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UK Human Rights Blog - 1 Crown Office Row
Search Results for: puberty blockers consent/page/14/Freedom of information - right of access) [2015] UKUT 159 (AAC) (30 March 2015)
Liberty, the human rights organisation, is looking for qualified and qualifying lawyers to staff its advice line.
This is a great opportunity – you can trust me on that, as I did it for a year whilst I was a pupil barrister. I learned a huge amount about practical human rights issues, as well as meeting some great people. The advice line provides an essential service to those who are unlikely to be able to obtain advice anywhere else.
All details after the break below, and on this flyer (PDF).
Waller v James [2013] NSWSC 497 (6 May 2013) – read judgment
So-called “wrongful birth” cases – where parents claim for the costs of bringing up a child that has been born as a result of the hospital’s alleged negligence – have long been the subject of heated debate.
Since 1999 (MacFarlane v Tayside Health Board) such damages have been refused on grounds of public policy – for the birth of a healthy baby, that is. As far as disabled children are concerned, parents can the additional costs attributable to the disability (Parkinson v St James and Seacroft NHS Trust). Now that so much more can be predicted with a high level of certainty from pre-birth, even pre-conception genetic tests, where do we stand on public policy in wrongful birth cases where the negligence not so much in failure to treat (failed vasectomies etc) but failure to inform? This Australian case gives some indication of the way the courts may approach such questions.
Background facts
Keeden Waller was conceived by IVF using the Wallers’ own gametes. There was a fifty percent chance that he would inherit from his father a blood disorder called antithrombin deficiency (ATD), a condition that affects the body’s normal blood clotting ability and leads to an increased risk of thrombosis. Keeden suffered a stroke a few days after his birth resulting in severe disabilities, which his parents, Lawrence and Deborah Waller, alleged was the result of ATD. They brought a claim in damages against their doctor for the care of their disabled son and psychological harm to themselves. Continue reading →
Updated | A judge in New York has barred prosecutors of a suspected-terrorist from using the testimony of a man whose evidence may be tainted by CIA torture. What would happen if a similar scenario arose in the UK?
The New York Times reports that those prosecuting Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani in the first civilian trial of a man held at Guantanamo Bay have suffered a setback: “just as the trial was to begin on Wednesday, Judge Kaplan ruled that he would not allow [a man who was to testify that Ghailani sold weapons to him] to testify. … the government had acknowledged that it had identified and located the witness through interrogation of Mr. Ghailani when he was earlier held in a secret overseas jail run by the Central Intelligence Agency. His lawyers have said he was tortured there.” The judge said:
Just a quick update on RightsInfo, my new human rights information project. As you can see, we now have a logo. The design is a clue to the look and feel of the site – all will be revealed when we launch on Tuesday 21 April.
RightsInfo will provide clear, reliable and beautiful human rights information to share. I am particularly excited that we have been working closely with the amazing Information is Beautiful Studios to build some fantastic infographics and other fantastic resources… I will say no more, just wait until a week on Tuesday!
If you would like to come to the launch party, there are around 20 spaces left and a final invitation will be going out via the RightsInfo mailing list shortly. If you want to receive it, and get general updates, sign up to the mailing list at rightsinfo.org.
Mirza and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2016] UKSC 63 – read judgment and press summary here.
The background to each of these appeals, although unfortunate, is not in any way extraordinary. Indeed, it is perhaps quite common for those applying for leave to remain to fall foul of procedural requirements or to be caught out by one of the many frequent changes in the legislative scheme governing immigration.
Whereas in most cases the solution may be simply to correct the procedural defect and make a further application, matters become much more complicated for those who apply too close to the date on which their leave to remain expires.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision makes clear that s.3C of the Immigration Act 1971 does not automatically extend a person’s leave to remain. Where leave expires in between the defective application and the fresh one an applicant will simply have run out of time for correction. This was the situation in which all three appellants found themselves.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been on the run from the US authorities after being linked to a serious US national security breach, has come out of hiding in Belgium.
