Nicola Sturgeon, along with other MSPs, has vocally condemned the UK government’s decision to unanimously refer two bills passed by Holyrood to the supreme court. Weeks before going into recess, the Scottish parliament passed two pieces of legislation, the United Nations convention on the rights of the child bill, and the European charter for local self-government bill.These bills were then referred to the supreme court by the UK government. According to a government spokesperson, this is because there were concerns that the practicalities of both pieces of legislation could put legal responsibilities on UK ministers. In a statement, the government expressed concerns that “parts [of the legislation] are outwith the legislative competence of the Scottish parliament.” In essence, the government has subjected a bill passed through the Scottish parliament relating to Scottish local authorities to the UK supreme court due to concerns over whether or not this was within the power of the Scottish parliament to do unilaterally as it implied possible risk of legal involvement from the UK.Naturally, the action has prompted outrage from Scottish politicians, with Nicola Sturgeon tweeting, “The UK Tory government is going to court to challenge a law passed by scotparl unanimously. And for what? To protect their ability to legislate/act in ways that breach children’s rights in Scotland. Politically catastrophic, but also morally repugnant.”Scottish ministers are accusing Westminster of trying to undermine the rights of children by subjecting the bills to the supreme court after they had passed through Scottish Parliament unopposed and certified independently as being within the powers of the Scottish Parliament.  John Swinney, deputy first minister for Scotland has pledged to fight the challenge, accusing the UK government’s actions as “morally repugnant”, and “deeply menacing”.For more information on children’s rights and family law, visit our dedicated page.

There has been an outpouring of support for blanket exemptions for parents on maternity leave from having to attend jury service after a breastfeeding mother was told that she’d have to attend her service in person. Zoe Stacey gave birth to her second child in February, and recently received a letter informing her that she had to attend Winchester crown court for jury service in May. She requested that she be excused because she will be breastfeeding her son over this period. However, she was refused her request and only offered the option to defer her service for 12 months. Ms Stacey has stated that she wished to breastfeed her child for longer than a year, so it was still not possible for her to attend jury service. Ellie Reeves, the shadow solicitors general has since written to Robert Buckland QC, the lord chancellor, criticising government policy for not having formal exemption procedures in place. Reeves has said that the current rule “unfairly penalises mothers of new-borns” and shows that there is still a large lack of understanding of, or interest in, the lives of new mothers.  However, justice minister Chris Philip has retorted that while he empathises with the difficulties of jury service for breastfeeding mothers, the jury is “made up of a cross section of society and provisions must be in place to ensure anyone who is eligible, including new mothers, can perform this duty”.While Ms Stacey was eventually excused from jury service after appealing the original decision, the issue is still being debated. The Ministry of Justice has since claimed that while it’s vital for juries to represent the population, which should include new mothers, they are urgently reviewing guidance to make it clear that they should be able to serve at a time that’s right for them.

The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has been held accountable for failing to ensure that tragic deaths in detention centres are properly investigated and has been told that she cannot undermine or interfere with inquiries into said deaths.On top of this, three of the detention policies put forward by the Home Secretary were found to be in breach of human rights legislation.The rulings come off the back of the situation with Ahmed Lawal and Oscar Lucky Okwurime, two friends from Nigeria who were in Harmondsworth immigration removal centre together. On 12 September 2019, Okwurime was found dead in his cell, which an inquest found to have been from unnatural causes. Specifically, he died after neglect following a subarachnoid haemorrhage which ruptured due to hypertension. A previous blood pressure reading had shown hypertension and, because of multiple failures to keep to basic healthcare policies, was not followed up with. These failures resulted in the death of a vulnerable person, amounting to criminal neglect. The only reason this inquest found the findings it did and proceeded to its conclusion was because Ahmed Lawal was able to testify and give evidence in person at the inquest in November 2020. The Home Office had tried to deport Lawal five days after the death of his friend, but he took the case to the high court and eventually the judge halted his deportation. His challenge centred around whether the Home Secretary was able to remove a potential witness to a death in custody prior to it being confirmed as to whether or not they will be needed as a witness. He was quite right in this regard, and his evidence was paramount to the eventual ruling. As a result, the current policy was determined to be ‘legally deficient’ and the judge found that it was unlawful to have an absence of policy around what should happen following the death of someone in a detention facility. The Home Office has since stated that it will be “refreshing” their current processes to try and ensure that this situation doesn’t happen again. 

A litigant in person has recently incurred around £100,000 in legal interim costs after being reminded that he would receive no special treatment on the grounds of representing himself in court. A ‘litigant in person’ is someone who has gone to court without official legal representation from a barrister or solicitor. The litigant in person in this instance was the defendant in the case of Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation v Hardy, Mark Hardy. Mr Hardy had faced a claim from the Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation after he made allegations including false accounting and fraud. The court ruled that Mr Hardy’s requests for copies of documents under section 116 of the Companies Act and was not made for a proper purpose. At this point in the trial, the claimant sought to recover its legal costs, which were around £163,000. Mr Hardy’s behaviour and conduct throughout the proceedings did not help his case. He insisted repeatedly that the remote trial should be streamed on YouTube, a request which was dropped before the trial without argument. The judge continued that Mr Hardy’s behaviour was ‘well out of the norm’, citing the volume and nature of his correspondences. He had employed unprofessional and offensive tones, had attempted to submit large amounts of irrelevant material, and made unsupported accusations against the claimants. After dragging proceedings on, the trial accrued larger and larger legal costs. When told he had to pay these, Mr Hardy was informed repeatedly that, just because he wasn’t being represented by a barrister or solicitor, he was not exempt from paying what he owed to the claimant and court. The judge reminded him that unrepresented people cannot expect special treatment. 

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”.