The socio-economic duty: A powerful idea hidden in plain sight in the Equality Act
Section 1 of the Equality Act 2010 asks public authorities to actively consider the way in which their policies and their most strategic decisions can increase or decrease inequalities. I...
Asylum Applications Should be Judged on the Basis of Law not Religious Doctrine
In March 2019, a Home Office letter rejecting an asylum application made the headlines of the biggest media outlets in the UK and abroad. It was not the case itself...
Gym Use and Changing Rooms: the illegality and chilling effect of (trans)gender segregation
A recent, high-profile article published on HuffPost claimed that the popular leisure group – David Lloyd Leisure – had decided to exclude all trans persons from their preferred gender segregated...
Why Depriving Shamima Begum of her UK Citizenship Breaches International Law
Shamima Begum, the British teenager who left the UK to marry an ISIS fighter, was recently found in Syria and expressed the will to go back home. A few days...
Human Rights in Scotland
On 10th December 2018 the First Minister’s Advisory Group on Human Rights Leadership set out its vision for the future of human rights in Scotland. The publication of the Group’s...
Successful Judicial Review of Benefits Payment in the UK
R (Johnson and others) and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2019] EWHC 23 (Admin) is an English High Court case relating to the benefit payment, Universal Credit. Universal...
Lessons from Sir Henry Brooke: Making Rights Real (II)
In my last post, I argued that the judgment in Gareth Lee v Ashers Bakery is the consequence of the failure to follow a structured human rights assessment. This is...
Lessons from Sir Henry Brooke: Making Rights Real (I)
What if? What if the UK House of Lords (as the UK Supreme Court then was) had left the judgment of Lord Justice Brooke in Begum in the Court of...
The High Court of England and Wales: facilitator of the death penalty abroad?
Last week, the High Court of England and Wales held that it was lawful for the British Government to assist American authorities with the investigation and prosecution of crime in...
The UK Supreme Court and the Gay Marriage Cake: Is ‘Indissociability’ Half-baked?
Giving the judgment of the court in Lee v Ashers Baking Co (2018), Lady Hale discusses ‘indissociability’ when determining whether direct discrimination has occurred. Indissociability refers to circumstances in which...
The Employment Rights of Uber Drivers: A Battle Won, the War Goes On
The judgment of the English Court of Appeal in Uber B.V. & others v Aslam & others (Case No: A2/2017/3467; 19 December 2018) has been hailed as a victory for...
The Two Child Tax Limit Perpetuates the Myth of Poverty as a Moral Failing
Families who have a third child born after 6 April 2017 will not receive child tax credits for the third child (this has been known as a ‘two-child limit’). The...
