Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of law at Swansea Law School
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This morning, the Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeal’s judgment on the Rwanda plan and declared that the scheme is unlawful. The Court of Appeal had said that the principle of sending asylum seekers to foreign countries was unexceptionable. But the courts had to decide if Rwanda was likely to be a safe country
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One problem clearly emerged after an Islamist fanatic blew himself up at a major pop concert in the Manchester Arena in 2017, killing 22 other people. This was that no one there had a clue about how to react to events of this sort. The government promised action. Action we now have, in the form
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What does Iran have to teach the world about human rights? The United Nations appears to think we have plenty to learn from a pariah state which backs Hamas, arrests and beats women for failing to wear a hijab, executes protesters and hangs gay people. In Geneva, the Social Forum of the UN Human Rights
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The EU’s response to the war between Israel and Gaza has been badly muddled. While Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden have been making their view crystal clear on Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas’s attacks, Josep Borrell, the top EU diplomat, has toed a different line. Borrell this week called for what was effectively an
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The function of the police, one might have thought, was to protect the weak against the overbearing and the bullying. Unfortunately, a by-product of the Gaza crisis has been to suggest that, at least on the streets of London, a bit of carefully targeted thuggery against your political opponents can pay useful dividends. For some
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Change in Poland looks likely. A second exit poll gives the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) the most votes, but not enough to form a majority. The nativist right-wing party Konfederacja might’ve helped them form a coalition, but even combined the two parties still don’t have the numbers. Ex-Eurocrat Donald Tusk, who leads Civic Platform
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It is understandable that Suella Braverman has swiftly written to chief constables demanding them to take a tough line on potentially anti-Semitic protests. She pointed out that while it was true that explicitly supporting Hamas, a proscribed terrorist body, was ipso facto a crime, the police could go much further in discouraging demonstrations of this kind.
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What, you might ask, has Rishi Sunak been smoking? There is no way to spin as conservative the idea of working towards a complete ban on cigarettes by legislating a progressive age-related bar on buying tobacco. This is not conservatism as libertarianism or as the Scrutonian practice of not taking the axe to existing social
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It’s easy to see the thinking behind Suella Braverman’s plan announced in Manchester today to prevent sex offenders changing their name. In a country without ID cards or universal means of identification, it is fairly easy discreetly to disappear if you are at the margins of society, and possibly even to find a way of claiming at
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Any serious politician knows perfectly well by now that net zero 2050 won’t fly democratically. There was an inevitability about Rishi Sunak graciously allowing us longer to keep buying our petrol cars and using our gas boilers, not to mention Emmanuel Macron’s own subsequent climbdown on the gas boiler issue in France earlier this week. Their voters would not
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Poland is Ukraine’s best friend in Europe. But no alliance can ever be entirely unconditional, and this is as true of the Poland–Ukraine bond as of any other. Poland, which has supplied Ukraine with tanks and fighter jets since the start of the war with Russia, has now said it will stop supplying weapons. The
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There’s a long list of academics, some of whom are on the right, who have had their lives made difficult by fellow academics. Now, for a change, a left-wing academic is feeling the heat. Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a history lecturer at University College London (UCL), has been accused of ‘undermining the history of Britain’ without evidence.
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Drivers could soon be prosecuted for travelling 1 mph over the speed limit, at least if some MPs get their way. The all-party parliamentary group on walking and cycling (APPGWC) also proposes stiffer penalties for drivers of heavy cars like SUVs involved in accidents, and an invariable requirement for a fresh driving test for anyone
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We all recoiled when Lucy Letby, a nurse of all things, was convicted of killing seven babies in cold blood. But this murderess had one more card up her sleeve. When called to court for the last time to receive the inevitable sentence – not only life, but in her case whole-life – she casually
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If you fret about a democratic deficit in the EU or even Britain, turn your mind for a moment to one European country with a very peculiar form of democracy indeed. In this country, divided into two parts which hardly deign to speak to each other, your right to vote, to be returned, and in
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Eurocrats don’t naturally do compromise, but Brussels may have to learn to compromise quite fast if it is to have any hope of avoiding a bruising showdown with eastern Europe. As often happens the backdrop is formed by events in Poland, where the ruling PiS party under Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki faces a crucial election
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Imagine a policeman feels your collar and tells you you’re nicked because someone has reported you for telling off-colour stories in a corner of the rugby club bar, or for making sick jokes at a party to a group of friends which the authorities disapproved of? Something as positively Stasi-esque wouldn’t happen here, would it?
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The story of the out-of-touch 1960s High Court judge asking counsel ‘Who are the Beatles? Are they giving evidence in this case?’ is almost certainly apocryphal, as is the suave response (‘I believe they are a popular beat combo, m’lud.’). But a majority decision from the Benchers of Lincoln’s Inn this week shows that senior
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The National Trust, RSPCA, RSPB and the Woodland Trust have put the government on notice over its climate policies. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has effectively been told: water down your net zero commitments and you’ll have our 20 million members to answer to. The warning came in an open letter in which the PM was
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It’s not difficult to pick holes in Education Secretary Gillian Keegan’s plan, publicised over the weekend, to deal with so-called ‘rip off’ university courses. True, there is a serious problem. Too many students are being inveigled into signing up for degrees with low entry requirements, little intellectual stimulation, a high drop-out rate and not a great
