Law

Monday

Douglas Murray

Rodney King and compensation

The late Auberon Waugh advised his readers to reflect on the case of David Flannigan when considering the munificent compensation often awarded to people after awful events. Mr Flannigan had been estranged from his parents for two years before the night of 21 December 1988, when Pan Am Flight 103 fell onto the family’s house in Lockerbie, killing all but one other member of his immediate family. Through a thoughtless, inhumane, process of compensation Flannigan (who had been a spray-painter) became a millionaire. Just over five years later, at the age of 24 — after fast cars, drink and drugs — he was found dead at a beach resort in

Tuesday

John Kampfner

A day for celebration, but more must be done to protect free speech

It’s not often that three relatively small NGOs can change politics. So today’s parliamentary debate on the Defamation Bill is cause for considerable pride, among my former colleagues at Index on Censorship and their partners at English PEN and Sense about Science. In November 2009, we began a campaign to reform England’s unfair libel laws. The claimant cabal, those law firms who encourage the rich and famous, particularly those from abroad, to use London’s indulgent courts, assumed that the campaign would fizzle out. It didn’t, picking up steam as it went along. So today’s events should be a cause for celebration. They are, but only in part. The legislative process

Wednesday

Alex Massie

A Victory for the ECHR

As Pete said yesterday, the arrest and presumed deportation of Abu Qatada to Jordan is worth a cheer or two. So too is the fact that the British government orefers to act within the law, not outside it. The government insists it has received assurances from the Jordanians that Qatada will face a fair trial (or, perhaps more accurately, as fair a trial as can reasonably be expected). This is also worth a cheer, even if one cannot be wholly confident of the worth of these assurances. Most of all, however, these developments are a victory for the too-often-maligned European Court of Human Rights. Granted, this assumes the Court will

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

How Clegg outmanoeuvred Cameron over the ECHR

News that Nick Clegg has brilliantly outmanoeuvred Cameron over the British Bill of Rights will come as no surprise to CoffeeHousers — we told you so last March. The panel was stuffed full of ECHR enthusiasts, balanced by Tories most of whose competence lay in other legal areas. Perhaps Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, the most clued-up of the Tory appointees, didn’t realise this when he joined the panel. He has twigged now, and has quit (or was eased out, depending on whose version of events you believe); observing that the ‘Lib Dem tail is wagging the Conservative dog’. As was evident from the start. Duschinsky made his j’accuse on BBC1’s Sunday Politics

Saturday

James Mather

Holy law

In the autumn of 1347, the Black Death arrived in Egypt. In the 18 months that followed, mosques turned into mortuaries across North Africa and the Levant. By the time the pestilence had subsided, up to a third of the Muslim world lay dead. Theologians delved into their books and found a comforting spin: infection was a blessing from God, they pronounced, and all believers touched with it were bound for paradise.  The hordes who fled their villages to escape the disease were apparently unconvinced. So too was an Andalusian scholar named Ibn al-Khatib, whose observations showed it to be spread by human contagion, not the hand of the Almighty.

Monday

David Blackburn

Raab’s early hits

The Commons will debate the UK’s controversial extradition treaty with the US and the European Arrest Warrant later today. The debate has been brought by Dominic Raab MP. He was on the Today programme this morning, explaining that he wanted to introduce a ‘forum clause’ to the UK-US treaty. Forum is a principle that could apply in cross-border cases like Gary McKinnon’s, which Raab has been championing. Raab wants to end the ‘sort of haggling between prosecutors behind closed doors’ that governs extraditions at present, and reform the process by placing it before open court in Britain. He argues that numerous other countries enjoy such an arrangement with the US,

