Are “squalid” prison conditions and the response to the Covid-19 pandemic breaching human rights?

6 July 2020 by Jonathan Metzer

The latest reports of HM Chief Inspector of Prisons and the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights lay bare the conditions in some British prisons.

Some of the language that is used to describe living conditions in the Chief Inspector’s report is shocking – including “appalling”, “squalid”, “intolerable”, “extremely squalid” and beset with “vermin and filth”.

The Chief Inspector’s view is that such conditions “should not feature in 21st century jails”. This conclusion was expressed prior to the further impact caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Since the pandemic, the Government has introduced measures to address the risk of contagion including a blanket ban on visits since around 24^th March which has still not been revisited despite the Covid-19 threat level having been reduced to level 3 on 19^th June.

The conclusion of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights is that the Government’s response and the deficiencies in the measures to mitigate the impact of this “have put at risk the right to family life of up to an estimated 17,000 children of mothers in prison”.

In the view of this author, the evidence indicates that in several respects the UK may well be in breach of vital protections for prisoners and their families under Articles 3 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This extended piece will examine these issues in detail.

Feature | A human right to money: will it ever happen?

8 June 2010 by Rosalind English

Ban on fertility treatment does not breach Convention, says Strasbourg

10 November 2011 by Rosalind English

S.H. and Others v. Austria (Application no. 57813/00), 3 November 2011 – read judgment

The Grand Chamber of the Strasbourg Court has rejected complaints from two infertile couples that the Austrian prohibition on using medically-assisted procreation techniques did not breach their right to respect for family life under Article 8 or the right to found a family under Article 12.  The choices the legislature had made reflected the then current state of medical science and the consensus in society and it had therefore not overstepped its (wide) margin of appreciation in this area.

This refusal to allow infertile couples the protection of the Convention against restrictive state legislation comes as some surprise in the light of Strasbourg’s readiness to insist that governments should allow prisoners access to artificial insemination (AI): Dickson v United Kingdom (2006).  Why should infertile couples be denied the anxious scrutiny accorded to those behind bars? This giving with one hand and taking with another simply confirms the cynic’s view of the court as being deeply partisan in its approach. And it is far from clear why governments should be allowed such leeway in an area so central to the ECHR’s concerns: the Court itself has said that where a particularly important facet of an individual’s existence or identity is at stake, the margin allowed to the State would normally be severely restricted. The matter of procreation and the genetic relatedness of one’s offspring must surely belong to this “core” area of life.
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Conscientious objection to abortion: Catholic midwives win appeal

3 May 2013 by Alasdair Henderson

Doogan and Wood v. NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde Health Board [2013] CSIH 36 – read judgment here

The Inner House of the Court of Session (the Scottish civil court of appeal) ruled last week that two midwives from Glasgow could not be required to delegate to, supervise or support staff on their labour ward who were involved in abortions. 

The ruling makes it clear that the conscientious objection provision in s.4 of the Abortion Act 1967 has very broad scope. This probably means that the General Medical Council (GMC), the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) and the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) will all need to change their guidance on the subject, since the existing versions take a much narrower view. This judgment affects England and Wales as well as Scotland (since the Act covers all three countries), but not Northern Ireland.

The facts of the case, and the original decision of Lady Smith in the Outer House of the Court of Session are covered in our previous blog post here.

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Coronial powers and the rights of the unborn (Part 2)

14 August 2023 by Ruby Peacock

In this two-part article, Maya Sikand KC, Tom Stoate and Ruby Peacock, explore two difficult questions arising from the inquest into the ‘harrowing circumstances’ of the death of a baby, Aisha Cleary, at HMP Bronzefield. 

The first part explored whether coroners should have jurisdiction to investigate stillbirths. 

This second part seeks to answer the question: should foetuses ever be protected by a ‘derivative’ right to life?

For a brief introduction to Aisha Cleary’s case, please see Part 1.

