Law

It’s not only in Northern Ireland that the EU has taken to acting like some imperial power. Last week, with international correspondents’ eyes conveniently fixed on the G7, it quietly began a legal push to take over large areas of its remaining member states’ domestic affairs. On Tuesday, the Commission announced that it was suing no fewer than seven of them in the Court of Justice for breaking EU law. Czechia and Poland are accused of not allowing EU citizens generally to join national political parties, and Hungary of not accepting migrants according to Brussels’s plans. The Netherlands, Greece and Lithuania are charged with failing to have severe enough laws

What have the Conservatives got against left-wing lawyers like me? Boris Johnson told the Commons recently that the government was ‘protect[ing] veterans from vexatious litigation pursued by lefty lawyers‘. It was far from the first time lawyers had been targeted.  The Home Office’s most senior civil servant conceded last summer that officials should not have used the phrase ‘activist lawyers’ in a video blaming them for disrupting the asylum system. But it seemed that the Home Secretary didn’t get the message.  A few weeks later, Priti Patel claimed that ‘removals (of illegal migrants) continue to be frustrated by activist lawyers’. At the Conservatives’ virtual party conference, Patel then vowed to stop ‘endless legal claims’ from

Bailiff-enforced evictions have been banned during the pandemic. But landlords eager to give tenants the boot are finding ways around this rule. Since the start of lockdown, there has been an extraordinary increase in the number of tenants facing applications from landlords to control the terms under which people live in their homes.  Sometimes the playing of loud music is given as the reason. Other times it’s because the TV is left on when neighbours are trying to sleep. Perhaps they have had visitors who slammed the front door of their block. But while the circumstances are often mundane, the effect on those who find themselves kicked out can be

The High Court has said the government acted unlawfully. It is important that is understood, because ‘unlawful’ is a word that can easily mislead. Above all, no one should accidentally think the Court has said that any of the PPE contracts are unlawful. They are not. What the Court has said is that because, on average, the contracts were published on a website after 47 days, the Department of Health and Social Care was unlawful because it promises to publish within 30 days. The government promised 30 days and 47 days is more than 30: that is unlawful. PPE was needed because of the pandemic and, due to the global

Copyright often seems like a joke. Most of us infringe it constantly, and publicly, without a second’s thought. With the advent of the internet, the public uploads countless videos, music, photographs, art, and a whole host of other things without the permission of the creators. Even large organisations get away with it. A few years ago, for example, the National Trust posted a picture of an unusual, heart-shaped honeycomb to social media, claiming it had been made by bees at one of their properties. It went viral, but it wasn’t actually theirs. Luckily for them, the beekeeper who took the photograph didn’t press the issue. Even creators, whom the system

We’re closing 2020 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 8: Steven Barrett on Germany and international law Boris Johnson’s proposal to break international law ‘in a specific and limited way’ has sparked uproar. But do you remember when the UK broke the Geneva Convention? Oh. Well we did. The government-ratified Geneva Convention on the Sea came into effect in Britain on 10 September 1964. From then the UK was bound forever by the treaty and bound by international law. On 25 September 1964, we were not. No explanation was given. No explanation was asked. Our Judge who ruled in favour of the government when it

‘Terms and conditions will apply.’ That, or something near it, was Dan Rosenfield’s initial response when Boris Johnson invited him to become Chief of Staff in No.10. Naturally, Mr Rosenfield was tempted. But he wanted assurances that he would have the authority to run a serious political outfit. He was not interested in becoming a zoo-keeper. That was not a problem. The zoo has been closed down. The Dominic Cummings era is over. Boris’s willingness to hire a completely different character, following the appointment of Simon Case as Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, suggests that the PM can recognise and value seriousness in others, even if he

Could British residents be forced to have a Covid-19 vaccine? Yesterday Health Secretary Matt Hancock refused to rule out mandatory inoculation, telling TalkRadio that the government would ‘have to watch what happens and… make judgments accordingly’. His comments have sparked questions about how realistic the prospect of mandatory vaccination is in the UK, or what restrictions people could face – with MP Tom Tugendhat suggesting that the unvaccinated could be banned from workplaces – if they refuse to get inoculated. If a policy of mandatory vaccination were to be carried out in the UK, what might it look like? That discussion is happening in Denmark now, as the country looks

Robert Buckland – ‘I will resign’ if government breaks law in ‘unacceptable’ way The Justice Secretary Robert Buckland was put on the spot this morning over the government’s proposed Internal Market Bill, which is due to be introduced to the House of Commons tomorrow. The bill intends to override aspects of the Northern Ireland Protocol – a part of the official Withdrawal Agreement – to give ministers the right to modify rules on customs, if there is no final trade deal agreed by December. Andrew Marr quizzed Buckland about whether using these powers would breach international law: AM: Is that the moment that [you] resign from the government – if

For the Scottish National party, the phrase ‘nanny state’ is not so much a criticism as an aspiration. This is the party that wanted to assign a state guardian to every child born in Scotland through its ‘named person’ scheme, only to be thwarted by the Supreme Court. Under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, there have been repeated attempts to regulate the eating and drinking habits of people, including proposed bans on two-for-one pizza deals and minimum pricing on cheaper alcoholic drinks. It makes sense, then, that the party’s paternalism should extend to the question of free speech. Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Bill was ostensibly proposed to repeal outdated