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Louisa Watts v UK [2010] ECHR 793 (4 May 2010) – Read judgment
A 106-year-old woman has lost her challenge in the European Court of Human Rights to the closure of her care home. This is a latest in a line of unsuccessful human rights challenges by care home residents facing similar scenarios. Are the courts providing enough protection to this vulnerable section of society?
Louisa Watts, a 106 year-old resident of Underhill House, a care home owned and managed by Wolverhampton City Council, challenged the Council’s decision to close the home and move her to alternative accommodation. Her application for judicial review was refused, as was her appeal against that decision to the Court of Appeal. As a last resort, she took her case to the European Court of Human Rights on the basis that her Convention rights, including her rights to life and to respect for private life, had been breached.
The Coalition Government have promised to “restore the right to non-violent protest”, but Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, is bringing court proceedings to evict protesters from Parliament Square. What are the human rights implications?
During the build-up to last month’s General Election, a number of protesters erected tents and flags in Parliament Square, a green outside the Houses of Parliament. The protesters still remain and have named the site “Democracy Village”. Brian Haw, famous for his protests against the Iraq war, is amongst the protesters.
Now Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has decided that enough is enough and is to institute trespass proceedings against the protesters. The BBC quotes a spokesman for Mr Johnson, who said “The mayor respects the right to demonstrate, however the scale and impact of the protest is now doing considerable damage to the square and preventing its peaceful use by other Londoners, including those who may wish to have an authorised protest.“
DH NHS Foundation Trust v PS (by her litigation friend, The Official Solicitor) [2010] EWHC 1217 (Fam) – Read judgment
The head of the Family Division, Sir Nicholas Wall, has ordered that a woman with learning disabilities be forced under sedation to undergo surgery in order to save her life.
This case brought to the fore the complex balance between allowing those who lack the capacity the autonomy to make decisions about how they wish to live their lives, and enabling the State to step in when such decisions are not only unwise but actually life threatening. It treads a delicate path between a number of human rights, in particular Article 2 (right to life), Article 5 (right to liberty and security) and Article 8 (right to privacy).
The European Court of Human Rights underwent something of a revolution yesterday with the long-delayed introduction of reforms to its rules. The changes will help the court clear its enormous backlog of cases, but also give it significant new powers to punish states which fail to implement its rulings. The UK may be one of the first on the receiving end of these new powers in relation to prisoner voting rights.
The Strasbourg-based European Court, which interprets and applies the European Convention on Human Rights, celebrated its fiftieth birthday last year. But it has recently been showing its age, creaking under the weight of its backlog of cases, running to an astonishing 119,300 waiting to be heard in 2009.
We have been following the debate on whether Britain will opt to supplement the Human Rights Act with a Bill of Rights. In a wide-ranging article published today, Geoffrey Robertson QC, a barrister specialising in human rights, has advocated “moving on from the Euro Convention – building on it, but not abandoning it.”
Despite these inadequacies, there is ample evidence that the Human Rights Act has measurably improved the level of dignity and decency accorded by the state to its most-vulnerable citizens, and for that relief much thanks to the Blair government which enacted it with cross-party support in 1998. But it has not, as its proponents hoped, conduced to a “culture of liberty”….
We posted on Friday that the libel reform debate is hotting up now that the Coalition Government has pledged to reform the law of libel. We are following the debate because of the wide-ranging implications any significant reform will have for the law of freedom of expression, as a number of articles published over the weekend demonstrate.
The chilling effect of our current libel law needs urgently to be tackled by the government and parliament. I hope that my bill will be the catalyst for much-needed legislative reform.
John Kampfner, chief executive of Index on Censorship, an organisation which aims to promote freedom of expression, writes in the Guardian:
The Guardian reports today that prisoner voting rights will be back in the public eye this week with critical comments from Europe and increased pressure from compensation claims.
Interestingly, the article has now been amended to remove part of a quote from the Ministry of Justice, who had initially said that “Disenfranchisement is an outdated, disproportionate punishment which has no place in a modern prison system with a renewed emphasis on rehabilitation and resettlement”. This line has been replaced by a policy-neutral quote. On the face of it, it seems that government may finally act on this issue, five years after the European Court of Human Rights criticism of its ban in the case of Hirst v UK.
The recent announcement of the review of libel and privacy law by a high-profile panel has led to a flurry of conjecture, comment and proposals. The new Government has pledged to reform the law of libel, but what shape will the reforms take?
The committee, which was announced last month, is being led by Lord Neuberger, the head of the Court of Appeal, and will be composed of legal and media experts. One notable absence, as Joshua Rozenberg blogs, is Mr Justice Eady, who has been responsible for many of the more controversial “super injunctions”.
The new Coalition Government have pledged to “reform libel laws to protect freedom of speech“. Cases involving libel, defamation and super-injunctions have seen two competing European Convention rights fighting it out; Article 8 (right to privacy) versus Article 10 (freedom of expression).
The Infrastructure Planning Commission (“IPC”) is to be one of the first fatalities of the new coalition government. What impact will another change to the controversial system have on the fairness of planning decisions?
In a letter on 24 May 2010, the head of the IPC, Sir Michael Pitt, has confirmed the government is planning to scrap the organisation as a part of a wider overhaul planning powers in the Department for Communities and Local Government.