The Telegraph reports that trouble started for Assange after a US intelligence analyst bragged about sending 260,000 confidential state department cables about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the online whistleblower website. Washington tried to stop the classified information being posted online by arresting the analyst, Bradley Manning. Amid reports that he was the target of a US military manhunt, Mr Assange went to ground for one month. Continue reading →
R (on the application of Maya Evans) v Secretary of State for Defence, with Associated Press intervening [2013] EWHC 3068 (Admin) – read judgment
In “Evans (No. 1)”, a 2010 case concerning the transfer of suspected insurgents for questioning in certain military centres in Afghanistan, the High Court had ruled, partly in an open judgment, partly in closed proceedings, that UK transfers to NDS Kandahar and NDS Lashkar Gah could proceed without risk of ill treatment (which is contrary to UK policy), but that it would be a breach of the policy and therefore unlawful for transfers to be made to NDS Kabul. It was subsequently discovered that there had not been jurisdiction to follow a closed procedure in that case, but what was done could not be undone, so the confidentiality agreements and the closed judgment remained in force. Continue reading →
Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss issued an injunction in 2001 conferring lifelong anonymity on Bulger’s killers. A number of Bulger’s relatives subsequently issued an application seeking to vary the injunction, though Bulger’s mother was not a party to it.
The application was considered by Edis J earlier this year, who made an order that it be considered by the President of the Family Division at the first available opportunity. The application requested that the court “consider that over 17 years on and with serious offending the experiment of ‘anonymising’ Jon Venables has not worked”. The application was made in light of child sex offences committed by Venables since 2001.
However, the bundle prepared for the hearing by the applicants did not comply with the relevant Practice Direction’s mandatory requirements. In particular, the applicants did not outline how the injunction should be varied or discharged. Compliance, the court held, was important to achieve the aims of bringing down waiting times and delays in hearing cases. Sir James Munby expressed regret that the Practice Direction was still not being adhered to 18 years after it was first issued. Secondly, a witness statement did not comply with Family Procedure Rule 25.4(2). If the applicants wished to reply on expert evidence, they should have made an application to do so. The court recognised that the application had been prepared in haste but noted that deficiencies remained three months later.
In light of this, counsel for Mr Venables and the Attorney General were severely disadvantaged in their understanding of the case. An order was therefore made to remedy the deficiencies in the relatives’ application. Continue reading →
PC (by her litigation friend the Official Solicitor)[1] and NC [2] v City of York Council [2013] EWCA Civ 478 – read judgment
It may seem strange that the same individual, with learning difficulties, can be considered to have capacity to marry, but not the capacity to decide whether to live with the person they have espoused. What, in essence, is marriage, that puts it on such a different footing to informal cohabitation?
The question arose because the woman in question (PC) had married NC after he had been convicted and sentenced for serious sexual offences. She had briefly cohabited with the him before he was convicted and married him in 2006 while he was in prison. He was due for release on licence in 2012. It was common ground that he posed a serious risk to PC in her capacity as a cohabiting wife. The local authority obtained a declaration from the Court of Protection ([2013] Med LR 26) that although PC had had capacity to marry and to understand the obligations of marriage, she did not have the capacity to decide whether to cohabit with NC upon his release. What Hedley J said was this:
She is undoubtedly within section 2(1) [of the Mental Capacity Act] requirements of impairment. Applying the section 3(1) test I am not satisfied that she is able to understand the potential risk that NC presents to her and that she is unable to weigh the information underpinning the potential risk so as to determine whether or not such a risk either exists or should be run, and should, therefore, be part of her decision to resume cohabitation. Continue reading →
W (Algeria) (FC) and BB (Algeria) (FC) and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2012] UKSC 8 – read judgment
The court is entitled to make an order for a witness to give evidence before the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) in such a way that the identity of the witness and the substance of the evidence remains confidential. Such an order will only be granted if the court is satisfied that a witness can give evidence which appears to be capable of belief and which could be decisive or at least highly material on the issue of safety of return and it has no reason to doubt that the witness genuinely and reasonably fears that he and/or others close to him would face reprisals if his identity and the evidence that he is willing to give were disclosed to the relevant foreign state.
In W (Algeria) (FC) and BB (Algeria) (FC) and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2012] UKSC 8 – read judgment
The Supreme Court has made a difficult decision. It is sometimes said that hard cases make bad law: this ruling may prove to be a good example of that cliché. The court was not being asked whether the Special Immigration Appeals Committee (SIAC) was legally allowed to issue orders that means evidence “will forever remain confidential” but rather the question was, “can SIAC ever properly make an absolute and irreversible order.”
