The Supreme Court in the US has thrown out a case on whether or not Donald Trump, the former president, could block people from seeing content published on his official twitter account. The conclusion to the case was that the end of Trump’s term as president made the case of whether or not he should be permitted to restrict visibility of his tweets moot. The second circuit had previously stated that, because the official account of the President amounted to a kind of public forum concerning official matters of public interest, restricting the public’s access as a form of retaliation could be a violation of the 1st Amendment.The day before the inauguration of current President Joe Biden, the US Justice Department requested that the Supreme Court dismiss the case as moot, arguing that Trump was within his rights as an individual Twitter user to block whomever he chose as a personal choice. The request effectively asked the Supreme Court to view the account as that of a personal one, as opposed to a public one. Trump’s Twitter account has been permanently banned following the events of 6 January 2021, in which a violent mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol building in a failed attempt to stop Congress from ratifying Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the court’s decision to make the case moot. However, he did express concern that applying old and often outdated legal viewpoints to modern and ever changing mediums could pose future issues and deserved further consideration.

In its annual report on human rights around the world, Amnesty International has released a scathing indictment of the UK government’s attitude to human rights, claiming that it is “speeding towards the cliff edge”. It focuses particularly on policies regarding housing, immigration, and pushes to end the legal right for members of the public to challenge governmental decisions.  The report details trends in human rights both globally and with a closer inspection of 149 individual countries. It expressed “serious concerns” about the UK’s increasingly negative attitude to preserving human rights legislation. Amnesty were damning about the UK’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic so far, in particular the government’s refusal to learn lessons from the past or act in the interests of vulnerable people. The comparatively high death-count over the pandemic, particularly of those in care homes, and the failure to supply adequate safeguards and testing for the population caused severe concern with the organisation in this regard. Furthermore, the report highlighted the refusal to conduct an independent inquiry into the handling of the pandemic as more evidence of a lack of care and diligence on behalf of the government. The humanitarian organisation also cited issues such as the government’s resumed and continued arms trading with Saudi Arabia, police discrimination against black and Asian communities, and attacks on the right to protest, to highlight the country’s attitudes to human rights. Hard line legislation also came under extreme scrutiny in the report, with Amnesty shining a light on the UK government’s reviews into the Human Rights Act, which they believe are “being sped through during the pandemic”, and could potentially reduce the public’s power to challenge government decisions. The Police, crime, sentencing, and courts bill also raised concerns for the organisation, which they say could seriously curtail the right to peacefully protest in the UK. Find our more about immigration law and learn about our services.

A Lords committee has found that while coronavirus has had a ‘devastating’ impact on courts, the full extent of the damage is still ‘fundamentally unclear’. The backlog in the criminal courts is reaching crisis levels to the point that a report from the Lords constitution has said that the quality of justice is ‘increasingly at risk’.One of the main issues being cited is that the quality of witness recollection and testimony naturally fade over time, so the longer cases have to wait to be heard, the less reliable they arguably become. The committee has urged the government to provide funding in order to ensure that all cases in the Crown court are tried within a year of the plea, as well as backing plans to trial remote juries. Another issue touched upon in the report is the effect of technology being used to try and keep the justice system flowing during the coronavirus pandemic. Data protection regulations are cited as a block to transparency on the impact of technology and whether it is affecting the outcomes of cases. However, it did raise concerns that reduced face to face trials risk alienating litigants, as well as potentially not giving the level of “empathy and humanity” needed in sensitive cases. The committee’s underlying verdict on the state of the criminal courts system was damning, labelling the unprecedented backlog as “neither acceptable nor inevitable”. They state that while the coronavirus pandemic has been the catalyst for the incredible number of unheard cases, is isn’t acting in a vacuum and that the situation results from “years of underinvestment” in the criminal courts. They continue to urge the government to approve more funding in order to retroactively sort existing cases and protect the court system from future troubles like this. Read additional information about criminal law and see how we can help you with your case.

