious discrimination cases it heard earlier this week.

Whatever the outcome – which is perhaps predictable – the Court’s ruling will have a significant influence on the place of religion in public life and on how the relationship between religion and the state should be structured to reflect the aims of fairness and mutual respect envisaged in the Convention.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission argues in its intervention submission that Strasbourg – and the UK courts – should move on from their “restrictive” interpretation of Article 9, summed up by Lord Bingham’s oft-cited description of the Court’s position in R (SB) v Governors of Denbigh High School [2006] UKHL 15

The Strasbourg institutions have not been at all ready to find an interference with the right to manifest a religious belief in practice or observance where a person has voluntarily accepted an employment or role which does not accommodate that practice or observance and there are other means open to the person to practise or observe his or her religion without undue hardship or inconvenience.[para 23]

(This is a revised intervention after the EHRC responded to widespread criticism of its proposed argument in support of “reasonable accommodation” of employees’ beliefs – see Alasdair Henderson’s post on this dust-up “Leap of Faith” and our following post on the reversal of the EHRC’s position.)
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The right not to hold any belief is fundamental, says Supreme Court

25 July 2012 by Rosalind English

RT (Zimbabwe) and others (Respondents) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2012] UKSC 38 – read judgment

It is no answer to a refugee claim to say that the individual concerned should avoid persecution by lying and feigning loyalty to a regime which he does not support.

So the Supreme Court has ruled today, considering the relevance to political beliefs of the so-called “HJ(Iran) principle” which was formulated in a case where it was held that it was no answer to an asylum claim by a gay man that he should conceal his sexual identity in order to avoid the persecution that would follow if he did not do so.
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“Unprofessional” website comment on Motown tribute band can be fair comment

1 December 2010 by Adam Wagner

Updated – Spiller and another (Appellants) v Joseph and others (Respondents) [2010] UKSC 53 – Read judgment / press summary

The Supreme Court has overturned the Court of Appeal to  unanimously hold that the defence of fair comment should be open to a booking agent which said on its website that a Motown tribute band, the Gillettes, were “unprofessional”. The court has also renamed the defence “honest comment”.

The decision will be a relief to those who think that Britain’s libel laws are too tough and that the fair comment defence – an important element of free speech rights – has become too difficult to deploy. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court recommended in its judgment that the whole issue of fair comment should be reviewed by the Law Commission or an expert committee. Presumably, this will be on the agenda for Lord Neuberger’s upcoming review of libel law. The Guardian has commented on the judgment here.

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The Secret Letter: Commission bows to government paranoia

18 January 2011 by Rosalind English

IFAW Internationaler Tierschutz-Fonds gGmbH; read judgment

EU law is replete with the soaring rhetoric of rights and transparency. Indeed the very first Article of the Treaty on European Union states that ‘decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen’ . But not, it appears, when the decision concerns the balance between short-term economic interests and those of the environment – or, in the Commission’s own words, the “Community’s natural heritage”.

Key facts and figures relating to central policy remain firmly under lock and key in the EU, as NGOs find when they try to get the Commission to enforce the various Directives against national governments and the EU institutions themselves.

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Blow to Parliament Square protest camp

28 March 2011 by Alasdair Henderson

The Mayor of London v. Brian Haw & others [2011] EWHC 585 (QB) – read judgment.

The High Court has ruled that it would not be a breach of Articles 10 (freedom of expression) and 11 (freedom of assembly and association) to grant a possession order in respect of Parliament Square Gardens (“PSG”) and an injunction compelling protesters to dismantle and remove all tents and other structures erected on PSG. The potential effect of this might be to remove Brian Haw, the peace campaigner who has been protesting almost non-stop outside Parliament for the best part of a decade.

This is the latest in a long-running series of cases exploring the extent of the freedom to protest. We have analysed the previous court decisions about the Parliament Square protesters here and here. The issue of restrictions on freedom of assembly and freedom of expression has been a hot topic in recent months more generally, having also come up recently in the contexts of the student protests last year, political asylum seekers and hate speech.

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State immunity upheld against human rights challenges in Strasbourg

18 January 2014 by Rosalind English

Jones and Others v. the United Kingdom (application nos. 34356/06 and 40528/06) – read judgement

The Strasbourg Court has ruled that the inability of four men to bring torture compensation claims against Saudi Arabia in UK courts did not breach the Convention.  The Court held that a “grant of immunity to the state officials in the present case reflected generally recognised rules of public international law”  and that there had been no violation of  Article 6 (right of access to court).

