Search Results for: puberty blockers consent/page/29/Freedom of information - right of access) [2015] UKUT 159 (AAC) (30 March 2015)
13 October 2021 by Rosalind English
Henrietta Lacks was a young Black woman who in 1951 was diagnosed with a particularly agressive form of cervical cancer. Her treating doctors at the Johns Hopkins hospital took a sample from the tumour and that was the birth of “HeLa” – an “immortal” line of fast-replicating cells that have been reproduced every since, used in scientific and medical innovations including the development of the polio vaccine, infertility research and even the early research into a vaccine against Covid19. The HeLa cell line was in essence the first time human cells could be successfully cloned and it has been in use continually for research that has touched nearly every realm of medicine.
In October 2021, her estate filed suit against Thermo Fisher, the pharmaceutical company that bought the cells from the hospital. Her family, represented by Ben Crump, the attorney who represented the family of George Floyd in 2020, is asking the company to pay back the full profits gained over 70 years of using her cells without consent. This is the US remedy of “disgorgement of profits”, which essentially involves the transfer of all the company’s patents and profits from the HeLa line to the Lacks estate. In essence, disgorgement removes the incentive to unjustly enrich yourself at another’s expense.
The problem with this remedy is it is dependent on the enrichment being based on the other person’s property. In US law, as in the UK, there is no property in the body. In fact US law is silent on ownership of bodily resources. The only statute that governs this subject is the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act which bans the sale of all organs including kidneys. The ban only extends to the sale of kidneys for transplantation; there is no ban on the sale of kidneys for research and experimentation.
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15 September 2011 by Adam Wagner
Welcome back
As has been long-heralded, the law on universal jurisdiction changed today. The change is contained in the new Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act and means that although anyone can initiate war crimes proceedings, the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions will be required before an arrest warrant is issued. The Justice Minister Ken Clarke said:
We are clear about our international obligations and these new changes to existing law will ensure the balance is struck between ensuring those who are accused of such heinous crimes do not escape justice and that universal jurisdiction cases are only proceeded with on the basis of solid evidence that is likely to lead to a successful prosecution.
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31 May 2018 by David Hart KC
You would have to be a monk or, at any rate, in an entirely internet-free zone, not to have had your recent days troubled by endless GDPR traffic. The tiniest charity holding your name and email address up to the data behemoths have asked, in different ways, for your consent for them to hold your personal data. You may have observed the frankness and simplicity of the former’s requests and the weaseliness of the latter’s, who try to make it rather difficult for you to say no, indeed to understand what precisely they are asking you to do.
Just in case you have not looked at it, here is the Regulation. It is actually a good deal easier to understand than a lot of the summaries of it.
This lack of transparency in these consent forms/privacy statements had not gone unnoticed by one of Europe’s more indefatigable privacy sleuths. Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer, who, at 30 years of age, has already been to the EU top court twice (see here and here), moved fast. By the end of GDPR day last Friday, 25 May, he sued global platforms with multibillion-euro complaints. 3 complaints said to be valued at €3.9 billion were filed in the early hours against Facebook and two subsidiaries, WhatsApp, and Instagram, via data regulators in Austria, Belgium and Germany. Another complaint valued at €3.7 billion was lodged with France’s CNIL in the case of Google’s Android operating system.
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5 October 2012 by Adam Wagner
Updated | Abu Hamza and others -v- Home Secretary – Read official summary
Abu Hamza, Babar Ahmad, Syed Talha Ahsan, Adel Abdul Bary and Khaled al-Fawwaz have lost their High Court Judicial Review challenges to their extradition to the United States to face terrorism related charges. The court refused permission to apply for Judicial Review.
Two weeks ago the European Court of Human Rights refused the men’s requests to refer their extradition appeal to its Grand Chamber for another hearing. This meant that their case, which was decided in the Government’s favour in April (see our post) became final and there were in theory no remaining barriers to their extradition to the United States to face terrorism charges [Update, 7.10.12 – they are already in the United States, so no more legal shenanigans on these shores].
The men each brought different judicial review claims as a final challenge to their extradition, and those claims have – quite rightly – been dealt with rapidly by the High Court, which rejected the claims outright. As the court’s summary says, these proceedings are “the latest, and if we refuse permission, the last, in a lengthy process of appeals and applications that has continued for some eight years in the case of three and 14 years in the case of two.”