The appointments to three top jobs combatting Covid-19 are to come under an official legal challenge in the high court. Legal representation on behalf of campaigners will argue that the Prime Minister and Health Secretary, Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock respectively, acted in a discriminatory way in order to appoint friends or associates to top positions. The case is being brought jointly by the UK’s leading race equality thinktank, the Runnymede Trust, along with the Good Law Project. The complaints centre around three main appointments made at the apex of the coronavirus crisis. Specifically, the appointment of Conservative peer Dido Harding as the head of NHS Test and Trace, Mike Coupe as director or testing at NHS Test and Trace, and Kate Bingham as the head of the UK’s vaccine task force. Despite the government defending its appointments on the basis of haste during an emergency, they will be challenged that the appointees were not given their positions on the basis on merit but at least partly on their connections to the Conservative Party. The case is separate from another involving Matt Hancock, also brought by the Good Law Project, that he had acted unlawfully when he failed to publish contracts worth billions of pounds within the thirty day period required by law. Regulations state that all contracts worth more than £10,000 need to be published and sent for publication within 30 days of being awarded. However, only £2.68bn or £15bn worth of PPE contracts had been published by the Department of Health and Social Care. Claimants against the government appointments have said that they are not seeking to remove anyone from their posts, but are acting to ensure that future governments have more stringent checks and balances when making public appointments.

Mercedes-Benz is set to come up against a sizable legal challenge from a law firm representing UK customers of the car manufacturer for allegedly cheating emissions tests.A US-based firm representing Mercedes purchasers in the UK has filed particulars of the claim in the high court in London against Daimler, the owner of the manufacturer. The case alleges that Mercedes-Benz fitted cars with ‘defeat devices’ when being tested. These would artificially lower carbon emissions detected during the testing stage in order to pass emissions regulations. The claim also alleges that the carmaker has deceived regulators, lied to customers, and breached UK consumer law by marketing vehicles with falsified emissions data. While this is not the first kind of claim of its kind, it will be the first one in the UK involving Mercedes-Benz. This case comes off the back of a protracted series of similar cases, starting from ‘dieselgate’, which involved Volkswagen being found to have installed defeat devices. Other manufacturers have since been found guilty of such behaviour and have collectively paid out billions of euros through fines and legal action by consumers. Over 33,000 potential UK claimants have already been gathered, each in line for a potential £5,000 payout should the claim be successful. Mercedes-Benz were in court in the US for a similar case which resulted in a $700 million settlement to thousands of customers, which will provide confidence to those in the UK seeking such damages. The claim could amount to an even larger sum, with an estimated 1.2 million parties potentially being eligible to claim for damages, including private owners, lease owners, and fleet owners. The law firm managing the case has said that the theoretical value of the maximum payout could exceed £1 billion.Mercedes-Benz and Daimler vehemently deny the allegations and have stated that they will “vigorously defend against them or any group action”.

Messaging app WhatsApp recently introduced an option on its service for users to make messages disappear permanently for both sender and recipient after seven days. Government ministers, many of whom use WhatsApp and its rival app which already has this feature, Signal, face a legal challenge to stop them using these services when conducting government business. A coalition of transparency campaigners and university archivists have launched a legal challenge after concerns were raised that government officials could use these features in order to avoid accountability. They argue that it renders it impossible to perform legal checks to make sure any such messages should be archived for posterity. Foxglove, a campaign group, argues that ministers using these messaging features are undermining the democratic process by limiting accountability on themselves and data collected in the public interest:“The basic point is that privacy is for the citizen and transparency is for the government. This government is amassing more and more data on all of us and we have less and less information on them. That has the democratic bargain exactly backwards.”The ability to automatically delete messages over an encrypted channel such as WhatsApp has raised legal questions regarding where such messages fit in with a ruling ten years ago that stated that private emails and texts discussing government business were still subject to freedom of information requests. While someone can still be prosecuted for destroying messages pertaining to a freedom of information request, automatically deleted messages that are the subject of public interest and governance pose more difficult legal questions. However, campaigners argue that the active use of this format of messaging is equivalent to actively seeking to manually destroy important information and leaves users above scrutiny. They claim that this affects both citizens and future historians, citing legislation from 1958 which states that documents required for archiving are not distinguished between formats. This would mean that messages sent over apps pertaining to government business fall under archivable material and have to be preserved. 

Johnny Depp has been refused permission by the Court of Appeal to challenge a High Court libel ruling involving an article in The Sun. A judge ruled that the appeal had “no real chance of success” and so the application was refused. The actor lost his libel case against The Sun last year over a 2018 article that claimed that he assaulted his ex-wife, Amber Heard. Over the course of a three-week trial in July 2020, during which both Depp and Heard gave evidence, Mr Justice Nicol found that allegations that Mr Depp had assaulted Ms Heard were “substantially true” and ruled in the publisher’s favour.In a recent hearing, Mr Depp’s lawyers asked the court to consider new evidence, including the allegation that Ms Heard’s claim that she gave her divorce settlement money to charity was a “calculated and manipulative lie”.However, Ms Heard’s lawyers claim that many of the donations were carried out across multiple charities and anonymously, and that the accusation was entirely baseless. Regardless, representatives for The Sun’s publisher News Group Newspapers said that the new ‘evidence’ that Mr Depp would want to rely on wouldn’t have made any impact on the original libel trial. The final conclusion from the court of appeal seemed to agree and its decision was that the grounds for appeal were primarily made up of a skeleton argument and oral submissions, and would not hold any real prospect of success.  In this latest judgement by the Court of Appeal, the court said that the prior hearing was “full and fair”, and that Mr Justice Nicol “gave thorough reasons for his conclusions which have not been shown even arguably to be vitiated by any error of approach of mistake of law”. 

