Law

Because our Parliament discusses little of significance anymore, most of the public tend to ignore it. The perception that the weekly silliness of Prime Minister’s Questions constitutes Parliamentary business is enough to put any normal person off.  And apart from that weekly bun-fight, even the media barely bothers to report on the work of either House any longer. Occasionally something still happens in the Commons or the Lords that is worthy of serious attention but because of its form elsewhere, such occasions fail to get the attention they deserve. Such is the Bill proposed by Baroness Cox, which had its second reading in the Lords on Friday.

Away from the drama of the reshuffle, the European Court of Human Rights is hearing the pleas of four British Christians, who are arguing that UK law inadequately protects their right to manifest their faith under articles 9 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The applicants’ cases are well known. Nadia Eweida, a British Airways employee, was asked to remove or conceal the crucifix that she wore around her neck in line with new uniform prescriptions. She did so on several occasions, but eventually refused and was sent home. She lost her workplace discrimination claims on grounds that she had breached her employer’s regulations without good cause.

Ministers were relieved today when the High Court ruled that the Work and Pensions Department's back-to-work schemes are not 'forced labour' and do not breach human rights. The case had been brought by two people: Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wilson, who argued that the unpaid schemes they had been put on violated article four of the European Convention on Human Rights. Ms Reilly, 23, was given 'unpaid menial work' at Poundland, while Mr Wilson, 40, was told that he would be required to undertake 30 hours' unpaid work each week cleaning furniture. Both had been subjected to sanctions for refusing to take part in the schemes, and were facing losing their jobseekers' allowance for six months, too. Had the DWP lost the case, its back-to-work schemes would have been ruled invalid.

It’s not often that three relatively small NGOs can change politics. So today’s parliamentary debate on the Defamation Bill is cause for considerable pride, among my former colleagues at Index on Censorship and their partners at English PEN and Sense about Science. In November 2009, we began a campaign to reform England’s unfair libel laws. The claimant cabal, those law firms who encourage the rich and famous, particularly those from abroad, to use London’s indulgent courts, assumed that the campaign would fizzle out. It didn’t, picking up steam as it went along. So today’s events should be a cause for celebration. They are, but only in part. The legislative process has been a long and tortuous one.

News that Nick Clegg has brilliantly outmanoeuvred Cameron over the British Bill of Rights will come as no surprise to CoffeeHousers — we told you so last March. The panel was stuffed full of ECHR enthusiasts, balanced by Tories most of whose competence lay in other legal areas. Perhaps Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, the most clued-up of the Tory appointees, didn’t realise this when he joined the panel. He has twigged now, and has quit (or was eased out, depending on whose version of events you believe); observing that the ‘Lib Dem tail is wagging the Conservative dog’. As was evident from the start.

The Commons will debate the UK’s controversial extradition treaty with the US and the European Arrest Warrant later today. The debate has been brought by Dominic Raab MP. He was on the Today programme this morning, explaining that he wanted to introduce a ‘forum clause’ to the UK-US treaty. Forum is a principle that could apply in cross-border cases like Gary McKinnon’s, which Raab has been championing. Raab wants to end the ‘sort of haggling between prosecutors behind closed doors’ that governs extraditions at present, and reform the process by placing it before open court in Britain. He argues that numerous other countries enjoy such an arrangement with the US, why shouldn’t its ‘stalwart’ British allies?