Article 2 ECHR rights in utero

Article 2, encapsulating the right to life under the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’), does not provide temporal limitations on the right to life and does not define ‘everyone’ (‘toute personne’) whose life is protected by the Convention.^[1] The European Court on Human Rights (‘ECtHR’) has left it to the margin of appreciation of Convention states to decide when life begins for the purposes of Article 2. In England and Wales, ‘Coroners do not have jurisdiction to conduct an investigation concerning a foetus or a stillborn child, as where there has not been an independent life, there has not legally been a death’.^[2]

Article 2

1 June 2010 by Rosalind English

Article 2| Right to life

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Art.2 European Convention on Human Rights provides as follows:

(1) Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law. No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law.
(2) Deprivation of life shall not be regarded as inflicted in contravention of this Article when it results from the use of force which is necessary:
(a) in defence of any person from unlawful violence.
(b) in order to effect a lawful arrest or to prevent the escape of a person lawfully detained.
(c) in action lawfully taken for the purpose of quelling a riot or insurrection.

The corresponding provision in the EU Charter is also Art.2 which reads:

(1) Everyone has the right to life.

(2) No one shall be condemned to the death penalty, or executed.

The right to life is not absolute, although the limitation carved out in the first paragraph of the ECHR provision ceases to apply now that the UK has ratified Protocol 6, in pursuit of its undertaking so to do in the Human Rights Act 1998 , and the death sentence has been abolished altogether from the statute books. The UK cannot now reintroduce the death penalty in future, except for acts committed in time of war or imminent threat of war.

Art.2 is relevant to several aspects of State power:

1. The use of  lethal force by the State through the mobilisation of its police and armed forces to combat terrorism, fight crime and quell civil unrest;
2. The prevention and prosecution of homicide
3. Legislation relating to abortion; and
4. The supply of medical services and the allocation of healthcare resources.

The right to respect for life, following the case of Diane Pretty v United Kingdom, does not include the right to die with dignity, although this element is considered in this context together with the right to physical integrity and privacy under Article 8.  This extended implied right under Article 2 does not oblige the state however to enable a sufferer from severe mental bipolar disorder to obtain, without a prescription, a substance enabling him to end his life without pain and without risk of failure: Haas v Switzerland (2011).

While special duties are owed by the authorities to protect the lives of prisoners from harm, including suicide, the Court has observed that the measures imposed should take into account principles of dignity and self-determination, indicating that oppressive security measures may go too far. In Keenan v UK ECHR 2001, where the applicant’s son committed suicide in his cell, the Court found that the prison authorities were aware of his mental problems but had taken reasonable steps by placing him in prison hospital care and under close watch when he showed signs of suicidal tendencies. There had been no reason on the day of the incident for the authorities to suspect that an attempt was likely.

In addition to the express obligation on states to respect the right to life, the Strasbourg Court has developed an implied duty on states to investigate suspicious deaths or disappearances. Critics suggest that this maneouvre was motivated by the court’s desire to avoid having to delve into “complicated and murky factual assessments” in the proliferating case law involving Turkish violations of Kurdish rights:

Extending human rights to create additional procedural obligations on states served as a cost-efficient substitute for a lack of evidence to deal with a growing docket of cases. The court has legislated its way out of its own internal problems. (Dominic Raab, The Assault on Liberty, Fourth Estate, London 2009)

Be that as it may, the domestic courts have not been slow to respond to Strasbourg expansionist tendencies in the interpretation of Article 2.  The right to life now engages the responsibility of the government for the deaths of soldiers in combat, whether they have been killed by enemy troops or illness if their demise is due to inadequate equipment or medical care (Smith v Secretary of State for Defence, [2010] UKSC 29).

Article 2 applies in countries where the Convention theoretically has no reach. In Al-Skeini v UK  (2012) the Court said that the killing of Iraqi civilians by British troops during the British occupation of the Basra region fell within the United Kingdom’s jurisdiction because Her Majesty’s army was exercising authority and control there.

More recently however, the Divisional Court has strongly endorsed the doctrine of combat immunity and appeared to set its face against the recent rise in claims against the MoD by soldiers deployed abroad and their next of kin (R(Long) v Secretary of State for Defence [2015] EWCA Civ 770.