The parents of a young child on life-sustaining treatment recently ran into legal difficulties when seeking representation regarding their child. The parents were fighting to continue their baby’s treatment when they faced to prospect of going to court without legal representation when seeking to prolong the treatment. The child had remained in the neonatal intensive care unit since they sustained a severe brain injury during birth last year. The hospital sought five separate declarations, including that it was no longer in the child’s best interests to continue receiving ventilation as well as other life-sustaining treatments. The parents opposed the applications, however were not able to get access to legal representation. The case highlighted a significant discrepancy in the law around who is entitled to public legal funding and who is not. However, the parents were saved the ordeal of going to court alone after a barrister stepped in to help them. The parents were told by the judge overseeing the case that unfortunately, while parents whose children are the subject of a local authority application to take the child into care are given full, unfettered access to public funding for legal representation, they would not be. Parents who are fighting against a withdrawal of treatment from their child do not have such privileges or access to funding for representation, so they faced going to court alone. Mrs Justice Judd expressed her deep concerns for the family, stating that not only are cases like the one posed medically complex, they are also “as hard as is possible to imagine for the parents.”In this particular case, the father of the child works and his wages meant that they did not qualify for funding assistance when seeking representation. However, despite being over the threshold to disqualify them from funding, they were not able to afford representation on his salary alone. The Barrister, a friend of someone at the hospital, generously stepped in to offer their services pro bono to the family. According to Mrs Justice Judd, they ‘represented them with the greatest of skill and care, ensuring that their case was properly put before the court and taking the burden from them of having to do it all by themselves.”Despite the representation, the family were unsuccessful in their opposition to the application and it was ruled that the case was one, “where the burdens and possible suffering that continuing treatment brings with it outweigh the benefits of prolonging life”, and found in favour of the declarations sought by the hospital trust.Stay informed and learn more about family law and services that we offer.

A landmark crime bill has recently passed its second vote in Parliament. The Police, crime, sentencing and courts bill was passed by 359 votes to 263 and covers a vast range of changes to the enforcement and sentencing of certain crimes in England and Wales. While Labour MPs had been due to abstain on voting, they changed their stance after a highly publicised police intervention during the vigil for Sarah Everard highlighted concerns over police overreach during such demonstrations. Regardless, the bill looks set to continue its trajectory. The Conservatives, on the other hand, have largely and vehemently supported the bill’s proposals.The bill is a colossal piece of legislation and covers a wide range of matters regarding policing and sentencing but the main elements of it that are garnering public attention and criticism are those relating to public protests and demonstrations. Police chiefs will now be able to impose conditions on protests which relate to how they can be handled by authorities. For example, they will be able to unilaterally impose start and finish times, and noise limits. Should a protest not follow these conditions placed on them, they will be breaking the law and would face criminal charges and/or a fine. It will also become a crime to not follow restrictions that protestors “ought” to know about even if they did not receive a direct order from the police. Previously, it needed to be proven that protestors had been told to move on before it can be said that they have broken the law. The bill has been called an “all-out assault” on the right to protest by civil liberties groups. The practical implications of the conditions now able to be imposed on protests mean that power now lies more in the hands of police or other law making authorities to decide how and when a protest can take place or be broken up. It gives the Home Office unilateral authority to define what counts as “serious disruption to the life of the community” and “serious disruption to activities of an organisation”. Critics of the bill point to how the new powers given to the police and Home Office essentially give them the power to decide what constitutes a valid and legal demonstration or protest, a severe limitation to the right to protest.The maximum sentence penalty in common law for public nuisance, which the new legislative power falls under, is ten years imprisonment; a further arguing point for opponents of the bill when compared to much more lenient sentences for seemingly more harmful crimes than protesting. The bill also covers changes to sentences to increase jail time for more serious crimes, as well as increasing the maximum sentence for low level ones.