Search Results for: puberty blockers consent/page/46/Freedom of information - right of access) [2015] UKUT 159 (AAC) (30 March 2015)
19 September 2011 by Graeme Hall
Welcome back to the human rights roundup, a regular bulletin of all the law we haven’t quite managed to feature in full blog posts. The full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here.
First, if you know an individual, campaign group or NGO which deserves to have its local or national human rights work recognised, nominations for The Liberty Human Rights Award close on 30th September 2011, so there’s still time to get nominating!
by Graeme Hall
In the news
Gagging the press
In an uncompromising piece in the Guardian, Geoffrey Robertson QC attacks the attempt of the Metropolitan Police to use the Official Secrets Act 1989 (OSA) to force the Guardian to disclose its source(s) which revealed the hacking of Milly Dowlers’ phone. Robertson not only describes Scotland Yard’s recourse to the OSA “blunderbuss” as misguided given that there is no evidence of the Guardian “inciting” this information from the police, but he also urges Parliament to revisit the OSA and insert a public interest defence to protect press freedom.
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21 April 2011 by Adam Wagner
This has been an interesting week for the continuing “debate” over the future of the European Court of Human Rights. Stay tuned for an explanation of the quotation marks.
First, Dominic Raab MP has released a pamphlet with the think-tank CIVITAS entitled Strasbourg in the Dock. Raab, a former lawyer, has been a vocal opponent of the European Court of Human Right as well as the Human Rights Act. The pamphlet can be read here and the press release and summary can be found here. He finds some of the European judges are “woefully lacking in experience” and, as a consequence, “are undermining the credibility and value of the Court“.
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2 April 2010 by Guest Contributor
There are a number of ways to keep regularly updated with the UK Human Rights Blog.
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17 January 2013 by Adam Wagner
The Government’s consultation on Judicial Review ends on Thursday 24 January – please forward your response to the consultation by email and I will include it in a roundup.
It is fashionable at the moment to speak about ‘evidence-based’ policy. The concept has been imported from the sciences by advocates such as Dr Ben Goldacre. In short, policies should be based on empirical evidence, statistics and perhaps even randomised trials. Very sensible. So sensible, you would hope that Government has been doing it anyway.
Which brings me to the planned reform of Judicial Review, the process by which legislative and executive decisions are reviewed by judges to make sure they are lawful. The Government’s ideas are fairly significant, although not quite as major as defeating Hitler, as the Prime Minister intimated they were when he announced them. I have already looked at the proposals in some detail – see also this excellent post. I wanted to concentrate here on the broader picture; the ‘mood music’, as it has been described by Mark Elliott.
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9 December 2012 by Sam Murrant
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your weekly bulletin 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 Leveson report is again dominating the blogosphere this week – and once again, there is some discussion on whether the UK should maintain a relationship with Strasbourg. Gay marriage is also back in the news. However, we also have some “new” news, covering such diverse topics as homosexuality in the Channel Islands, “indie lawyers” and legal aid. A quick reminder: tomorrow (Monday 10 December) is Human Rights Day. We will be hosting a guest post which you can read in the morning.
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26 August 2010 by Adam Wagner
Updated, 1 Sep | The high-profile criminal trial of a German popstar who caused her former partner to be infected with HIV has resulted in a 2-year suspended sentence. In other words, she has been convicted but escaped jail. What would happen in similar circumstances in the UK?
The facts of Nadja Benaissa’s case were relatively simple. She had been infected with HIV since the age of 16 and is 28 years old now. She had sex with three people without telling them she was infected, and as a result one of them became infected himself. She claimed that she did not intend to infect him, and that she had been told by doctors the risk of passing on the disease were “practically zero”.
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5 April 2012 by Adam Wagner
The UK Human Rights Blog launched on 30 March 2010 with a total of 2 readers and a budget of £200. Two years later, despite the budget remaining consistent, the Blog has just surpassed 1,000,000 individual page views and has over 10,000 subscribers over email, Twitter and Facebook. I would like to take a moment to reflect on this success.
As you can probably guess, we are (and I am) thrilled at the response to UKHRB. When we launched, our aim was to provide a new voice in the always colourful but often shrill arena of human rights commentary. We felt that there was a gap in the market (as it were – the blog has been and remains free to access) for a non-ideological legal human rights update service which would be accessible to the lawyers and lay persons alike.
