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UK Human Rights Blog - 1 Crown Office Row
Search Results for: puberty blockers consent/page/44/Freedom of information - right of access) [2015] UKUT 159 (AAC) (30 March 2015)
In a case that was described as “the first such case to have come on for hearing before this court” and one that shares many similarities with the tabloid-grabbing story of Shamima Begum (discussed on the Blog here), Mr Justice Pepperall refused permission to bring judicial review proceedings on behalf of an Islamic State combatant whose citizenship had been revoked by the Home Secretary.
The Facts
A father (Mr Islam) brought judicial review proceedings on behalf of his son (Ashraf) challenging the Home Secretary’s decision to revoke Ashraf’s British citizenship because of his involvement with the Islamic State / Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (referred to in the judgment as ISIL).
Ashraf was born in London and is a British citizen by birth. He has lived and studied in both Bangladesh and the United Kingdom throughout his life and was studying in Dhaka at the time of his disappearance in April 2015. Shortly after his disappearance, Mr Islam learned that his son had crossed into Syria and joined ISIL.
This week’s Round-up is brought to you by Alex Wessely.
In the news
In a written statement the legal aid minister Mr Shailesh Vara confirmed that a further 8.75% will be cut from the criminal legal aid budget in 2015. The legal profession has reacted with dismay. Andrew Caplan, president of the Law Society has stated his “deep concern” and published an open letter to the lord chancellor arguing that the cuts “undermines the role of criminal legal aid solicitors in our justice system”. He also points to December 2014 research which shows that young legal aid lawyers are a “dying breed”, something which the most recent cuts will not help to alleviate. Elsewhere, Jonathan Black – president of the London Criminal Courts Solicitors’ Association – has also expressed his bitter disappointment: “There is no further fat to be cut, let alone meat or skin – we are cutting deep into the bone.” Alistair Macdonald QC, chairman of the Bar Council, also expressed his “serious concerns”. Last month, 96% of criminal barristers voted for industrial action if these planned cuts went ahead. Continue reading →
McMorn (R, on the application of) v Natural England[2015] EWHC 3297 (Admin) – read judgment
Public opinion regarding raptors and pheasant shoots should not influence the authorisation of buzzard control, the Administrative Court has ruled. Any derogations to the EU protection of wild birds should apply equally across wild avian species, irrespective of their popularity.
This was a gamekeeper’s challenge to the refusal by the defendant statutory body (Natural England) to grant him a licence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 to kill buzzards which he said were destroying such high numbers of game birds as to render his shoot unviable.
At the heart of the claimant’s challenge was his contention that NE treated raptors differently from other wild birds, making it far harder, well-nigh if not quite impossible, for anyone to meet the statutory conditions for the issue of a licence.
He maintained the defendant treated these licence applications differently because of the public controversy which the grant of a licence for the killing of buzzards would engender. This was because of perceived adverse public opinion about the protection of a pheasant shoot. Hence, the decision was based on unjustified inconsistencies in NE’s treatment of raptor and other birds equally protected under the law. Continue reading →
R (on the application of Tigere) v Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills [2014] EWCA Civ 1216 (31 July 2014) – read judgment
The United Kingdom was not in breach of the human rights of those individuals ineligible for student loans because they did not have indefinite leave to remain in the country. The relevant legislation limits eligibility for student loans to those who are “settled” in the United Kingdom (within the meaning of the Immigration Act 1971 ) and who have been ordinarily resident in the UK for three years. According to the Court of Appeal, requiring the Secretary of State to link criteria for educational eligibility to changes in immigration rules would “enmesh” him into immigration policy:
His picking and choosing candidates for settlement as eligible for student loans, while not … unconstitutional, would be a fragile and arbitrary basis for policy in an area where clarity and certainty are required.
This appeal turned on issues in relation to the right to education under Article 2 of the first protocol (A2P1) and the prohibition of discriminatory treatment under Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
What is the role of parliament in the protection and realisation of the rule of law and human rights? Should there be a set of internationally agreed principles and guidelines on this issue to help parliaments develop their role? If so, what should be the content of any internationally agreed principles and guidelines? And how do we get international agreement on them? These were some of the questions posed and addressed at a recent high-level international conference held last month at Westminster.