When dealt with at an oral hearing, refusals by the court of permission to apply for Judicial Review are not appealable. So pending any legal shenanigans (I can’t think of anything more they can do but as Julian Assange has taught us all, anything is possible), the (this time really) final barrier to extradition looks to have been removed.
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1 April 2014 by Rosalind English
Meiklejohn v St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust and Another [2014] EWCA Civ 120 – read judgment
Richard Booth QC of 1 Crown Office Row represented the appellant in this case. He has nothing to do with the writing of this post.
This was an appeal against the finding by HHJ Robinson, sitting as a High Court Judge, that there was no duty of care owed to the appellant in respect of his rare genetic disorder ([2013] EWHC 469 (QB), [2013] Med. L.R. 191). See my previous post for the factual and medical background of the claim. Briefly, the appellant suffered from a rare genetic version of the platelet insufficiency disorder, aplastic anemia (AA), the disorder in question being known as Dyskeratosis Congenita (“DC”).
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17 July 2012 by Alasdair Henderson
ANS v ML [2012] UKSC 30 – read judgment / press summary
Another week and another judgment about adoption. This time it is a decision of the Supreme Court about the Scottish family law system. Whereas last week’s post was about a case where children should have been placed into adoption, but were not, this case concerned a mother who opposed an adoption order being made for her child. The mother challenged the legislation which allowed the court to make an adoption order without her consent, arguing that it was incompatible with her Article 8 rights to private and family life. However, the Supreme Court ruled that there was no breach of the Convention.
The appellant mother argued that s.31 of the Adoption and Children (Scotland) Act 2007 was incompatible with the Convention. This would mean it was unlawful, as statutory provisions incompatible with the ECHR are not within the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament under s.29(2)(d) of the Scotland Act 1998. (This is different to the UK Parliament in Westminster, which is able to legislate contrary to the ECHR, and the most the courts can do under the Human Rights Act is make a declaration of incompatibility.)
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20 April 2016 by Rosalind English
Spencer v Anderson (Paternity Testing) [2016] EWHC 851 (Fam) – read judgment
A fascinating case in the Family Division throws up a number of facts that some may find surprising. One is that this is the first time the courts in this country have been asked to direct post-mortem scientific testing to establish paternity. The other is that DNA is not covered by the Human Tissue Act, because genetic material does not contain human cells. One might wonder why the statute doesn’t, given that DNA is the instruction manual that makes the human tissue that it covers – but maybe updating the 2004 law to cover genetic material would create more difficulties than it was designed to resolve.
The facts can be briefly stated. The applicant had been made aware of his possible relationship to S, who had died of bowel cancer some years before. When S had presented with the disease, it turned out that there was a family history of such cancer. The hospital treating him therefore took a blood sample and extracted DNA from it to test for high-risk genes. If the applicant was the son of the deceased he would have a 50% risk of inherited predisposition to bowel cancer. This risk would be mitigated by biannual colonoscopies.
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22 January 2014 by David Hart KC
R (o.t.a HS2AA, Buckingham County Council and others) v. Secretary of State for Transport, [2014] UKSC 3 – read judgments
So the challenge to the way in which the Government wished to push the HS2 project through Parliament has failed before the Supreme Court, though not without clarifying the way in which key EU environmental provisions are meant to work. And we will also see a further flexing of the Court’s muscles against a too straightforward reading of the supremacy of EU law when seen against our constitutional principles.
The objectors said the command paper which preceded the Parliamentary hybrid bill, in which the Government set out its proposals for HS2, fell within the scope of the Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive 2001/42/EC and that an SEA ought therefore to have been carried out. The directive applies to plans or programmes which set a “framework” (Art.3(2)(a)) for future decisions whether to grant development consent for projects, and it was said that the command paper set the framework for the decision whether to grant consent for HS2.
Secondly, the objectors said that the legislative procedure in Parliament does not meet the requirements of the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive 2011/92/EU. The EU Court of Justice has interpreted that directive as imposing a number of requirements, including that the legislature must have available to it the information required by the directive, and a requirement that national courts must be able to verify that the requirements of the directive have been satisfied, taking account of the entire legislative process, including the preparatory documents and the parliamentary debates.
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9 March 2013 by Rosalind English
Meiklejohn v St George’s Healthcare Trust [2013] EWHC 469 (QB) – read judgment
Richard Booth of 1 Crown Office Row acted for the claimant in this case. He is not the author of this post.