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7 December 2010 by Clare Ciborowska
Tzipi Livni
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).
The Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill has now started its passage through Parliament, following its introduction to the House of Commons on 30 November 2010.
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27 August 2014 by Adam Wagner
Updated x 2 | At the risk of sounding like a broken record, The Sun has got it badly wrong on human rights. Again. On 24 August 2014 Craig Woodhouse reported that “Euro judges go against UK in 3 out of 5 cases” (£). This is false and seriously misleading.
I explored this issue in detail back in 2012 when the Daily Mail as well as others claimed that the UK loses 3 out of 4 cases. Since that debacle, the European Court of Human Rights has produced some very clear documents on the statistics page of its website.
According to page 8 of this document, there have been 22,065 applications against UK 1959-2013. That means that 22,065 people or so have brought cases against the UK. Of those cases, there have been 297 resulting in a violation.
I am no statistician but 297 as a percentage of 22,065 is not “3 out of 5”. It is in fact 1.35%. Less than 2 in 100.
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16 March 2016 by acwessely
Photo credit: Guardian
This week’s round up comes from Alex Wessely.
In the news
A highly experienced magistrate – Richard Page – has been sacked for airing views opposing same-sex couples being allowed to adopt. In a statement the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office said his views – which he had expressed in an BBC interview in 2015 – constituted “serious misconduct which brought the magistracy into disrepute”. Alice Arnold in the Guardian agrees with the decision to sack him (“the law is clear… magistrates must respect it”), whereas the Christian Legal Centre say this represents a “new political orthodoxy” and “modern day madness”. In a subsequent development, Mr Page is now planning to sue Michael Gove, citing religious discrimination.
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15 July 2015 by David Hart KC
Quite a lot has happened in the 6 months since my post here on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). TTIP is a proposed trade agreement between the US and the EU, with negotiations on the substantive issues between the EU and the US underway in Brussels at the moment.
The proposed treaty may have significant effects on EU regulation, but let’s concentrate on whether TTIP should contain specific provisions enabling investors to sue governments.
The ground for action would be governmental “expropriation” of investments – and that may mean anything from telling a cigarette manufacturer that he must have to change what his packets look like, (with consequential loss of profits), to imposing new environmental standards on a power generating plant.
This mechanism is known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement or ISDS. Our government seems astonishingly sanguine about this, on the basis that it has not yet been sued successfully under existing bilateral treaties with similar provisions. This does not seem to be a very profoundly thought-through position to adopt, if the proposed system has its problems – which it plainly does, when one compares it with traditional claims in the courts. Put simply, why wave it on?
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26 October 2017 by Rosalind English
The first episode from the Public Law Seminar given by members of 1 Crown Office Row is now available for podcast download here or from iTunes under Law Pod UK. Look for Episode 13: Tackling radicalisation through the civil courts.
For non-Apple devices the podcasts are available via the Audioboom app.
For ease of reference the following three posts set out the introductions to each of the presentations and the case citations. Click on the heading for PDF copies of each of the presentations.
Introduction
The Civil Courts have now been involved in cases of radicalisation brought before them by local authorities for very nearly three years (we are approaching the third anniversary of the first case). What was then innovative is now reasonably well-established (see President’s Guidance on Radicalization Cases in the Family Courts (8 October 2015) and the judgment of Hayden J in London Borough of Tower Hamlets v B [2016] EWHC 1707.
Concern was stirred originally by the spectre of significant numbers of people travelling to Syria to demonstrate their support for ISIS or the Al Nusra Front. This problem is not novel as 80 years ago Britain and Ireland were similarly fixated with the problem of volunteers departing for Spain to fight on both sides in the Civil War. A portrayal of the indoctrination of school age children to fight in that war even seeped into popular culture courtesy of Muriel Spark’s novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The current situation is complicated by the relative ease of international travel, the tactics and targets used by extremists and the fact that the UK has already experienced domestic terrorism inspired by international examples.
The number of UK nationals travelling to Syria may have fallen but reports in 2016 of significant numbers of youths travelling from Kerala to Syria show that the problem has not fallen away and is truly international.
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15 November 2011 by Adam Wagner
Updated x 2 | Today, guardian.co.uk’s Comment is Free (CIF) was “taken over” by the Occupy London movement. This has led to two particularly worrying articles being published. Both purport to offer legal advice which, if followed, could lead you straight to prison.
