Search Results for: puberty blockers consent/page/46/Freedom of information - right of access) [2015] UKUT 159 (AAC) (30 March 2015)
14 January 2016 by Kate Richmond
Social Media button on a keyboard with speech bubbles.
Barbulescu v Romania, 12 January 2016 – read judgment
In December 2015, the European Court of Human Rights, by 6 votes to 1, dismissed a Romanian national’s appeal against his employer’s decision to terminate his contract for using a professional Yahoo Messenger account to send personal messages to his fiancé and brother.
Mr Barbulescu contended that his employer had breached his Article 8 right to respect for his private life and correspondence, and that the domestic courts had failed to protect his right. The Court found that there had been no such violation because the monitoring of the account by his employer had been limited and proportionate.
Background facts
Mr Barbulescu’s employers asked him to create a Yahoo Messenger account for responding to client enquiries and informed him that these communications had been monitored. The records showed that he had used the Internet for personal purposes, contrary to internal regulations. The employer’s regulations explicitly prohibited all personal use of company facilities, including computers and Internet access. The employer had accessed the Yahoo Messenger account in the belief that it had contained professional messages.
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27 January 2013 by Daniel Isenberg
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your recommended weekly dose 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.
Commentary on the Eweida Christian cross case continued to dominate legal commentary this week, some of it critical of the European Court of Human Rights. Bloggers have also welcomed the go-live of the Supreme Court’s online archive of judgment summaries. Some interesting cases in the courts this week this week relating to attempts to use the European Convention on Human Rights in a housing dispute, as well as (in a similar vein) a local council’s ability to withhold details of vacant properties from potential squatters. Keep an eye out next week for the publication of the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust Public Inquiry on 5th February.
by Daniel Isenberg
If you would like your or your organisation’s response to the Government’s Judicial Review consultation, please email it to Adam Wagner by the end of Monday.
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9 March 2011 by Adam Wagner
Updated | CPS -v- Mohammad Razaul Haque and Emdadur Choudhury – Read judgment
A man has been found guilty of public order offences for burning poppies and chanting “British soldiers burn in hell” on Remembrance Day. He was fined £50.
The ruling, and in particular the fine, has led to public anger. The Sun called the fine “pathetic” and asked whether Britain is now “deep in a quicksand of political correctness and hand-wringing over human rights“. The Prime Minister has said that we should be “making a stronger statement that that sort of behaviour is completely out of order and has no place in a tolerant society”
The Sun is wrong that Emdadur Choudhury’s low fine had anything to do with human rights; Chief Magistrate Riddle made clear that “invoking the criminal law to interfere with freedom of expression is proportionate“. But two important questions do arise. First, whether the conviction represents a disproportionate breach of Emdadur Choudhury’s right to freedom of speech. Secondly, if the £50 fine was adequate.
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10 April 2012 by David Hart KC
R (o.t.a Guardian Newspapers) v. City of Westminster Magistrates Court, USA as Interested Party, 3 April 2012, Court of Appeal: read judgment
No, not a case about secret trials, but about the way in which newspapers can get hold of court papers in open oral hearings. And, as we shall see, it led to a ringing endorsement of the principle of open justice from the Court of Appeal, leading to production of the documents to the Guardian.
Bribery allegations against a London solicitor and a former executive of a Halliburton company, and extradition sought by the USA and keenly challenged by the defendants. Some lack of clarity as to why the Serious Fraud Office was not prosecuting the defendants. All in all, a tasty morsel for the Guardian to get its teeth into. It was allowed into the hearing, but then not allowed critical documents provided to the courts, including the written arguments submitted by the USA and the defendants, affidavits supporting the extradition, and various other letters and documents put before the court.
Why not?
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30 June 2015 by Rosalind English
Jack Lowe and Dennis Reynolds, Plaintiffs v Atlas Logistics Group Retail Services
The first prosecution under the 2008 US Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) has won $2.25 million jury damages for the individuals involved .
I have posted about genetic discrimination here and here. In the US some of these problems have been foreseen and legislated against: GINA prohibits discrimination against healthy individuals for employment decisions or health insurance purposes on the basis of genetic information alone; it also prevents employers and insurance providers from demanding or using information from genetic tests.
The law does include limited exemptions, however. Forensic laboratories can ask workers for their DNA to check that employees’ genetic material does not contaminate the genetic samples that they analyse.
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30 January 2019 by Dominic Ruck Keene
Dominic Ruck Keene is a barrister at One Crown Office Row.