The principles of open justice would tend towards the answer being no – but the court prioritised the welfare of the witness and allowed the order.
W v. M, S, an NHS PCT and Times Newspapers Ltd. [2011] EQHC 1197 (COP) – read judgment. In the midst of all the fuss over the last two weeks about ‘superinjunctions’ and the law on privacy (see our coverage here, here, here and here) the Court of Protection (“CoP”) has just granted an injunction imposing extensive reporting restrictions on the media in a case involving potentially controversial end-of-life issues.
The press has picked up on the decision mainly because the injunction is the first in the UK courts (and perhaps anywhere in the world) to specifically prohibit publishing restricted information on any “social network or media including Twitter or Facebook“. This is noteworthy given the recent furore about an anonymous Twitter user ‘outing’ a number of UK celebrities who had obtained injunctions (although given that Twitter is a US-based website, it is difficult to see how the order will be enforced). But the decision by Baker J is far more interesting for the way he described how the media’s free speech rights should be balanced against the parties’ privacy rights in the kind of sensitive cases dealt with by the CoP, and how he expressly distinguished it from the approach taken in celebrity cases.
District Judge Coleman, a judge sitting in the Westminster Magistrates Court, has issued a summons for Boris Johnson to appear in the Crown Court. He will face three charges alleging misconduct in a public office in a private prosecution brought by Marcus Ball. The offences alleged are indictable only which means that they can only be heard in the Crown Court.
Marcus Ball, a 29-year-old businessman who has brought the proceedings with the help of crowdfunding, alleges that the frontrunner for the Tory leadership lied about the amount of money which the UK sends to the EU both during the referendum campaign and during the general election campaign in 2017.
The controversial claim that £350m a week was sent by the UK to the EU and could better be spent on public services in the UK instead was a particularly eye catching aspect of the Leave campaign and attracted considerable criticism at the time and since. Some of that criticism particularly from the Institute of Fiscal Studies which branded the claim “absurd” and UK Statistics Authority whose chair described the claim as a misuse of statistics forms an important part of the case.
At issue in this procedural hearing was whether the court should issue a summons for Boris Johnson to attend court. He opposed the application and lost. He will be required to appear therefore be required to attend court for a preliminary hearing and the case will then be sent to the Crown Court.
A district court in California has ruled that the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is unconstitutional, and has awarded the plaintiffs a permanent injunction barring further enforcement of the statute embodying the policy. Read judgment.
The Times reports today that Judge Virginia Philips found that the policy violated the plaintiffs’ rights to substantive due process guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and their rights of freedom of speech, association, and to petition the government, guaranteed by the First Amendment. Continue reading →
Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council v KW (by her litigation friend Celia Walsh) [2014] EWCOP 45 – read judgment
Mostyn J has pulled no punches in rejecting an application for a declaration that an incapacitated person, being looked after in her own home, has been deprived of her liberty contrary to Article 5. There is a very full account of the judgment on the Mental Capacity Law and Policy blog so I will keep this summary short.
The first respondent, KW, is a 52 year old woman who is severely mentally incapacitated. She suffered brain damage while undergoing surgery to correct arteriovenous malformation in 1996. This resulted in a subarachnoid haemorrhage and long term brain damage. She was left with cognitive and mental health problems, epilepsy and physical disability. She was discharged from hospital into a rehabilitation unit and thence to her own home, a bungalow in Middleton, with 24/7 support. Physically, KW is just about ambulant with the use of a wheeled Zimmer frame. Mentally, she is trapped in the past. She believes it is 1996 and that she is living at her old home with her three small children (who are now all adult). As Mostyn J says,
Her delusions are very powerful and she has a tendency to try to wander off in order to find her small children. Her present home is held under a tenancy from a Housing Association. The arrangement entails the presence of carers 24/7 [who] attend to her every need in an effort to make her life as normal as possible. If she tries to wander off she will be brought back.
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Liberty, the human rights organisation, is looking for qualified and qualifying lawyers to staff its advice line.
Just a quick update on 
In W (Algeria) (FC) and BB (Algeria) (FC) and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2012] UKSC 8 – 
W v. M, S, an NHS PCT and Times Newspapers Ltd. [2011] EQHC 1197 (COP) – 
A district court in California has ruled that the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is unconstitutional, and has awarded the plaintiffs a permanent injunction barring further enforcement of the statute embodying the policy. 
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