The IPC was set up as part of a number of planning reforms under the Planning Act 2008. The goal of the IPC is described on the website as “making the application process for nationally significant infrastructure projects faster, fairer and easier for people to get involved in”. Whether the IPC was achieving this goal is hard to say, as the body only began operation on 1 October 2009, and only began to receive applications on 1 March 2010.
The recent Old Bailey case involving two boys aged 10 and 11 accused of rape on an eight year gold has reignited the long running debate over the treatment of child witnesses in the adversarial courts system.
More than 1,000 children under the age of 10 are called to give evidence in courts in England and Wales every year.Almost two thirds are themselves the victims of crime, asked to relive a traumatic experience, often as much as a year after the event. Although special measures are in place to make the ordeal of giving evidence in court less stressful, the current system remains open to criticism.There is no legal minimum age to give evidence in court but prosecutors must be satisfied that a child is capable of understanding evidence and being cross-examined before they can be called.
It should be noted at the outset that evidence from children can only be compelled by the courts in criminal prosecutions. We posted recently on the case of Re W (Children) [2010] UKSC 12 , where the Supreme Court ruled that refusing an application for a child to give evidence in a trial may contravene Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Lady Hale said at para 22 of the judgment: Continue reading →
In relation to the UK, Amnesty’s report condemns the UK’s continuing reliance on “diplomatic assurances” in deportation cases where individuals were likely to be at risk of torture or other abuse if sent to countries where the Government accepts they would otherwise be abuse, in particular Algeria and Jordan. The report summarises that:
Reports implicating the UK in grave violations of human rights of people held overseas continued to emerge. Calls for independent investigations into the UK’s role in these violations went unheeded. The government’s attempts to return people to countries known to practise torture on the basis of “diplomatic assurances” (unenforceable promises from the countries where these individuals were to be returned) continued. The European Court of Human Rights found that, by detaining a number of foreign nationals without charge or trial (internment), the UK had violated their human rights. The implementation of measures adopted with the stated aim of countering terrorism led to human rights violations, including unfair judicial proceedings.
The authorities’ statutory power to detain pending deportation had to be motivated purely by the need to remove a subject from the United Kingdom, not to ensure his surrender into custody of the authorities operating in the receiving country. A subject detained not only for the purpose of effecting his removal from the UK, but also for the purpose of investigating whether acceptable arrangements could be made to return him into detention in the receiving country, was being detained unlawfully.
The claimant sought damages and declaratory relief against the defendant both at common law for the tort of false imprisonment and pursuant to s. 6(1) and s.7(1) of the Human Rights Act 1998, by reason of a claimed breach of Article 5(1) of the European Convention of Human Rights.
Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, is in trouble for offering to sell her influence for cash. She proposed to sell access to her ex-husband Prince Andrew, a “trade envoy”, for £500,000 to an undercover reporter from the News of the World. The circumstances of the sting raise interesting issues in respect of the right to privacy under the Human Rights Act.
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights provides that “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence“. The right is not absolute, and can be breached by a public authority “in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society”, that is, if the breach is in the public interest. Only public authorities need to keep within these rules.
The Inforrm Blog has posted an interesting analysis of the issue, concluding that
it seems to us that there is a proper justification for the publication of the story. What the Duchess was offering was “access to a public official”, for a payment which appears to be wholly disproportionate to the “monetary value” of the service offered… The fact that neither the Duchess nor the businessman had any specific wrongdoing in mind does not matter. The whole transaction was “tainted” and its exposure was, we suggest, justified for that reason. Continue reading →
The Coalition Government has presented its legislative agenda for the coming year in the Queen’s Speech. Below are links to some of our previous posts which address some of the proposed policies.
The full line-up of bills announced can be found on the Number 10 website, or you can also read the full transcript. Our analysis of the Coalition’s human rights policies is here. The list will probably not be exhaustive, as some of the promises made in the Programme for Government may be instituted via secondary legislation or attached to other related Acts of Parliament.
One notable absence is any mention of reform to extradition policy (see our post from yesterday). The Programme for Government included the promise to “review the operation of the Extradition Act – and the US/UK extradition treaty – to make sure it is even-handed.” Liberty, the human rights organisation, had already welcomed the change in a statement on Monday. The family of Gary McKinnon would have also been waiting for this, as Mr McKinnon is currently awaiting a decision from the new Home Secretary as to whether he will be extradited to the United States on computer hacking charges. That being said, a change to the extradition arrangements may be included in another bill, although this seems unlikely.
Human rights challenges to deportation and extradition seem to be constantly in the public eye. Gary McKinnon’s battle against extradition has caught the public, as has the now notorious “Pathway Students” terrorist deportation case. An examination of three recent decisions highlights the various ways in which the courts approach the human rights arguments in such cases.
There have been a steady stream of high-profile deportation and extradition decisions in the past few weeks, none more controversial than the “Pathway students” case, where two suspected terrorists were saved from deportation to Pakistan as they were thought to be at risk of torture or death upon their return. The Daily Telegraph reports that the Human Rights Act is being invoked in a growing number of asylum and immigration case, although it does not say whether the number of successful uses of the Act has increased.
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Louisa Watts v UK [2010] ECHR 793 (4 May 2010) – Read judgment
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