As far as the Strasbourg Court is concerned, there is no right to life that can be asserted in opposition to abortion; a foetus is not protected under Article 2. However, in Vo v France [2004] ECHR 326, (2005) 40 EHRR 12 , where the mother lost the foetus due to a mistake by a doctor, the Court considered that it was neither appropriate nor desirable to decide whether the unborn child was a person for the purposes of Article 2. In Calvelli and Ciglio v Italy, where the applicant complained that the state had failed to prosecute a doctor whose negligence allegedly caused the death of his baby, the Court held that the state’s positive obligation under Article 2 to protect life required regulations in place to safeguard patients’ lives and to provide an independent judicial system which can determine the cause of death of patients in the care of the medical profession. The provision of a civil remedy which could allocate responsibility and award damages fulfilled this obligation on the state.

The failure to provide an effective examination of the circumstances of the death of the applicant’s wife in childbirth disclosed a breach of Article 2: Bryzkowski v Poland, 27 June 2006.

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Now, a win for the Chagossians

4 March 2019 by Dominic Ruck Keene

The International Court of Justice has given a near-unanimous opinion that the separation in 1965 of the Chagos Archipelago from the then British colony of Mauritius was contrary to the right of self determination, and that accordingly the de-colonisation of Mauritius by the United Kingdom had not been in accordance with international law. The ICJ held that Britain’s continued administration of the islands was an internationally wrongful act, which should cease as soon as possible.

This is the latest in a long series of cases concerning the Chagossian islanders, the last domestic one being Hoareau last month, which summarises decisions so far. Also see [120]-[130] of the ICJ’s opinion for the back-story.

Background

The Chagos Archipelago consists of a number of islands and atolls in the Indian Ocean. The largest island is Diego Garcia, which accounts for more than half of the archipelago’s total land area.

Mauritius is located about 2,200 km south-west of the Chagos Archipelago. Between 1814 and 1965, the islands were administered by the United Kingdom as a dependency of the colony of Mauritius. In 1964, there were discussions between America and Britain regarding the use by the United States of certain British-owned islands in the Indian Ocean, in particular in establishing an American base on Diego Garcia.

Article 11

1 June 2010 by Adam Wagner

Article 11 | Right to freedom of assembly and association

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Article 11 of the Convention provides as follows:

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

(2) No restrictions shall be placed on the exercise of these rights other than such as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. This Article shall not prevent the imposition of lawful restrictions on the exercise of these rights by members of the armed forces, or the police, or of the administration of the State.

The right to freedom of assembly covers peaceful protests and demonstrations. Public and private meetings are protected under this Article. These may be limited mainly on the grounds of public order. In most cases Article 11 rights are considered together with the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 and sometimes the right to a fair trial under Article 6. The Strasbourg Court will only reach a ruling under Article 11 if it considers that this is the lex specialis to be applied in a given case, in other words whether its provisions are more relevant to the facts than those in Article 10.

The right to freedom of association guarantees the capacity of all persons to join with others to attain a particular objective. Freedom of association also implies a negative right for individuals who may not be compelled to join an association: (1) Young (2) James (3) Webster v United Kingdom (1981) 4 EHRR 38 (a case concerning closed shop agreements) and Sigurdur A Sigurjonsson v Iceland (1993) 16 EHRR 462 (compulsory membership of a taxi association breached the applicant’s right to freedom of association). In addition to this in the recent case of Demir & Baykara v. Turkey (10 November 2008), the Grand Chamber held that the right to bargain collectively had become one of the essential or core elements of the right to join and form trade unions, something of a departure from the case law on this particular element of trades unionism in the seventies. States are also under a positive obligation to provide legal safeguards for employees against actions taken by private employers. In one case a private company dismissed the applicant who was a candidate for the British National Party, because he might allegedly have offended clients of ethnic origin if they discovered his leanings. The Strasbourg Court upheld his complaint under Article 11, concluding that his right to freedom of association has been infringed and violated, because the qualifying period of one year for unfair dismissal left no room for a claim that he was discriminated against on grounds of his political beliefs: Redfearn v United Kingdom, 6 November 2012.