Monday

John Kampfner

A crucial week for the cause of free expression

For those who care about free expression in the UK, and particularly the reform of our invidious libel laws, this is a crucial week. Today and tomorrow, the UK Supreme Court hears the Times’s attempt to overturn an appeal court ruling in a libel case brought against it by Metropolitan Police officer Gary Flood.   On Wednesday the Joint Committee on the Draft Defamation Bill produce its first report. There are grounds for hope that it will suggest strengthening some key areas, paving the way for full legislation early in 2012 — if the government can be persuaded to find parliamentary time. They should, as this will be a win-win

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Grieve tucks into May

A fringe debate on the Human Rights Act hosted by the Tory Reform Group might not have been a crowd puller. But yesterday’s feline foul-up and the presence of Attorney General Dominic Grieve, a firm advocate of human rights, ensured the event was a sell-out. If Grieve had been advised against deepening internal animosity on the ‘cat flap’ furore, he ignored the direction. The TRG’s Egremont blog quotes Grieve as saying: “We need to have a rational debate. We must be more productive than just going for the ‘meow’ factor.” Then he added: “The judicial interpretation and case workload of the European Court ought to be a concern for the UK and other

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

May’s cat story is nonsense

If Theresa May took Ken Clarke up on his wager that no one has avoided deportation because they had a cat, as May claimed in her speech earlier, she should pay up. According to the Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow, a spokesman for the Judicial Office has explained: ‘This was a case in which the Home Office conceded that they had mistakenly failed to apply their own policy – applying at that time to that appellant – for dealing with unmarried partners of people settled in the UK. That was the basis for the decision to uphold the original tribunaldecision – the cat had nothing to do with the decision.’ This is

David Blackburn

The human rights smokescreen

Today’s papers resound with the news that Theresa May is resisting Liberal Democrat opposition to close the loophole over the “right to family life”, Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This change, it is argued, will ensure that foreign criminals are deported so that the courts protect, as David Cameron put it, “the United Kingdom”.  The announcement is a carefully choreographed step to differentiate the Tories from the Liberal Democrats. Dr Evan Harris, the self-anointed king of the Lib Dems in exile, told the BBC this morning: ‘It’s actually a useful tool because it enables Nick Clegg to say the Human Rights Act (HRA) is here to say

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

An EU ruling that Cameron must fight

A showdown with the EU may come sooner than we expect. The European Commission has today threatened to sue David Cameron’s government unless it starts letting EU citizens come here to claim benefits. Until now, any EU citizen could live here, but if they couldn’t find work, they were not entitled to claim benefits. This was widely accepted. Today, the EU has issued a statement saying: ‘Under UK law, certain social security benefits – namely Child Benefit, Child Tax Credit, State Pension Credit, Income-based Allowance for Jobseekers, Income-based Employment and Support Allowance – are only granted to persons with a “right to reside” in the UK. Other EU nationals have to

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Your Lying Eyes

I don’t know, just as you don’t know, whether Troy Davis is innocent. I do suspect that his conviction would, in this country, be considered unsafe. Not that this, or anything else, matters to the Georgia Board of Pardons who have denied Davis’s last appeal for clemency. No-one should be surprised by that. Nevertheless, the case highlights a major problem in criminal trials: eye-witness testimony is often unreliable. According to the University of Virginia’s Brandon Garrett: The federal court that finally reviewed evidence of Davis’ innocence agreed “this case centers on eyewitness testimony.” Yet that court put to one side the fact that seven of the nine witnesses at the

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Our Crazy Drug Laws, Part XVI

As legal entertainments go Man facing jail after reporting his cannabis plants stolen is a pretty good one. The Edinburgh Evening News reports: Police were called to David Williamson’s home to investigate reports that he had been assaulted and robbed. But after Williamson volunteered that it was two of his prized cannabis plants which had been stolen, suspicious officers got a warrant to search the 34-year-old’s Edinburgh home and discovered a further 20 plants. Williamson was immediately arrested. The case caused barely disguised mirth among lawyers and officials at Edinburgh Sheriff Court today, when Williamson admitted producing a controlled drug at his Sighthill home in May this year. So far,

Daniel Korski

What kind of Libyan justice?

