Access to Justice

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In the news For several years, China has been enacting a policy of repression and brainwashing against over a million Uyghur Muslims in its northwest Xinjiang province. Reports include instances of forced sterilisation. Its hundreds of ‘re-education’ camps have been revealed as places where contact with relatives, the ability to pray and even when to use the toilet are tightly controlled. A leaked document reveals the state’s use of algorithms to score inmates on…
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Most UK people’s 2020 Christmas eves were cheered by the news that we had some sort of Brexit deal – here, in all its majesty. Given the deadline for no deal, some deal, however thin, was a good deal better than nothing, with the ill-tempered chaos between the UK and a major trading partner which would have followed from the latter. News in the last few weeks has concentrated on some of the immediate supply…
The beltway certainly has their collective panties in a bunch over the “storming” of the Capitol building last week. Talk of “sedition” and “insurrection” abounds. It used to be, before Trump, that charges of sedition and insurrection were discredited. We quote from the landmark first amendment case, New York Times v. Sullivan: Although the Sedition Act was never tested in this Court,[16] the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the…
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Whilst many of us would prefer not to dwell on 2020, it was a year that produced many interesting decisions. In Episode 134, Michael Spencer and Jon Metzer talk to Emma-Louise Fenelon about the cases they consider to be 2020’s most significant landmarks. This episode refers to: Whittington Hospital NHS Trust v XX [2020] UKSC 14 For more, listen to William Edis QC discuss the case in Episode 110. Barclays Bank v Various…
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In the news: Last week’s round-up looked at the measures and messaging of the UK’s latest lockdown. This week we ask what it means for vulnerable children and victims of domestic abuse. Are sufficient legal safeguards in place? For vulnerable children, it unfortunately seems not. On Wednesday, a Guardian investigation revealed that thousands of children were sent to unregulated care homes last year, while local authority provisions were stretched throughout many months of restrictions. These homes…
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Selahattin Demirtaş delivering a speech in 2016. Photograph: Ozan Köse/AFP/Getty Images. Source: The Guardian On 22 December 2020, the European Court of Human Rights (“ECtHR”) published a Grand Chamber decision against Turkey, requiring the immediate release of the pro-Kurdish opposition leader Selahattin Demirtaş from pre-trial detention (Selahattin Demirtaş v Turkey, Application no. 14305/17). The ECtHR said that Mr Demirtaş’ detention went against “the very core of the concept of a democratic society” and was…
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The exterior of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg In this two-part article, Ruby Peacock, an aspiring barrister and currently a legal and policy intern at the Legal Resources Centre in Cape Town, examines the history of medical claims brought under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The first part analysed the history of how such cases have been decided, with particular focus on claims based on psychiatric illness. This second part…
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Courtroom of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg In this two-part article, Ruby Peacock, an aspiring barrister and currently a legal and policy intern at the Legal Resources Centre in Cape Town, examines the history of medical claims brought under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The first part analyses the history of how such cases have been decided, with particular focus on claims based on psychiatric illness. The second…
Today we have this weird situation where the votes of the “electoral college” are counted – or not – in a joint session of Congress with Vice President Pence presiding and counting, or maybe not counting, maybe someone else does. We don’t know. Apparently this has all been fertile territory for political conflict before, since Article II, section 1 of the constitution prescribes some fairly detailed procedures for this whole thing, and then that didn’t…