Freedom of assembly is often in the news as demonstrations, sit-ins, staged occupations and other forms of protest are part and parcel of the public life of a liberal democracy.   We discuss the application of domestic public order laws and the extent to which they can be mitigated by Article 11 here.

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Article 14

1 June 2010 by Adam Wagner

Article 14 | Anti-discrimination

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Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights provides:

The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this European Convention on Human Rights shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status.

This right is parasitic; it is of no use to someone wishing to complain of discrimination who cannot establish that another free-standing Convention right is engaged. As with the other Convention rights it is only actionable against the State and public authorities as defined by the Human Rights Act 1998.

So, Article 14 must be pleaded in relation to some other substantive right in the Convention. It is not necessary to establish an actual violation of another Article; if the claim comes within the ambit of another protected right then it is possible for the applicant to succeed on discrimination alone, even if the primary violation has not been established, or the Member State’s action has been found to come within one of the permissible exceptions to that right (Belgian Linguistic Case (1967) 1 EHRR 252).

A good example of this is to be found in the sex discrimination case, (1) Abdulaziz (2) Cabales (3) Balkandali v United Kingdom (1985) 7 EHRR 471 ). The European Court of Human Rights stated here that:

Although the application of Article 14 does not necessarily presuppose a breach [of the substantive provisions of the Convention and its Protocols] – and to this extent it is autonomous – there can be no room for its application unless the facts at issue fall within the ambit of one or more of the rights and freedoms.

Equally, even if the right does not itself arise directly out of one of the Convention provisions – the right to have a system of appeal courts, for example, is not implicit in the fair trial provisions of Article 6 – once a signatory State has put such an appellate system into place, it cannot operate it in a discriminatory fashion since Article 14 prohibits discrimination in access to courts throughout the whole judicial system.

In cases where the Court finds a violation of a substantive right, it is still theoretically possible to obtain a ruling that Article 14 has been infringed as well. In Marckx v Belgium (1979) 2 EHRR 330, the Court concluded that the unfavourable treatment of illegitimate children under Belgian inheritance laws violated their right to a family life under Article 8, and breached the requirement under Article 14 that Convention rights should be secured without discrimination. On the other hand, in (1) Lustig-Prean (2) Beckett v United Kingdom : (1) Smith (2) Grady v United Kingdom (1999) 29 EHRR 449 the Court held that the investigations into and subsequent dismissal of several members of the armed forces on grounds of their sexual orientation amounted to a breach of their right to a private life under Article 8. The applicants contended that they had also been discriminated against in the enjoyment of their Convention rights, but the Court held that this contention did not give rise to any issue separate to that already considered under Article 8.

In most cases, however, the Court will content itself with a finding that a substantive right has been breached. In another case involving Article 8, the applicant challenged laws criminalising homosexual behaviour in Northern Ireland (Dudgeon v United Kingdom (1981) 4 EHRR 149). The Court, having found a violation of Article 8, left it at that, without going on to consider the applicant’s claim that the imposition of these laws in Northern Ireland and not in the rest of the United Kingdom was a breach of Article 14.

According to Karen Reid in The Practitioner’s Guide to The European Convention on Human Rights (Sweet and Maxwell, 2015), there has been a recent emphasis on the condemnation of racism and ethnic hatred with corresponding positive obligations on the state to maintain the confidence of minorities in the ability of the authorities to protect them from racist violence, and to investigate properly incidents of racial hatred (Menson v United Kingdom, App No 47916/99) ECHR 2003). Indirect discrimination may disclose a violation of Article 14; in other words where a neutral measure has a disproportionate effect on a group it is not necessary to show that there is any discriminatory intent; the burden shifts on to the Government to show that the difference in impact of the legislation or the or measure was the result of objective factors unrelated to ethnic origin: DH v Czech Republic, where statistics showed that Roma children were being grouped into special schools (13 November 2007). Although this could have been done with the best possible intention of providing educational support, the Court criticised the way that in practice these became ways of excluding the Roma children from mainstream schooling, without effective procedural safeguards. The fact that the parents themselves had consented to the placements was not a defence. The Court stated that no waiver of the right not to be subjected to racial discrimination could be accepted.

