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Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular smorgasbord 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.
The focus this week has been on the continuing Abu Qatada saga. The Home Secretary lost her appeal and for the time being, Abu Qatada will remain in the country. In other news, the Justice and Security Bill edges towards the finish line, discussion continues on whether the UK will be able to remain in the EU if they leave the ECHR and people are split on the proposed press regulation measures.
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular smorgasbord 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.
There was a lot of reaction this week to the proposed Royal Charter on press regulation and the auxiliary legislation upon which it relies. Commentators are divided on whether the move will work or not, with most controversy surrounding the concept of a ‘relevant publisher’ and how this will affect small, online media. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has declared that it does have the power to read closed judgments of courts below, and therefore could, too, issue closed judgments. Debate continues about the shape of human rights in the UK, especially after the next election; whilst the ECHR slowly evolves with a new protocol ready for ratification.
Please welcome our new rounder upper, Sarina Kidd, a student on the GDL course at City University. Sarina joins Daniel Isenberg (our other rounder upper) and replaces Sam Murrant, who has moved on to pastures new after producing a fantastic run of human rights roundups. We wish him all the best and welcome Sarina on to the team – Adam Wagner
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular smorgasbord 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.
In the News
The Human Rights Act and Strasbourg
The debate continues over the suggestion that a future Conservative government would repeal the Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention.
Earlier this week Lady Hale, the UK’s most senior female judge, warned that her fellow judges would ‘regret’ a decision to repeal the HRA and that such a repeal would allow Parliament to pass laws incompatible with the ECHR.
David Anderson QC, the Independent Reviewer of terrorism legislation, has released his first report into the operation of Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures, introduced in 2011 with the aim of protecting the public from persons believed to have engaged in terrorism, but who can neither be prosecuted nor deported.
TPIM subjects in 2012 were subject to restrictions including overnight residence at a specified address, GPS tagging, reporting requirements and restrictions on travel, movement, association, communication, finances, work and study. Like their predecessor, control orders, TPIMs have been highly controversial and, as Anderson points out, “vigorously attacked – from opposite directions – by civil libertarians and by the more security-minded.” However, his conclusion is that they are broadly acceptable: Continue reading →
A newsflash on the eve of the May 2010 elections was instantly eclipsed by the news of the coalition-bartering in the days that followed. But it concerned one of the most important scientific discoveries of the year, if not the century.
Evolutionary biologists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany had finished sequencing the Neanderthal genome. In the publication of their results the team pointed up the similarity between the four billion pairs of Neanderthal DNA and stretches of the human genome, suggesting that humans and their ancient hominid cousins must have interbred some time after modern Homo Sapiens left Africa, meaning that elements of Neanderthal genome is present in non-African modern humans. The study found that 2.5 percent of the genome of an average human living outside Africa today is made up of Neanderthal DNA. Continue reading →
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular smorgasbord 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.
The suggestion that a future Conservative government might withdraw from the ECHR and repeal the Human Rights Act dominated this week’s headlines, with much commentary noting that such measures are likely to have only minimal practical effects on our courts. Lord Neuberger also used his first interview as President of the Supreme Court to speak his mind on a number of issues of human rights concerns; and the Justice and Security Bill continues its passage through Parliament.
Just a quick note to say that yesterday, in the furore surrounding the Conservative Party potentially threatening to take the UK out of the European Court of Human Rights and Angela Patrick’s post on secret trials, the UK Human Rights Blog surpassed an all-time total of two million hits.
The blog was launched on 31 March 2010 and is written by members of 1 Crown Office Row barristers’ Chambers. It is now attracting around 100,000 page views per month and has thousands of subscribers across email, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe for free by email, Twitter or Facebook – more details here.
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular smorgasbord 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.
This week saw three new appointments to the UK Supreme Court, which has in turn prompted discussion of equality and diversity within the senior judiciary (unsurprisingly, all three of them are white, male and “of a certain age”), as well as Conservative warnings over withdrawal from the European Court of Human Rights.
Today’s Mail on Sunday reports that the Home Secretary is to announce “soon” that the Conservative Party’s election manifesto for 2015 will include a pledge to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights if the party obtains an overall majority.
I thought it would be useful to answer a few basic questions about what this would might mean for the UK. Bizarrely, the article appears alongside the Prime Minister’s opinion piece in the Sunday Telegraph promising that his party would not “veer right” and also “stick to the course we are on“. Talk about mixed messages. Anyway, let’s concentrate on Strasbourg. For a basic introduction to the Court and what it does, see my recent post: No, The Sun, the Human Rights Act is not the EU and David Hart QC’s A bluffer’s guide to human rights courts.