Tory MP Dominic Raab has a piece in The Times today (£) about the need for Libyans to rely on the International Criminal Court in the Hague, rather than seek retribution and revenge against Colonel Gaddafi and his loyalists in Libya. A former Foreign Office lawyer, Raab knows his subject well. But I can’t help but quibble with a few of his points. For the history of the International Criminal Tribunal in Yugoslavia, a precursor to the ICC, raises questions about how societies can best deal with such crimes. The ICTY allowed space for the post-conflict consolidation to take place before indicting criminals. In contrast, the ICC issued an indictment

Monday

David Blackburn

From the archives: the perils of bringing Gaddafi to trial

Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the leader of the National Transitional Council, has indicated his hope that Colonel Gaddafi will be tried in Libya. But the far reaching tentacles of the International Criminal Court may claim Gaddafi from the Libyan people. Judge Richard Goldstone, former chief prosecutor at The Hague, told the BBC World Service earlier this afternoon that those who capture Gaddafi “will be under an obligation to put him on an airplane and send him to The Hague.” Meanwhile, the internationally renowned human rights lawyer Philippe Sands was less certain. He told the World Service: “It shouldn’t be assumed that anyone is automatically going to The Hague…There are still a

Thursday

David Blackburn

Capital punishment to be debated in parliament?

Sir George Young has graced the pages of the Daily Mail this morning, arguing that MPs cannot ignore the clamour for a debate on the death penalty, as examined in depth by Pete last weekend. The Leader of the House’s intervention is the greatest indication yet that parliament will discuss the issue for the first time since the passage of the Human Rights Act in 1998. This has not come as a bolt from the blue. A string of e-petitions will mature soon and capital punishment is expected to be near the top of the list, as it always is when the public is asked for its opinion. Young sees this as

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Sickly Mubarak in court

As an accompaniment to the unique photo-history of the Egyptian revolution currently being shown on the Books Blog, here is Channel 4’s latest footage of the invalid Hosni Mubarak being brought to trial. This is a momentous moment in Egypt’s rebirth as a nation, but one denuded of dignity if these images are anything to go by.

David Blackburn

Moving slowly towards the future

Yesterday’s leak of Vince Cable’s response to the Hargreaves report into the Digital Economy Act (DEA) set tongues wagging. The headline was as expected: ‘web-blocking’, the practice whereby copyright infringers are barred from internet access, will be dropped because it is unworkable. In line with Hargreaves’ recommendations, Cable also plans to remove restrictions on using copyright material to create parodies, which is excellent news for Downfall enthusiasts. And he will rationalise copyright law to legalise supposedly forbidden practices like copying CDs onto an i-Pod. Finally, Cable has permitted an exception from copyright for data mining for research purposes. The Business Department and the Treasury believe that these reforms will net the economy an extra

Thursday

James Forsyth

Cameron needs to move fast to regain the initiative

Westminster is rife this afternoon with rumours that there’ll soon be a high-profile arrest in the phone hacking case. For David Cameron, this issue is going to remain incredibly difficult as long as the focus remains narrowly on News International. But Cameron has one tool he can use to try and broaden out the issue, the inquiries he mentioned yesterday at PMQs. If Cameron were to move quickly on setting up judge-led public inquiries into the police and into journalistic abuses, he would regain some of the initiative. These inquiries are really the only tool he has, given that the government is hemmed in on the takeover of BSkyB as

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Schooling the judges

The judges are judging the judges, or at least judging by the cover of this morning’s Times (£) they are. “Radical reform of the selection of judges,” some leading figures tell the paper, “is needed to break the stranglehold of white Oxbridge males at the top of the judiciary.” The story continues inside the paper, with a tranche of statistics on just how white, Oxbridge and male the judiciary actually is (i.e. very). It all reminded me of a table we put together for Coffee House some months ago, and which I thought I’d excavate this morning. Here it is, with judges sitting firmly at the bottom: Of course, some