The conference heard about the growing international consensus about the importance of the role of parliament in the protection and realisation of the rule of law and human rights, which has emerged over the last five years. International and regional institutions, including the United Nations General Assembly, the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC), the Council of Europe and the Commonwealth Secretariat, have taken a number of active steps to increase parliament’s role. Just last week, the HRC passed a third resolution at the close of its October 2015 session, addressing the “contribution of parliaments to the work of the HRC and its Universal Periodic Review” (link here). Continue reading →
“Our aim is a straightforward one”, New Labour Party told us in October 1997 “[it is] to bring those rights home”. In 2000, the Human Rights Act came into force. For the first time, people in the UK had human rights which could be enforced in UK courts. The right to life, the right not to be tortured, to free speech. What was not to love?
If only it was that simple. 1997 seems a very long time ago. Now, in the final few hours before the 2015 Election, we see the major parties fundamentally divided on human rights.I haven’t written about the Election and human rights yet, mainly because I have been setting up a wonderful new human rights website, rightsinfo.org (more on that later).
General Medical Council v. Dr Bawa Garba, Divisional Court, 25 January 2018 – read judgment here
By Jeremy Hyam Q.C. of 1 Crown Office Row: see end of post for his involvement.
On 4th November 2015, Dr Bawa Garba was convicted of gross negligence manslaughter of a 6 year old boy. She was sentenced to two years of imprisonment suspended for two years. On 29 November 2016 the Court of Appeal Civil Division refused her leave to appeal against her conviction.
This case concerns proceedings before the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS), the MPTS’s decision to suspend her, and the GMC’s successful appeal on the basis that Dr Bawa Garba should have been erased from the register.
Essex County Council v RF and Others (deprivation of liberty and damages) [2015] EWCOP 1 – read judgment
The Court of Protection has castigated the actions of a County Council in depriving an old person of his liberty and dignity in their overreaction to reports that he might be subjected to financial exploitation. This, said the judge, amounted to punishing the victim for the acts of the perpetrators.
Factual background
The facts of this case can be summarised very shortly. P, a 91 year old gentleman, is a retired civil servant and WWII veteran, and until February 2013, has lived in his own home for fifty years. He has been alone with his companion cat since the death of his sister in 1998. He is described as being a very generous man ready to help others financially if he believed they needed it, as well as making donations to various charities. Continue reading →
It was fitting but tinged with irony, that the GMC itself, in its submissions to recent the MPTS review of Dr Bawa-Garba’s suspension maintained that the ‘appropriate and proportionate sanction’ to reflect her continuing ‘impairment’ of fitness to practice was now a period of conditional registration having regard to Dr Bawa-Garba’s ‘absence from active clinical practice’, and also taking into account the evidence of ‘Dr Bawa-Garba’s positive and continuing remediation to date’.
This after all is the ST6 (a specialist registrar in her 6th
year of post-graduate training) paediatrician who was convicted by a jury on 4
November 2015 of gross negligence manslaughter, and given a suspended sentence
of imprisonment by the Judge trying her case. The doctor who – given her
suspended sentence, her undisputed insight and reflective learning from past
events, and the support of her employing Trust was initially suspended rather
than erased by the MPTS in November 2017 for the maximum 12 month period but
with a review at the end of her suspension.
It is most likely that, had that decision been left undisputed by the GMC, then Dr Bawa Garba who continued then, as now, to have the fulsome support of her employer and colleagues, would have returned to work under supervision at the end of her suspended sentence. That would have been in or about November 2017. But that was not what happened.
Pham v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] UKSC 19 – read judgment
Angus McCullough Q.C. and Shaheen Rahman from 1COR acted as Special Advocates earlier in these proceedings. They had nothing to do with the writing of this post.