There is no doubt that medical diagnosis and therapy are struggling to keep pace with the genetic information pouring out of the laboratories and sequencing centres. And the issue of medical liability is being stretched on the rack between conventional treatment and the potential for personalised therapy. Treatment of disease often turns out to be different, depending on which gene mutation has triggered the disorder. However fine tuned the diagnosis, it may turn out to be profoundly wrong in the light of subsequent discoveries.
This is perhaps an oversimplified characterisation of what happened in this case, but it exemplifies the difficulties facing clinicians and the courts where things go wrong, against the backdrop of this fast-moving field of scientific endeavour.
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22 November 2024 by Esme Cairns
Introduction
Ten years on from Cheshire West [2014] UKSC 19 (covered on this blog at the time), the seminal decision on deprivation of liberty by the Supreme Court, the Family Court faces an ever-increasing number of applications for deprivation of liberty orders for children. Two recent decisions from Mrs Justice Lieven, Peterborough City Council v SM [2024] EWHC 493 (Fam) and Re J [2024] EWHC 1690 (Fam), could curb this trend. But while these decisions emanate from the Family Court, their reasoning may be of broader interest and could prompt wider questions about Article 5 ECHR and what constitutes a deprivation of liberty.
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22 May 2015 by Guest Contributor
Sajid Javid’s reported objections to the Government’s pre-election proposals on countering extremist ideas uncover just how controversial the new laws will be. He had objected, it seems, to a mooted expansion of Ofcom’s powers to take pre-emptive action to prevent the broadcast of programmes with ‘extremist content’ before they are transmitted.
That specific proposal may no longer be part of the proposed laws, but Ofcom is likely to be given powers to move against broadcasters after transmission. And there will be plenty else to discuss when the legislation is likely announced in the Queen’s Speech next week.
The main points have already been revealed when last week the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary announced that new laws will be introduced ‘to make it much harder for people to promote dangerous extremist views in our communities.’ As always in counter-terrorism laws, the relationship between freedom and security will be brought into sharp focus when the proposals are debated. In this piece we set down some of the questions which we think warrant attention.
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3 March 2013 by Sam Murrant
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 saw three new appointments to the UK Supreme Court, which has in turn prompted discussion of equality and diversity within the senior judiciary (unsurprisingly, all three of them are white, male and “of a certain age”), as well as Conservative warnings over withdrawal from the European Court of Human Rights.
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12 December 2025 by Peter Skelton KC
Introduction
In this case, the High Court considered the appropriate legal test for leaving findings of fact to juries in Article 2 inquests. Is it that such findings are arguable? Or is it that there is sufficient evidence to support them? The answer, quite firmly, is the latter.
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17 September 2018 by Conor Monighan
Credit: The Guardian
Conor Monighan brings us the latest updates in human rights law
In the News:
The CPS has said there is enough evidence to charge two Russian men with conspiracy to murder Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Although the Skripals survived, another lady called Dawn Sturgess later died of exposure to Novichok.
The two men visited Salisbury last March, at the same time the nerve agent attack took place. It is believed the two men, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, are military intelligence officers for GRU, the Russian security service. The CPS has not applied for their extradition because of Russia’s longstanding policy that it does not extradite its own nationals. A European Arrest Warrant has been obtained in case they travel to the EU.
In response, the two men have claimed they were merely tourists. In an appearance on Russia Today (RT), they said the purpose of their visit to Salisbury was to see its cathedral. Arguing that their presence was entirely innocent, the two men said they were following recommendations of friends. Petrov and Boshirov went on to say that, whilst they had wanted to see Stonehenge, they couldn’t because of “there was muddy slush everywhere”. The men insisted they were businessmen and that, whilst they might have been seen on the same street as the Skripals’ house, they did not know the ex-spy lived there. The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has said they are “civilians” and that “there is nothing criminal about them”.
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25 March 2019 by Alethea Redfern
A white supremacist murdered 50 worshippers and injured 50 more in two consecutive terrorist attacks at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand during Friday Prayer on 15 March 2019. The victims’ ages ranged from 3 to 77. Immediately prior to the attacks, the perpetrator emailed a 73-page manifesto to more than 30 recipients, including several media outlets and the office of Prime Minister Jacinda Arden. It expressed anti-immigrant hate speech, white supremacist rhetoric, and an unequivocal statement that the motive behind the attacks was to accelerate anti-Muslim and anti-migrant sentiment across majority white nations.
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