The claimants argued that there there was emerging support for a special exception to this immunity in cases concerning civil claims for torture lodged against foreign State officials. But the Court took the view that the bulk of the authority was to the effect that the State’s right to immunity may not be circumvented by suing its servants or agents instead. The fact that conduct was unlawful or objectionable was not, of itself, a ground for refusing immunity.
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EU to lift ban on animal by-products for livestock food

30 June 2021 by Rosalind English

Over ten years ago I posted on the wasteful prohibition under the EU Animal By-Product Regulation on feeding meat and bone meal – waste from slaughterhouses – to omnivorous farm animals, poultry and pigs. See Pigswill and public health: a load of EU Bull, 7 January 2011. While this regulation has been in force the protein needed by these fast growing animals has had to come from expensive soybeans, imported from South America where hundreds of miles of rainforests have been laid waste to make room for the soy crop. As you will remember from that post, the ban was introduced following the BSE crisis, itself a possibly predictable consequence of feeding spinal tissue to vegetarian ruminants.

This ban extended to anyone feeding food scraps to farmed animals, no matter how small the operation and how innocent the scraps. As I said in my last post,

Anyone with a few hens pecking away in the backyard needs to look sharp: a “farmed animal” for the purpose of the Regulation means any animal kept for the provision of food, and a couple of eggs a week may bring a Defra van trundling up the drive at any moment.

And in 2004 our very own Prime Minister, then MP for Henley, reported that in his constituency a hotel

must now pay an extra £1,000 a year to a licensed collector, whose responsibility it is to remove wet waste that previously went to a pigswill feeder. Given that there is room for only three years’ waste in our landfill sites, that is not the cleanest and greenest solution. It is estimated that the ban on swill feeding is generating an extra 1.7 million tonnes of waste per year, and that which does not fill up our landfill sites must be going down our drains, clogging up the sewers and attracting vermin

Finally it seems to have dawned on the EU Commission that this is a very un-green piece of legislation in an era where the EU obliges its member states by draconian legislation to recycle, limit landfill, restrict incineration, cut down on carbon emissions and save energy. 

Removal of child following faulty diagnosis of injury breached Article 8

2 April 2010 by Rosalind English

AD and OD v United Kingdom (Application No 28680/06), 2 April 2010

Read judgment

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled unanimously that a local authority’s failure to conduct a risk assessment, which resulted in a child being placed with foster parents, breached the right to respect for family life under Article 8 of the Convention.  It also concluded that the mother should have had available to her a means of claiming that the local authority’s handling of the procedures was responsible for any damage which she suffered and obtaining compensation for that damage. As such redress was not available to her, the Court held that she had suffered a violation of Article 13.

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Vavilov – a restatement of reasonableness – Adrienne Copithorne (2)

6 February 2020 by Guest Contributor

In the previous post under this topic, I referred to Mr Justice Binnie’s proposal for the exercise of the standard of reasonableness review in the 2007 case of Dunsmuir v New Brunswick. This would eventually resurface in Vavilov, where the majority of the Supreme Court of Canada held that the starting point should be a presumption that the reasonableness standard applied. In the interim, there had been much academic, practitioner and judicial commentary on the lack of clarity and consistency in the application of the principles espoused by the majority in Dunsmuir in subsequent cases and on the difficulty in applying such principles in claims. Members of the Supreme Court also expressed concerns in subsequent cases, for example, Abella J in Wilson v Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd 2016 SCC 29. The majority in Vavilov explicitly refers to such criticism coming from the judiciary and academics but also from litigants before the Court and organizations representing Canadians who are affected by administrative decisions. As the Court stated,

These are not light critiques or theoretical challenges. They go to the core of the coherence of our administrative law jurisprudence and to the practical implications of this lack of coherence.

The Court also referred to concerns that the reasonableness standard was sometimes perceived as “advancing a two-tiered justice system in which those subject to administrative decisions are entitled only to an outcome somewhere between “good enough” and “not quite wrong”.