X AND OTHERS v. AUSTRIA – 19010/07 – HEJUD [2013] ECHR 148 (19 February 2013) – Read judgment
The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (by 10 votes to 7) has found that Austrian law discriminated against a same sex couple as it prevented them from adopting jointly the biological child of one of them (what we would call a second-parent adoption). The Court found a violation of Article 14 (anti-discrimination) in conjunction with Article 8 (respect for private and family life) protection because this was less favourable treatment than if they were an unmarried different sex couple who would have been permitted to adopt together.
The narrowness of the majority might have had something to do with the fact that the father of the Child had been a party to the case in the domestic courts and opposed the adoption (although the fact that the child of the lesbian couple in Gas and Dubois v France had been conceived through anonymous donor insemination had not helped that case). In the event, the Grand Chamber decision was based on the fact that the Austrian Supreme Court had referred to the “legal impossibility” of the proposed same sex adoption in this case.
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular booster shot 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.
Unsurprisingly, Theresa May’s views on the role of immigration judges sparked much debate this week – yet haven’t stopped the judges making findings that Immigration Rules are unlawful. The consequences of the dismissal of the Pryce jury are still playing out, while the Strasbourg Court has made an important ruling on discrimination based on sexual orientation. Keep an eye out on some new events advertised this week, and various updates in the legal blogging world.
Another title for this post might have been “they did not want to understand the judgment.”
In light of recent shenanigans, it seems apt to reproduce the first five paragraphs of the 25-year-old Court of Appeal judgment in (1) Nadarajah Vilvarajah, (2) Vaithialingham Skandarajah v Secretary of State For the Home Department 1990 WL 754859 (Update – download from BAILII here), which I was alerted to by a colleague. Sir John Donaldson, then Master of the Rolls, complains in withering style about media coverage of a recent judgment. The last line is the best, although a little depressing.
Lessons learned? The more things change, the more they stay the same. Political posturing over immigration and asylum law long predated the Human Rights Act. And Law in Action was as good then as it is now.
The Home Secretary, Theresa May, is no stranger to ill-founded outbursts concerning the evils of human rights. Against that background, her recent article in the Mail on Sunday(to which Adam Wager has already drawn attention) does not disappoint. May’s ire is drawn by certain recent judicial decisions in which the deportation of foreign criminals has been ruled unlawful on the ground that it would breach their right to respect for private and family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Some of these judgments, May contends, flout instructions issued to judges by Parliament about how such cases should be decided.
Those instructions consist of new provisions inserted last year into the Immigration Rules, the intended effect of which was to make it much harder for foreign criminals to resist deportation on Article 8 grounds. The Rules – made by the executive and endorsed by Parliament, but not contained in primary legislation – provide that, where certain criteria are met, “it will only be in exceptional circumstances that the public interest in deportation will be outweighed by other factors”. The assumption appeared to be that this would prevent judges – absent exceptional circumstances – from performing their normal function of determining whether deportation would be a disproportionate interference with the Article 8 right.
RCW v A Local Authority [2013] EWHC 235 (Fam) (12 February 2013) – Read judgment
This case, described by Cobb J as an “unusual and troubling” case, concerns a 1 year old girl “SB” and a woman “RCW”. SB was born prematurely, at 27 weeks, weighing just 1 kg; almost immediately she was abandoned by her natural mother.
She spent many months in the Special Care Baby Unit. In October 2012 SB was matched with RCW, a single woman who worked as a project manager for the NHS. In January 2013 things took an “unexpected and wretched turn” in the form of RCW’s diagnosis with a brain tumour. Hurriedly, RCW made arrangements with a cohort of friends to care for SB while RCW underwent surgery to remove the tumour which was situated near the optic nerve. The operation, whilst successful in removing the tumour, left RCW without sight; it is not known whether the lack of sight is temporary or will be permanent.
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Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular smorgasbord 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.
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular smorgasbord of human rights news. The full list of links can be found 
David Anderson QC, the
A newsflash on the eve of the May 2010 elections was instantly eclipsed by the news of the coalition-bartering in the days that followed. But it concerned one of the most important scientific discoveries of the year, if not the century.
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular smorgasbord of human rights news. The full list of links can be found 
Just a quick note to say that yesterday, in the furore surrounding the 
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular smorgasbord of human rights news. The full list of links can be found 
Today’s 
X AND OTHERS v. AUSTRIA – 19010/07 – HEJUD [2013] ECHR 148 (19 February 2013) – 
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your regular booster shot of human rights news. The full list of links can be found 
The Home Secretary, Theresa May, is no stranger to 
RCW v A Local Authority [2013] EWHC 235 (Fam) (12 February 2013) – 
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