On first glance, this was not a judgment about human rights. It concerned the definition of statelessness under article 1(1) of the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, and raised issues of competence and jurisdiction in relation to EU citizenship. Its specific interest for human rights lawyers lies primarily in the observations about the principle of proportionality; and in where the case, which most certainly does raise human rights issues, is likely to go next.
The independent police watchdog has published a report this week claiming Black people and those with mental health problems are more likely to be subject to prolonged Taser use. The report from the Independent Office for Police Conduct reviewed some of the most serious cases of Taser use in the last five years, including 16 deaths. The report suggested that 60% of Taser incidents against Black people lasted for longer than 5 seconds, more than double the 29% of white people subjected to a similar length. The report made 17 recommendations, including a new system of police training on the use of the weapons. Following the report, families of victims killed by the use of a Taser have argued that the police should be banned from using them where it is clear the subject is suffering from a mental health crisis, and suggested that many of the cases of Taser deaths (some of which were sent to the Crown Prosecution Service but never reached court) should be reinvestigated. However, the police rebutted the report’s findings, asserting that they were ‘vague’ and misrepresentative, given that the report looked at only 0.1% of Taser use between 2015-2020, and focused on serious cases which had already been investigated by the Commission. This issue is becoming ever more relevant as a greater number of police officers are issued with Tasers each year.
In Episode 183 Lucy McCann speaks to Cara Guthrie and Matthew Flinn of 1 Crown Office Row about multi-defendant litigation in the field of clinical negligence. The discussion covers, who to sue, the costs implications of having multiple defendants, contribution proceedings, apportioning liability between defendants, and interim payment applications.
The Finns are, or so it appears from a recent referral to the European Court of Justice: Case C‑674/17.
Man up, Finns! That is the AG’s advice. The Habitats Directive allows of no derogation from the protection of species obligation that does not come up with a satisfactory alternative. Furthermore it must be shown that any derogation does not worsen the conservation status of that species.
Whatever the CJEU decides, the opinion of AG Saugmandsgaard Øe makes for fascinating reading, going to the heart of the conservation problem. As human populations spread, how to secure the preservation of wild species, particularly carnivores?
Thursday 5 February 2015 marks the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta as well as the 50th anniversary of the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London. To commemorate both of these milestones, the Human Rights Collegium at Queen Mary University of London will be hosting this special event.
Paul Mahoney has been the UK judge on the European Court of Human Rights (Strasbourg) since November 2012. Before this, he spent the greater part of his career in the Registry of the Strasbourg Court, beginning as a case-lawyer in 1974 working on the case of Golder v. United Kingdom and ending as Registrar of the Court from 2001-05, with a three-year break in the 1990s as Head of Personnel of the Council of Europe (Strasbourg).
This event will be chaired by Professor Geraldine Van Bueren QC, and Lady Justice Arden will deliver the response.
The lecture will take place between 18.30 – 20.30 on Thursday 5 February at the Arts 2 Lecture Theatre, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS.
Imagine you are on the board of large corporation. You attend the Annual General Meeting and asked the chief executive about that controversial tax avoidance scheme the company had been considering, but which the in-house legal team had advised against. The Chief Exec smiles and says that has been dealt with: “we just sacked the lawyers”.
The BBC is reporting what many suspected. Attorney General Dominic Grieve QC was sacked in order to clear the path for major reform of the relationship between the UK and the European Court of Human Rights. This is bad news, for the UK and potentially for the European Court of Human Rights too.
The Attorney General’s advice, which has been leaked to the BBC, was that plan to limit the power of the European Court of Human Rights were “incoherent” and a “legal car crash… witha built-in time delay“. Intriguingly, the BBC’s Nick Robinson also reports that William Hague, the now-former Foreign Secretary, also raised doubts over the plans.
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“Our aim is a straightforward one”, New Labour Party told us in October 1997 “[it is] to bring those rights home”. In 2000, the Human Rights Act came into force. For the first time, people in the UK had human rights which could be enforced in UK courts. The right to life, the right not to be tortured, to free speech. What was not to love?
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