Andrew Tettenborn

On Friday, the High Court in Northern Ireland deflected a serious threat to the right to free speech, not only in the province but also in the country as a whole. It was, however, a very close-run thing, and the affair is still highly worrying. A Northern Ireland Assembly law that came into effect last year, the Justice (Sexual Offences and Trafficking Victims) Act (Northern Ireland) 2022, made it an imprisonable crime to publish the fact that someone had come under police investigation for a sexual offence unless and until they were charged. If they were never charged the matter had to be hushed up until 25 years after their death (or even longer, if a court agreed to their relatives’ request). As I pointed out at the end of last year, this law was incredibly wide-ranging.

The Georgian parliament has rammed through its new foreign agents law amid massive protests, overriding the veto of pro-western and pro-EU president Salome Zourabichvili. The new law essentially will require all non-commercial organisations operating in Georgia to register as foreign agents and publicise themselves as such if they receive over 20 per cent of their funding from abroad. Its aim is to counter the influence of pro-western NGOs in the country. The Georgian government has a point when it defends the requirement of registration as a transparency measure The proposal has already caused serious unrest, and this will undoubtedly now balloon. You can see why. The government led by ruling party Georgian Dream is not a pleasant grouping.

It has been argued that the preparedness of the courts to declare governmental action unlawful is vital to the rule of law. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Yesterday’s High Court decision which annulled new police powers to control protests shows that there might be two sides to this, especially when you find yourself on the school run behind a deliberately dawdling crocodile of JSO protesters or in front of a a bunch of XR zealots lying in the road. The rule of law is all very well, but progressives cannot be allowed to have it all their own way The background to the episode is boringly legalistic. (Please accept apologies in advance.

James Cleverly won’t be able to move the Julian Assange file out of his inbox quite yet after all. The High Court has allowed Assange to appeal once more against extradition to the US on the basis that no sufficient assurances have been received over his ability to rely on the First Amendment if tried there. We don’t know what the result will be (today’s hearing merely gave permission to appeal, with no guarantee as to its outcome). Nevertheless, we should still think twice before we hope that the appeal will ultimately be dismissed, thus allowing the final removal of someone who has been a thorn in the UK authorities’ side for nearly 15 years. This is Assange’s second brush with extradition law.

Except for households blessed with rather generous incomes, most mothers these days have to work to keep a family decently fed and housed. Some kind of subsidised childcare is therefore an unfortunate necessity. The government recognises this, and has just introduced a new scheme. When fully up and running, it will give parents working full-time who earn less than £100,000 a free 570 hours a year of child-minding or early education for each child between nine months and four years. Plus it will (in effect) also hand them a basic rate tax deduction if they want to spend a further £10,000 per year on it. This will be over and above a free 570 hours available to any parent of any child aged three or four. Generous?

Before 7 October last year, observers had long suspected an uncomfortable symbiosis between UNRWA, the UN organisation tasked with organising aid to the unfortunate Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, and the autocratic Hamas government in control in Gaza city. The attack on Israel on that day certainly didn’t dispel these suspicions, and in January this year Israel alleged that a number of UNRWA staff had been implicated. Seventeen countries paused funding for UNRWA, including the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, the EU and several individual European states. So did the UK, which last year had provided about £35 million. The UK, which had said it would await the Colonna report before making a decision, will now face immense pressure to resume payments Will this funding come back?

It was always a racing certainty that this week’s ‘Swiss grannies’ climate change judgment in Strasbourg would spawn a new wave of environmental lawfare and give new life to that already in progress. A taste of the brave new future duly came from the High Court in London yesterday. Section 58 of the Climate Change Act requires the government periodically to lay before parliament its objectives to deal with climate change. The government has duly produced a so-called ‘National Adaptation Programme 3’, but some people say it is not good enough.

The media and the middle class may love net zero. Unfortunately, it is increasingly clear that voters are less keen. Predictably then, activists have been trying to take as much power as possible away from elected representatives, transferring it instead to international courts and judges. This morning, this programme of lawfare scored a major success in the European Court of Human Rights. Every yard gained by a well-meaning extension of the ECHR is a yard lost to the democratic process Some months ago, three high-profile cases reached the Court where the claimants suggested that climate change was a European human rights matter.

The Garrick Club affair has taken a new and slightly worrying twist, this time courtesy of – of all bodies – the Bar Council. Hot on the heels of calls for judges to resign en masse from the club because it remains single-sex, the Council now apparently wants to go even further. It is hinting that it may forbid any member of the Bar from being a member. Its menacing words bear quoting in full:  For now, it is a matter for individuals to determine whether or not membership of an institution, such as the Garrick Club, is compatible with the views they espouse in their professional lives, but this may change. As a profession it is vitally important that we retain the trust and confidence of the public.

The fall-out from Covid continues. Its latest manifestations on the international stage are a draft pandemic preparedness treaty, soon to be formally published and opened for signature by the WHO, and an upcoming vote on proposals to amend the organisation's International Health Regulations 2005 (IHR). The latter is a set of internationally binding rules for dealing with, among other things, pandemics. Neither text makes for gripping reading; both might look innocuous and almost uncontroversial. In fact, however, as a group of Tory MPs and peers from the all-party parliamentary group on pandemic response and recovery pointed out this week, they could carry considerable dangers for Britain's sovereignty, freedom and democracy.

Judge Tanweer Ikram is not your usual judge. Ikram, who has a CBE to his name for services to diversity, has tirelessly insisted that minorities need to see people looking like them in senior positions (he has Pakistani Muslim heritage). Whether you see him as an innovative radical or a dreary progressive, Ikram is now mired in less savoury controversy. Last month, he notoriously gave a 12-month conditional discharge to three women guilty of publicly displaying paraglider images supporting Hamas, a banned terrorist group. It was quickly pointed out afterwards that he had previously 'liked' a post on LinkedIn accusing Israel of terrorism in Gaza (something he says he did mistakenly).

Churches are emptier than ever since Covid. Fewer clergy have more and more parishes to look after; the buildings themselves are falling down, with little money available to repair them. In the face of these existential problems, what high-profile subject was discussed over the weekend by the General Synod of the Church of England? Encouraging more worshippers, perhaps, or possibly improving finances? Not quite. You’ve probably guessed the answer: racial justice.  The Synod ran what can best be described as a consciousness-raising session to cheer on the work of the Archbishops’ racial justice commission. It's aim, it seems, is to push race towards the top of the ecclesiastical agenda.