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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.
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.
Following yesterday’s welcome announcement that the UK Supreme Court (UKSC) is uploading judgment summaries to YouTube (see Adam’s post), there has been some speculation as to whether the UKSC will take the next step in its embrace of digital technology and upload full hearings of trials. But could taking this step result in falling foul of the UK’s copyright law?
There are several issues to consider here. Firstly: who owns the recording? Secondly: what rights do the individuals involved in the recording have? And finally: what defences (if any) apply?
Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, has lost his High Court appeal against extradition to Sweden. He lost on all four grounds of appeal.
Unless he is granted permission to appeal to the Supreme Court under Section 32 of the Extradition Act 2003, he must now face charges of sexual assault and rape in Sweden. Appeals to the Supreme Court will only be allowed in cases where there is a “point of law of general public importance involved in the decision”.
This week saw the Government’s controversial Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill undergo its second reading in the House of Lords. The proposed legislation, which would broaden police powers, enable the extraction of more information from mobile phones and impose harsher sentences for assaults on emergency workers, has drawn strong criticism for its predicted discriminatory impact.
Two provisions have attracted particular concern. First, the introduction of Serious Violence Reduction Orders (SVROs), which would authorise the police to stop and search people on account of their previous offending history without requiring ‘reasonable grounds’ to do so. Such discretionary powers are predicted to have a disproportionate effect on black people, given that police figures demonstrate they are already nine times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people. In an open letter published on Monday, criminal justice organisation Liberty said that the law ‘effectively creates an individualised, suspicionless stop and search power, entirely untethered to a specific and objectively verifiable threat’ and risks ‘compound[ing] discrimination’.
The High Court has struck out a claim that the disclosure of certain personal information made by a charity to the claimant’s GP was unlawful. Although only summary, this judgment goes to the heart of what we believe data protection to be about. As you will tell from my somewhat trenchant comments at the end of this post, I find it difficult to accept the main conclusion in this ruling.
The LGBT Foundation provides services including counselling and health advice. The claimant sought to access the charity’s services by completing a self-referral form in 2016. The form gave an option for the self-referring individual to consent to information being disclosed to their GP, and stated that the charity would break confidentiality without the individual’s consent if there was reason to be seriously concerned about their welfare. Mr Scott gave his GP’s details in the form. He also stated in the form that he no longer wished to be alive, detailed a previous suicide attempt, said that he had recently been self-harming and that he continued to suffer problems from drug use.
A sessional health and wellbeing officer at the charity conducted an intake assessment for Mr Scott to ascertain what support would be best for him. She told him of the confidentiality policy, including the provision that any information he disclosed would be passed on if the charity considered him to be at risk. In this interview he gave further details of drug use, self-harm and suicidal thoughts. The health officer paused the assessment and consulted a colleague, who advised her to inform Mr Scott that they would be contacting his GP because they had concerns about his welfare. The charity concluded it was at that time unable to provide him with the services he sought from them because of his ongoing drug use. They passed the information on to Mr Scott’s GP via a telephone call. This information was in due course recorded in his medical records.
I have blogged before on the Pandora’s box of ethical problems and dilemmas emerging out of our increasing understanding of genetic disorders (see here, here and here), and here is a case that encompasses some of the most difficult of them. Continue reading →
This is a case in which Philip Havers QC of 1 Crown Office Row appeared for the General Dental Council; he is not the author of this post.
The General Dental Council v Savery and others [2011] EWHC 3011 (Admin) – Read judgment
Mr Justice Sales in the High Court has ruled that the General Dental Council’s (GDC) use and disclosure of the dental records of fourteen patients of a registered dentist who was the subject of investigation was lawful.
The court also offered general guidance about how the GDC may proceed (particularly by reference to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to privacy and family life) when it wishes to investigate allegations against a dentist of impairment of fitness to practise by reference to confidential patient records in the absence of consent from the patients in question.
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”). Continue reading →
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. Continue reading →
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.
This article was first published on the UK Labour Law Blog ( @labour_blog). We repost it with the kind permission of Dr Philippa Collins (@DrPMCollins at Exeter University)and the editors of the Labour Law Blog
One of the lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic upon the world of work is likely to be a move away from the traditional workplace. In some sectors, such as academia, IT, and administration, remote work or home working is an established working pattern, although a rare one given national statistics from 2019 which indicated only 5% of the workforce worked mainly from home. The need to prevent the spread of the coronavirus through contact in the workplace precipitated a rapid and widespread move to homeworking. In an ONS survey in early May, 44% of adults surveyed were working from home. As some businesses begin to transition back into their previous working patterns, several high-profile companies have announced that they will not expect their staff to return to the workplace and will support homeworking as a permanent option in the future.
The sequel to this Scottish judicial review decision in Sustainable Shetland, (Lady Clark of Calton, read judgment, and my post) is another unedifying example of executive government ignoring courts when it suits them.
In this case, the judge (a former Law Officer in Scotland) quashed the grant of a wind farm consent, for two reasons, the relevant one being that the wind farmer could not apply for the consent anyway because it had not got the requisite licence which was a pre-condition for such an application. Readers will recall that Scottish Ministers had also resisted the highly controversial planning appeal being heard at public inquiry – or the Scottish equivalent.
If you are an ordinary citizen, and you get an adverse judgment, you can only do one thing – appeal it and wait for the decision on appeal. The Scottish Ministers plainly do not like the decision. They have sought to reverse it by a legislative amendment, which did not find favour in the House of Lords. But, rather less attractively, they are simply ignoring the decision pending that appeal on the basis that it is wrong. Judges, rather than ministers, might be thought to be a reasonable judge of that. But the Scottish Ministers think not.
Updated | A new bill which seeks to reform the powers of the police also seeks to make it harder to issue private arrest warrants for universal jurisdiction offences, such as war crimes, torture and hostage taking,
The controversial change would mean that they can only be issued where there is a reasonable prospect of a successful prosecution (see our previous post).
Eleven Winterbourne View staff have pleaded guilty to 38 charges of ill-treatment and neglect of a mental health patient under s127 Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA). In this post I want to consider why we need ‘special’ offences like s127 MHA and also s44 Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA), rather than prosecuting crimes in care settings using more ‘mainstream’ offences.
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), with articles emphasising access to justice (Article 13) and equal recognition before the law (Article 12) encourages us to think about how we can ensure disabled people have effective access to the law that protects us all before we develop parallel ‘special’ systems of rights protection (see, for example, Inclusion Europe, European Disability Forum). So my question is: why are we using ‘special’ offences of ill-treatment and neglect to prosecute crimes that occur in care, rather than the ordinary ‘offences against the person’ those outside of care rely upon?
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