The list of grounds on which a person must not be discriminated against is not exhaustive under Article 14. The provision refers to “any ground” and concludes with a reference to “other status” and has been applied, interestingly, to different treatment on the basis of a genetic disease: GN v Italy, 1 December 2009.  In another example the Court found it unjustified to refuse a residence permit to the Uzbek husband and father of Russian citizens on the ground that he had HIV (Kiyutin v Russia, 10 March 2011). The Court comes particularly hard down on cases of discrimination on the basis of sex, observing frequently that advancement of equality of the sexes is a major goal of the Council of Europe and its contracting states. The same can be said of the importance of combatting racism.

In domestic terms, the Equality Act 2010 is designed to express most of the principles explicit or implicit in Article 14 in statutory terms.  For public authorities at least there is a duty to consider equality in all decision making processes: see  s.149 of the Act , containing the public sector equality duty).

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Protocol 2 Article 1

1 June 2010 by Adam Wagner

Protocol 2 Article 1 | Right to education

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Article 2 Protocol 1 provides:

No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and teaching, the state shall respect the rights of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.

Although this Article is incorporated into national law by the Human Rights Act 1998, the United Kingdom has filed a reservation in respect of the Protocol 1 Article 2 which applies to domestic interpretation of the right as well as to this country’s obligations under the Convention at international level. The reservation accepts the principle of education in conformity with parent’s religious and philosophical convictions “only so far as it is compatible with the provision of efficient instruction and training, and the avoidance of unreasonable public expenditure.

The leading case on Protocol 1 Article 2 is Belgian Linguistic (1968) 1 EHRR 252 in which the European Court of Human Rights stated that the rights protected in that Article are:

1. a right to access to educational institutions existing at a given time;
2. a right to an effective education;
3. a right to official recognition of the studies a student has successfully completed;

However, this right does not impose on States an obligation to establish at their own expense, or to subsidise, education of any particular type or at any particular level. Nor does it entail a right for aliens to remain in the State of entry to take advantage of the local education system: (1) Henry Holub (2) Eva Holub v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2001] 1 WLR 1359. Nor does this article impede the power of local education authorities to refuse grants for certain vocational courses (R v Birmingham City Council, ex parte Jacob Youngson (2001) LGR 218).

This right has been invoked by pupils who have been excluded from schools for disruptive behaviour, however these kinds of challenges rarely succeed. Provided schools reserve exclusion for serious cases in which less intrusive measures are inadequate, restrict the removal to as short a period as possible and make sensible efforts to provide alternative educational support, they will not be found by the domestic courts or Strasbourg to be in breach of A2P1: see Ali v United Kingdom (2011) ECHR 17 and Joe Barrett’s discussion of the case here.

It is arguable that parents may claim a right under this Article to start and run a private school: see European Commission of Human Rights decision in Ingrid Jordebo Foundation of Christian Schools Ingrid Jordebo v Sweden (1987) 51 DR 125 and the State may not use its regulatory power to make it impossible to establish private schools.

Finally, it is important to note that the “right” to an education is not a “civil right” to which the fair trial guarantees of Article 6 may apply: see R v Richmond-Upon-Thames London Borough Council ex parte JC (A Child) (2001) LGR 146.