The European Court of Human Rights has held in Catt v The United Kingdom (43514/15)) that that the retention by UK police of information on the Domestic Extremism Database about a 90 year-old activist’s presence at political protests was a breach of his Article 8 ECHR rights. The ruling follows the Supreme Court’s contrasting judgment that such gathering and retention had been lawful and a proportionate interference with Mr Catt’s Article 8 ECHR rights.
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20 December 2022 by Jonathan Metzer
R ((AAA) Syria and Ors) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWHC 3230 (Admin)
On 14th April of this year, the then-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, announced a new ‘Migration and Economic Development Partnership’ between the UK Government and the Government of Rwanda to enable the removal of certain persons to who enter the UK to claim asylum (particularly those who arrive in small boats crossing the English Channel) to Rwanda, where – if their claims succeeded – they would be resettled.
Yesterday, the Divisional Court (Lewis LJ and Swift J) held that, in principle, the relocation of asylum seekers to Rwanda was consistent with the Refugee Convention and other legal obligations on the government, including those imposed by the Human Rights Act 1998. However, the Court also held that Home Secretary had failed to properly consider the circumstances of eight individual claimants to decide whether there was anything which meant that their asylum claim should be determined in the UK or they should not be relocated to Rwanda. Therefore, the decisions in those cases were set aside and referred back to the Home Secretary for her to consider afresh.
The Court’s judgment is detailed and addresses a number of issues. In this post, the focus will be on the general challenge made to removal to Rwanda in principle and what can be expected in the (likely) event that this aspect of the case is appealed further.
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3 September 2020 by Guest Contributor
In this article, Prachiti Venkatraman and Ashley Jordana of Global Rights Compliance analyse the case before the International Court of Justice relating to the persecution of the Rohingya people by the Myanmar authorities.
Readers are encouraged to read the previous articles about this topic published on the blog here and here.
To read more about Global Rights Compliance’s work with the Rohingya, please see: https://www.globalrightscompliance.com/en/projects/the-rohingya-accountability-project.
The perilous situation of the Rohingya in Myanmar continues – the recent UN policy brief on Covid-19 in South-East Asia highlighted the compounded effects of the nation’s weak healthcare system and an ongoing armed conflict that targets ethnic communities.
On 11 November 2019, The Gambia filed an Application to commence proceedings against Myanmar before the International Court of Justice (‘the Court’). The Application alleged that Myanmar had violated its obligations under the Genocide Convention by committing acts intended to destroy in whole or in part the Rohingya community, as well as attempting and conspiring to commit genocide, inciting genocide, being complicit in its commission, and failing to prevent and punish genocide. To demonstrate the validity of these allegations, The Gambia relied on the actions of the Burmese military (‘the Tatmadaw’) and individuals connected to the State of Myanmar during the ‘clearance operations’ in 2016 and 2017 which led to the mass murder, sexual violence, and destruction of Rohingya villages in Rakhine state.
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12 June 2013 by David Hart KC
Queen Mary University of London v the Information Commissioner (1) and Robert Courtney (2) First Tier Tribunal EA/2012/0229 read judgment
Rosalind English has recently posted here on incomplete academic work in the climate change field. This appeal is closely related, in that it concerns a university’s claim to hold on to data from a publicly-funded randomised controlled trial pending peer-reviewed publication.
Between 2005 and 2010 Queen Mary ran a trial into the efficacy and safety of the current treatments for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalopathy, namely Adaptive Pacing Therapy , Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Graded Exercise Therapy. £5m of public money was spent, and the perceived benefits (and some of the detriments) were written up into a major article published in the Lancet in March 2011. The upshot, said this article, was that CBT and GET could be safely added to current medical care with a moderate improvement in outcomes. This recommendation has already fed into an interim review of the NICE guidelines on CFS/ME.
However, the data on deterioration within the trial had not been fully published. You could not see how many patients deteriorated in response to each therapy, just the net deterioration over the whole cohort. Our appellant, Mr Courtney, is evidently a bit sceptical about the results of this trial. As he pointed out, the deterioration data had a 20 point difference, whereas the improvement had only to be modest – an 8 point difference. And, he said, how can patients sensibly form a view on treatment without knowing how much deterioration that specific treatment might cause?
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11 August 2010 by Adam Wagner
Redaction in Al Rawi
Gradwick v IC and the Cabinet Office (EA/2010/0030) – Read decision
The Panopticon Blog has highlighted an interesting recent case in the General Regulatory Tribunal which may prove to be useful in the many different situations where documents are disclosed in redacted form.