For that reason, Guardian CIF goes straight to the legal naughty step, where it can share a tent with the Occupy London movement. I understand that the Guardian’s online legal editors had nothing to do with the commissioning of the articles, and I also realise that “comment is free“. But there has to be a limit, and there is a huge difference between a controversial but plausible point of view and quackery. As C. P. Scott’s phrase continues “… comment is free but facts are sacred“.
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5 November 2020 by Rosalind English
Would you be first in the queue for the Covid-19 vaccine if and when it is rolled out? Or would you prefer to wait and appraise its effects on more pioneering citizens? With nearly a year of widespread media coverage of the coronavirus, it would not be surprising if a large percentage of an already fearful population exercised its right not to be subjected to what would be an assault and battery under English law: medical treatment without consent.
This is a syndrome, and it has a name. It is called “vaccine hesitancy”. The WHO describes this as “the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines”. Our willingness to avail ourselves of a future COVID vaccine is very much in doubt, and it is in doubt in high places.
Should a Covid-19 vaccine become available at scale, we cannot expect sufficient voluntary uptake.
Update: on Tuesday 17 November the Danish government finished considering a new law giving the government extended powers to respond to epidemics. Parts of this law that propose that:
People infected with dangerous diseases can be forcibly given medical examination, hospitalised, treated and placed in isolation.
The Danish Health Authority would be able to define groups of people who must be vaccinated in order to contain and eliminate a dangerous disease.
People who refuse the above can – in some situations – be coerced through physical detainment, with police allowed to assist. See the Danish newsletter here. In this country, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has refused to rule out mandatory inoculation, telling talkRADIO the government would ‘have to watch what happens and… make judgments accordingly’.
In July 2020 a group of philosophy and law academics presented written evidence to Parliament proposing that individuals should undergo vaccination as a
condition of release from pandemic-related restrictions on liberty, including on movement and association
The authors of the report base this proposal on two “parity arguments”:
a. If Covid-19 ‘lockdown’ measures are compatible with human rights law, then it is
arguable that compulsory vaccination is too (lockdown parity argument);
b. If compulsory medical treatment under mental health law for personal and public protection purposes is compatible with human rights law, then it is arguable that compulsory vaccination is too (mental health parity argument).
They contend that there is “an arguable case” for the compatibility of compulsory vaccination with human rights law.
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10 November 2025 by Rosalind English
We all want to know about American libel law, now that President Trump has launched his pre-action missile at the BBC. If he pursues his claim it will be under Florida law, where his defamation action will not be statute barred. In the UK such claims must be commenced within one year of publication; Florida allows two. There are other significant differences between English and American defamation systems, which I will explore in this and the following post. Whatever the outcome of Trump v the BBC, the question that is occupying libel lawyers in the US at the moment is not a human run journalistic enterprise, whatever its flaws. It is the collision between antiquated libel laws the world over and the runaway publication machine called Artificial Intelligence.
No UK court has yet issued a judgment in a libel or defamation claim concerning AI-generated content, but several cases and legal actions are emerging and the issue is widely anticipated to reach the courts soon. I will discuss these later. There is rather more activity on this front across the pond. American defamation law is very different from ours, but we can see the enormous problems that arise when a technology provider is presented with a libel writ in respect of a statement that has been distributed by AI, if it has caused serious harm to a person’s reputation. A recent example is set out in an article in The New York Times by Ken Bensinger, who reports that a solar contractor in Minnesota, called Wolf River Electric, noticed a dramatic fall off in sales.
“When they pressed their former customers for an explanation, the answers left them floored.
The clients said they had bailed after learning from Google searches that the company had settled a lawsuit with the state attorney general over deceptive sales practices. But the company had never been sued by the government, let alone settled a case involving such claims.
Confusion became concern when Wolf River executives checked for themselves. Search results that Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence technology, delivered at the top of the page included the falsehoods. And mentions of a legal settlement populated automatically when they typed “Wolf River Electric” in the search box.
Unsurprisingly, Wolf River executives decided they had no choice but to sue Google for defamation. This is just one instance of half a dozen libel claims filed in the US over the past two years over content produced by AI tools that generate text and images. Another case dating back to 2023 involved a talk radio host and a Second Amendment advocate (the right to carry a gun) who found out that AI had falsely accused him of embezzlement – this was discovered by a journalist looking up the radio presenter’s name on the internet.
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