Andrew Tettenborn

Yet another immigration and human rights story scandalised the right-leaning press yesterday. Thirty-odd arrivals who came by boat in 2020 have, according to the Home Office, received damages totalling around £200,000. This came after a 2022 decision by the High Court which found their human rights had been infringed when on arrival they had been searched, and their mobile phones forcibly seized and trawled through. Police and immigration officers were looking for leads on the racketeers who had organised migrant journeys and anyone who might have helped them. Over 40 other similar claimants are still negotiating over compensation; the ultimate bill to the taxpayer could easily top half-a-million.

You have to watch the House of Lords carefully these days. Whenever a Bill on some fairly general subject, like crime, is passing through it, pressure groups regularly intervene and slip in their own pet amendments. This week it is the turn of a legal ginger group called Art not Evidence. They have got sympathetic peers Shami Chakrabarti and Doreen Lawrence to put forward an amendment to the otherwise fairly unexciting Victims and Courts Bill. This amendment would prevent any 'creative or artistic expression' from being used as evidence against a criminal defendant unless its literal meaning directly implicates them in the crime charged.  Still none the wiser? There is, as you might imagine, more to this than meets the eye.

Five out of six Palestine Action protesters on trial in relation to a break-in at the Elbit Systems factory in Filton in 2024 were released on bail on Wednesday. The verdicts handed down to them at Woolwich crown court over events at the UK subsidiary of the Israeli defence manufacturer – reported to have caused over £1 million's worth of damage – will not have pleased the government. Labour has been desperate to show its zeal in fighting violent protest and assure supporters of Israel that it hasn’t abandoned them. Nevertheless, despite whoops of delight from left-wingers including Jeremy Corbyn and Zack Polanski – together with others who ought to have known better – the result was very far from a vindication of the defendants’ actions.

Just as a cash-strapped administration looks for ways of streamlining justice by curbing jury trials, by a nice coincidence academic researchers have come up with the idea of holding jury hearings remotely over the internet. According to a study just released by academics from Exeter, El Paso and Cornell, volunteer mock jurors from New York State seem to have maintained roughly similar levels of concentration and enagagement whether deliberating remotely or in person. The current difficulty with jury trials is not so much inefficiency as the unsuitability of many of the cases subject to them You can hear the suggestions already: might this let the Government solve the jury conundrum without tinkering with the immemorial right of the citizen to be tried by his peers?

Did you read the big news about Reform? No, not its scooping-up of Tory MPs Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell; but rather Nigel Farage’s announcement of a new regime for future defections. Reform may once have jauntily set up what must be a first for any political party, an online defection application form: but the whole exercise is now to be strictly time-limited. As from 7 May, the date of such local elections as the government have not seen fit to cancel, Reform will entertain no further applications from any existing politician. Even for those who do apply in time, there are going to be no shoo-ins. I have already turned away several people, says Farage; and will undoubtedly turn away more.

It is easy to forget that, under a quirk of the UK legal system, if you want to get the law changed it is often not enough simply to get legislation passed. Most Acts of Parliament state that their provisions come into force not immediately, or even on a given date, but when a ministerial order is issued. Supposedly aimed at flexibility and the ability to squish boring bureaucratic bugs before they bite, it also gives governments an effort-free way to annul legislation they don’t like. No need to repeal it: just don’t activate it. It will remain in limbo: law, yes, but still legal dead wood.

Another new year, and another controversial human rights victory for a criminal. Fuad Awale was a violent thug and Islamist serving a life sentence for drug-related murder. In 2013, he took a prison officer hostage in an attempt to force the release of Islamic hate preacher Abu Qatada. After this episode he was moved to a close supervision centre, a unit meant to contain fanatical prisoners like him. There, his rights of association with other prisoners were understandably severely restricted, particularly as regards other Islamists (he had asked, for example, to chum up with the Islamic fanatics who had murdered Private Lee Rigby, a request that did not go down well). The result was that he spent a great deal of time on his own.  In 2024 Awale sued the Home Office over this.

The Church of England’s House of Bishops met to discuss the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) project yesterday: that is, the project to change the rules about blessings of single-sex relationships so as to allow stand-alone services (such blessings being currently permitted only as an incidental part of some other service) and, additionally, to eventually open the door to priests being able to enter into single-sex civil unions.  At yesterday's meeting the bishops, as expected – although much to the fury of LGBT campaigners – confirmed their decision made in October to mothball the project. Though their precise formal statement has been left until after Christmas, it is now clear that LLF will not proceed in the near future. Many thinking Anglicans will rejoice.