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A Moral Assessment of the European Court of Human Rights

9 January 2013 by Guest Contributor

This is a short version of an article on the subject to be published by John Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Human Rights at London University 

There have been three major conferences over the past two years (at Interlaken, Izmir, and Brighton) to discuss the functioning of the European Court of Human Rights and possibilities for its development and reform. Each provided an opportunity to scrutinise such important components of the Court’s work as the subsidiarity principle, the (quite separate) principle of the margin of appreciation, the prioritisation of Convention articles, admissibility criteria, the idea of “European consensus”, “just satisfaction”, and “significant disadvantage” as well as  broader topics such as the future role of the Court and whether a court of individual petition with case law as its only corpus of wisdom is the best way of promoting and protecting human rights in Europe. On each occasion debate was hijacked by the singular topic of reducing the backlog of cases. Wherever one of these components had a bearing on the Court’s overload, discussion was virtually confined to how it could be amended to cut the backlog and bring applications and judgements into balance. 
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R. v. Foster: Reigniting the UK Abortion Law Debate

17 July 2023 by Guest Contributor

Last month marked one year since the startling repeal of Roe v Wade on the 24^th June 2022 – the day the US Supreme Court rowed back the right of American women to obtain an abortion. Almost exactly a year later, back in the UK, last month saw the conviction of Carla Foster for the late abortion of her 32-week-old foetus. The case has brought abortion law back into the public conscience this year and reignited the fears around the safety of women’s rights to abortion in the UK. Thousands of protestors descended on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice days after the conviction was announced, fighting for a woman’s right to abortion to be enshrined in UK law and opposing the fact that, legally, abortion remains a crime in the UK.

Benefits tourism in the EU – Analysis

25 March 2011 by Rosalind English

The case of Patmainiece  v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions was reported in an earlier post.  Here we discuss the underlying rationale for the decision and ask whether the finding that the nationality requirement amounted to mere indirect discrimination was a correct “fit” with EU principles of free movement.

Article 18 (now article 21 TFEU) provides:

1. Every citizen of the Union shall have the right to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States

However a different regime applies to non-economic actors as opposed to workers.  Free movement of workers is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the internal market on which the EU is based. The main EU Directives and Regulations giving effect to the right to free movement of workers are Regulation No 1612/68 on freedom of movement for workers within the Community (as amended by Directive 2004/38/EC) and Directive 2004/38/EC on the right of EU citizens and their family members to move and reside freely within the territory of the member states.  But the rights of those who are economically inactive to reside for more than three months in other member states is subject to certain conditions, set out in the 2004 Directive; they must

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This way, that way, the other way? Latest debate on Human Rights Act – Brian Chang

23 October 2015 by Guest Contributor

Those who want change should have to make the case for it, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC challenged her fellow panellists, at a recent event jointly organised by the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law and British Institute of International and Comparative Law, and hosted by Bindmans. The panel was one of the most stimulating contributions of the year to the debate over the proposed repeal of the Human Rights Act and its replacement with a British Bill of Rights, featuring contributions from three members of the 2012 Commission on a Bill of Rights, a number of comparative perspectives including one from Australia, and even a call for what appears to be a written constitution.

Professor Jeffrey Jowell gave some preliminary remarks to set the scene for the panel discussion. He noted that the Bingham Centre had not adopted any particular position on the proposed repeal of the Human Rights Act (HRA) and its subsequent replacement with a British Bill of Rights, since the Conservative Government had not yet published its proposals. He then quoted a recent  report that the Government was planning to publish its consultation paper within the next two months, and then seek to legislate rapidly to get the British Bill of Rights on to the statute books by the end of next summer. Given this, he felt that the time was therefore right to hear a spectrum of views on the subject to assist the Bingham Centre in forming its position.
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Triumph for canal boat litigant in person

15 February 2013 by Rosalind English

 Moore v British Waterways Board [2013] EWCA Civ 73 – read judgment

A boat owner has won his appeal against the British Waterways Board preventing him from mooring his boats alongside his land on a tidal stretch of the Grand Canal.  Although he had no common law right to permanently moor the boats, he had committed no actionable wrong in doing so, and they were therefore not moored “without lawful authority” within the meaning of the British Waterways Act 1983. This judgment is an interesting and important endorsement of the principle in English law that everything is permitted except what is expressly forbidden. 

This key “rule of law” principle applies as much to the BWB as it does to the police and other law enforcement agencies.
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