The General Regulatory Tribunal (‘the Tribunal’) regulates information rights, amongst other things. Simply, the Tribunal held that if parts of documents disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 are to be redacted (blacked out), it is not good enough to transcribe a new document with the offending parts removed. This is because, as the Tribunal said:
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12 January 2012 by Rosalind English
AMP v Persons unknown – read judgment
If you lose your mobile phone with highly confidential and private information on it, all may not be lost. The unscrupulous finder may be prevented from blurting its contents all over the web, even if the identity of that person is unknown to you or the court. It requires considerable input of computer expertise, but it is possible, as this case (cleverly taken in the Technology and Construction Court) illustrates.
The applicant’s mobile phone was reported to the police as stolen after she lost it at university in 2008. It contained digital images of an explicit sexual nature which were taken for the personal use of her boyfriend at the time. The applicant was alone in the photos and her face was clearly visible.
Invoking the right to privacy under Article 8, and the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, she applied for an interim injunction to prevent transmission, storage and indexing of any part or parts of certain photographic images taken from the phone, and an anonymity order under CPR r.39.2(4), which meant that the application, which was heard in private on the basis that publicity would defeat the object of the hearing, would preserve the anonymity of the applicant. Both applications were granted.
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28 March 2018 by Guest Contributor
David Seymour is a New Zealand MP sponsoring a Bill in support of assisted dying.
Our liberal history can be briefly sketched out in two stages. Establishing a bundle of rights and then expanding them to include a wider range of people. In one sense, the right to assisted dying is a continuation of this movement and perhaps its final chapter.
In dark ages past people had few dimensions of freedom and little self-expression. Most people had one option for spiritual thinking with severe penalties for deviance. As for choice in sexuality, the electoral franchise, freedom of speech, unless you fitted in exactly the right box, forget it.
In my maiden speech to parliament, I borrowed heavily from AC Grayling’s excellent Towards the Light of Liberty where from the Inquisition to the Reformation through the abolition of slavery, the liberation of women and expansion of the franchise, the black civil rights movement and finally the LGBTI movement, the sphere of liberty was expanded and then eventually included all people.
The British Commonwealth has long been an important institution for advancing these liberties. The Treaty of Waitangi, which established ‘the same rights and duties as citizens of England’ for all New Zealanders, was an extraordinary document for colonial times marred by arrogance and violence by colonisers. Today, the Commonwealth Charter sets out an admirable set of values that would make the world a better place if only they were universally followed. They include access to health: voluntary euthanasia is merely consistent with this value.
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13 October 2015 by Rosalind English
Wye Valley NHS Trust v B (Rev 1) [2015] EWCOP 60 (28 September 2015) – read judgment
The Court of Protection has recently ruled that a mentally incapacitated adult could refuse a life saving amputation. This is an important judgement that respects an individual’s right to autonomy despite overwhelming medical evidence that it might be in his best interests to override his wishes. The judge declined to define the 73 year old man at the centre of this case by reference to his mental illness, but rather recognised his core quality is his “fierce independence” which, he accepted, was what Mr B saw as under attack.
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22 November 2010 by Guest Contributor
There are now over 400 posts on the UK Human Rights Blog. This landmark provides a good opportunity to remind readers how to search the site.
The most basic search function is by entering a word into the “search” box which is always available at the top right of the screen.
You can also search by category via the blog archive or the drop down menu which is on the sidebar to the right. Each post is ‘tagged’ with:
- A blog category (for example ‘case summary‘ or ‘in the news‘)
- A legal category (for example, family law) and
- An article of the European Convention on Human Rights (for example, Article 2, the right to life).
You can read more about the individual rights on our ECHR page, which is also in a tab above. The full list of categories is reproduced below:
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14 May 2010 by Adam Wagner
The Coalition Government is only a few days old but it is already receiving a cautious welcome from civil liberties commentators and bloggers, with all eyes on significant policy commitments in the Con-Lib deal. The previous government enacted major civil liberties legislation within a year of taking power; the question now is whether the Coalition has the time, will and co-operative potential to fulfil its lofty promises.
In its final years, New Labour was regularly criticised on civil liberties issues, particularly in relation to anti-terrorism law. But it is undeniable that within around a year of coming to power it had enacted a major piece of civil liberties legislation in the Human Rights Act 1998, which was followed shortly after by two others; the Data Protection Act 1998 and Freedom of Information Act 2000. Some, such as the Human Rights in Ireland Blog, say that sadly this was a high water mark and not to be repeated.
The Con-Lib coalition has already made significant early promises. The focus of commentators has been on the cabinet appointees who will influence law and order policy, as well as the surprisingly full civil liberties section in the Con-Lib Coalition agreement. Just as important, however, is what has been left out.
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