David Lammy clearly spotted that he had set the cat among the pigeons when his plans to cut back on jury trials were leaked last week. Realising how many noses he had put out of joint by proposing to go further even than Sir Brian Leveson’s ideas of last July, in his speech to the Commons today he essentially returned to the Leveson scheme.  Under the new rules, fraud trials will largely become judge-only. In addition, the aim is for anything with a likely sentence of three years or less to be tried by a judge alone in a new crown court bench division. For offences currently triable either way, where currently the defendant has an absolute right to a jury trial – even for (say) the theft of a Snickers bar from Aldi, they will now be decided by a judge alone.

David Lammy’s plans to prune the right to trial by jury are certainly drastic. Juries would remain only for murder, manslaughter, rape and cases deemed to be in the public interest, with other offences carrying sentences up to five years tried by judge alone. Lawyers are predictably unhappy at these proposals. They see them as seriously compromising the traditional rights of defendants to be tried by their peers, not to mention revealing the hypocrisy of the man who, under the Tories, robustly defended the right to trial by one’s peers. They also think, rightly, that Lammy is now acting not so much from principle as from a desperate need to find a way to clear the backlog of criminal cases (up to five years in some cases) without much money to do so.

Shabana Mahmood is a bright minister among a cabinet of duds, dealt a difficult hand and playing it rather well. There was a good deal to like about her speech this afternoon, launching the document describing the government’s plans to deal with refugees and deportation. The idea of reviewing refugee status every 30 months, with a view to ending it if the country of origin is no longer dangerous, is overdue. That temporary unrest in a particular state should entitle those at the sharp end automatically to claim permanent rights to remain here is wrong, however much they may prefer their settled life in Britain, when this negatively impacts native Britons.

When a maniac ran amok on a train near Huntingdon on Saturday, train steward Samir Zitouni put his life on the line. Zitouni bravely blocked the attacker from stabbing a girl, leaving him with a gash on his head and neck. The railway worker remains critically unwell in hospital. His family say they are 'immensely proud of Sam and his courage'. They're right to be: Zitouni saved numerous lives. Whether or not Zitouni is an immigrant isn't clear – and nor does it matter But as Zitouni, who has worked for LNER for more than 20 years, recovers in hospital following the brutal attack, he is being used by some as a political football. 'B****y immigrants coming here and…oh.

Seventy-five years ago today the European Convention on Human Rights was signed in Rome by the 12 states, including Britain, that then formed the Council of Europe. There will be official celebrations: in Strasbourg tonight, a solemn ceremony of speeches and a gala classical concert at the Opéra national du Rhin, and in London next month a formal lecture by our recently-retired man in Strasbourg followed by a Foreign Office reception. But one thing is very noticeable: beyond the great, the good and the earnest (such as the human rights bar and organisations like Amnesty and Liberty), few care. Most of the public, and for that matter most of our politicians, will blithely ignore the whole caboodle.

When Nigel Farage introduced a bill in the House of Commons requiring the UK to leave the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) this week, it was clear that something has changed in British politics. It wasn't the absence of deluded heckling from Labour MPs or Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, both of which were fixtures of the debate. And, no: the Reform leader's bill didn't get anywhere. No-one expected it to, but that was not the point. Such bills are not generally taken as serious legislative proposals; they are more ballons d’essai to gauge reaction. And reading between the lines, the reaction to this one is both informative, and also encouraging to ECHR-sceptics. It demonstrated all too clearly that human rights scepticism is now mainstream.

The Met has announced that it will stop investigating non-crime hate incidents, or NCHIs. The pressure on other forces to fall into line may well now be hard to resist (we will have to see). But don’t cheer too loudly yet. The devil is in the detail, and there may be less to rejoice over than you think. An NCHI, to remind you, is any incident ‘perceived’ to be motivated – wholly or partly – by hostility or prejudice towards someone with a particular characteristic. It is noted by police, often secretly, against a person’s name; and while not a criminal record it has effects.

The problems with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the bureaucracy behind it aren’t limited to the spanners they push into the wheels of immigration enforcement. They also now appear to be meddling over hard-won sex-based rights. A letter from the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner, Michael O’Flaherty, is likely to be seized upon by the trans lobby to further their cause.