General Medical Council too late with child sex abuse complaint, rules High Court – Robert Kellar

26 September 2013 by Guest Contributor

Robert Kellar appeared for D in these proceedings

D, R (on the application of) v The General Medical Council [2013] EWHC 2839 (Admin) – Read judgment

The High Court has strongly affirmed the prohibition against the pursuit of long delayed complaints against doctors in regulatory proceedings. The prohibition arose from the General Medical Council’s own procedural rules. It applied even where the allegations were of the most serious kind, including sexual misconduct, and could only be waived in exceptional circumstances and where the public interest demanded. The burden was upon the GMC to establish a sufficiently compelling public interest where allegations had already been thoroughly investigated by the competent authorities such as the police and social services.

Although the Court’s robust approach is to be welcomed, an opportunity to clarify the relevance of Article 6 ECHR in this context was not taken. The author suggests that Article 6 ECHR has an important part to play in protecting the rights of practitioners facing long delayed complaints.

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Old and minor convictions and cautions need not be disclosed – Supreme Court

18 June 2014 by Rosalind English

R (On the application of T and another) (Respondents) v Secretary of State for the Home Department and another (Appellants) – read judgment

The Supreme Court has unanimously declared that government rules regarding the disclosure of spent convictions are unlawful and incompatible with Article 8 of the Convention.

One of these conjoined appeals involved T,  who was prevented from employment involving contact with children when  a police caution was disclose in respect of the theft of two bicycles when the respondent was eleven years old (see my previous post on the Court of Appeal judgment in T). In JB, the police issued a caution to a 41 year-old woman in 2001 when she was caught shoplifting (a packet of false fingernails).  In 2009 she completed a training course for employment in the care sector. She was required to obtain an “enhanced criminal record certificate” or ECRC, which disclosed the caution. The training organisation told JB that it felt unable to put her forward for employment in the care sector.
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‘War crimes’ defence against Israel company protest convictions fails in Supreme Court

7 February 2014 by

Richardson v Director of Public Prosecutions [2014] UKSC 8 – read judgment / press summary 

The tactics of protesters engaging in demonstrations, or acts of civil disobedience, frequently raise interesting questions of law. A demonstration by two activists opposed to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories, who entered a shop in Covent Garden which sold produce from the Dead Sea, produced on an Israeli settlement, recently resulted in the Supreme Court addressing two such questions.

First, in what circumstances can someone who trespasses on premises and disrupts the activities of the occupiers avoid prosecution by arguing that those activities were in some way unlawful?; and second (obliquely) is the construction of Israeli settlements on the West Bank an offence under English law? The short answers were (1) only when the unlawfulness is integral to the occupier’s activity; and (2) probably not.

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Extradition agreements review is victory for rights campaigners

3 September 2010 by Adam Wagner

Updated, 3 Sep, 16:35 | The Home Office is to announce a review of UK extradition agreements with other countries, including the controversial and some say unbalanced agreement with the United States. This represents a provisional success for campaigners against certain extradition agreements.

According to reports, the review will include the Extradition Act 2003 which implemented into law the UK-United States extradition treaty. It will also consider the European Arrest Warrant, which was used for 50% more arrests last year. The review fulfils the pledge made in the coalition’s program for government to ”review the operation of the Extradition Act – and the US/UK extradition treaty – to make sure it is even-handed”.

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Rejoinder to Deb and Graham: Yes, the ECHR prohibits States from euthanising people by Rajiv Shah

19 November 2024 by Guest Contributor

Deb and Graham characterise my argument as follows: “the right to life under Article 2 is absolute and allows no exception; there is a negative obligation upon the UK not to take life; any euthanasia laws would necessarily involve the taking of life; therefore euthanasia laws would breach Article 2.” They then point out that this argument has been rejected in Mortier v Belgium.

The problem is that this completely mischaracterises my argument and as result Deb and Graham dedicate several paragraphs to attacking a strawman. My argument was much narrower than they claim. As I explained in my blog post the “negative obligation prohibits the State from conducting euthanasia and assisted suicide itself, even as part of a well-regulated scheme with appropriate safeguards. This means that, under the Convention, States may allow/tolerate private parties from conducting euthanasia/assisted suicide with appropriate safeguards but the State itself cannot conduct them.” (emphasis added)

Shaker Aamer’s release: What happens next?

31 October 2015 by Jim Duffy

And so, thirteen years after his capture, eight years after the US Government cleared him for release, and seven years after President Obama’s spectacularly broken promise to shut down Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer has left the prison, as innocent as the day he went in.

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