Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of law at Swansea Law School
Three researchers from Leicester University’s Centre for Hate Studies produced a curious report on Monday about the English countryside. Their theme is that much of rural England is a white racist redoubt, where anyone from an ethnic minority is made to feel unwelcome and psychologically, if not physically, excluded. People of colour, it is said,
It wasn’t surprising that the Home Office chose to back an urgent appeal in the Epping hotel case. Not only were its asylum arrangements in tatters as a result of Mr Justice Eyre’s decision last week: more important, the deadline of 12 September set by the court to stop the use of the Bell Hotel
If Nigel Farage wanted headline treatment for his immigration speech at Oxford Airport this morning, he certainly got it. So far the reaction has been fairly predictable. But politically, there is a good deal more to this affair than meets the eye. The difficulty faced by Farage’s opponents is that, whatever the details, the man’s
The government is badly rattled on immigration. It knows that its perceived inability either to curb rampant asylum abuses or smartly deport those who ought not to be here amounts to an electoral threat. Over this Bank Holiday weekend the Home Office announced yet another scheme to deal with the matter. Currently anyone refused asylum
Yesterday’s injunction granted to Epping Forest council giving the government three weeks to stop using the Bell Hotel for asylum seekers on planning grounds is not quite the slam-dunk that it looks. It is theoretically open to appeal: furthermore, it is only an interim measure pending a full trial later this year. But the affair
Every year the US State Department is required to produce a report on the human rights situation in every country in the world. The report card for the UK came out yesterday. While otherwise fairly anodyne, the US was painfully scathing about our record on free speech. Unsurprisingly, the State Department was unhappy about the Online Safety
The Home Secretary’s extension of the list of countries covered by the ‘deport now, appeal later’ scheme for foreign criminals, announced this morning, doesn’t actually add to the number of undesirables that we can deport. But it could lubricate the process of getting rid of them. Barring a Damascene conversion of the Strasbourg court, something
Today the much-vaunted ‘one in, one out’ agreement over returning small boat migrants to France officially comes into effect. Keir Starmer, as you might expect, has announced with an air of quiet satisfaction that repatriation can now start in earnest and implied that the Channel-sized hole in Britain’s borders is well on the way to
Last week, 15 judges from the International Court of Justice at the Vredespaleis in the Hague, at the request of the UN General Assembly, pronounced solemnly on climate change. Every state, they said, owed duties in international law to take all reasonable measures to suppress climate change; duties, they added, which included exercising control over
Kemi Badenoch this weekend waded into the Islamophobia debate. In a public letter to Keir Starmer she urged the government to suspend the operations of its working group looking for a semi-official definition of Islamophobia. Unfortunately she then rather spoilt the effect by suggesting that the group needed to be supplemented by representatives of grooming
This morning’s paper on leaving the ECHR from Suella Braverman and the Prosperity Institute doesn’t say much that hasn’t been said somewhere before. It reiterates the fairly obvious political case for a UK ECHR exit. It talks about the erosion of sovereignty over immigration, policing and vast swathes of social policy; the baneful ‘living instrument’
To much fanfare, the Church of England this week instituted a plan, funded to the tune of some £150 million and overseen by a well-respected City law firm, to compensate the victims of abuse carried out by church officials. So far, so good. But when we are talking big money like this, eligibility needs to
Among the many peripheral hangers-on at the UN, are members of a curious class of functionary known as special rapporteurs. Numbering about 80, these are in theory independent experts appointed by the Human Rights Council to oversee either particular countries or particular issues. In practice, however, they tend to be drawn from the ranks of
A major plank in the Labour Party’s electoral platform last year was its policy of scrupulous obedience to international law. Attorney-General Lord Hermer has repeatedly pushed this view, swearing undying loyalty to everything from pyjama injunctions coming out of Strasbourg to arrest warrants from the Hague. Unfortunately this exercise in legal piety is now coming
At this stage we can’t predict what the government’s new grooming gangs inquiry will say. But one thing is overwhelmingly likely: many will feel the heat. This includes police who stood back in the face of clear patterns of child sexual exploitation by young Pakistani men to avoid racial tension; social workers desperate not to
Not for the first time in Whitehall, we are seeing a power struggle between elected government ministers and civil servants under their control claiming the right to follow their own agenda. 300 middle-ranking mandarins in the Foreign Office have written to the Foreign Secretary attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza, suggesting that it contravened international humanitarian
If you think Keir Starmer is rattled by Reform’s awkward-squad views on human rights, spare a thought for Kemi Badenoch. In a speech today obviously aimed at Conservative voters thinking of defecting to Nigel Farage with his unapologetic call to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), she will announce that the Tories too
You might well have felt slightly repelled if last February you had passed someone ineptly trying to set fire to a copy of the Quran on the streets of London, while simultaneously using some remarkably fruity language about Islamic doctrine and its effect on believers. The man was Turkish dissident Hamit Coşkun: much to the
Rachel Reeves announced that a trade deal with the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) – in other words, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states – was imminent last week. It was then leaked that, even though the deal was with unashamed petrostates with no time for net zero and, in some cases, a distinctly doubtful record
Yesterday, following a last-minute flurry of lawfare, the government published the text of its Chagos agreement with Mauritius. Future history books may well cite it as the perfect example of Britain ceasing to be a country that can be taken seriously. This lousy deal essentially amounts to a massive gift from British taxpayers to the
