The Court of Appeal in the case of Bahta, a case ^of general application^, criticised the approach of Administrative Court Judges to relief and costs and forcefully restated the principle that their judgments represent the law until and unless they are overturned. The case also represents a landmark recognition of the duties of the courts to legally aided practitioners. Read more...
As set out in our earlier article Who you gonna call? we have previously written to the Administrative Court to express our concern about the difficulties in having an application for interim relief heard overnight by a duty Judge Read more...
A recent prison law judicial review case dealt with adjudication charges against five prisoners. An incident took place in HMP Full Sutton in which the five claimants fought with another group of male prisoners. Hot oil was thrown and a number of prisoners and a prison staff were injured.
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Duncan Lewis recently wrote to the Administrative Court raising concerns about recent restrictions on access to duty judges when seeking emergency injunctions out of hours. The Court has replied, and indicates that these applications should usually be heard. Read more...
The case of Negassi was heard as a test case on the question of whether the Secretary of State should be liable in damages for unlawfully refusing to grant permission to work to repeat asylum seekers who had not had their claim decided for a year. Read more...
Duncan Lewis were today granted permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal against decisions refusing to award costs to the Claimants in the High Court in a test case. Read more...
The question before the Court of Appeal in the conjoined appeals of Secretary of State for the Home Department v Hassan Abdi and Afrah Khalaf v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] EWCA Civ 242 was "in deciding whether a foreign national (prisoner) facing deportation has been detained for too long, does time which he has spent appealing against deportation count?" Read more...
It is envisaged that the Tribunal will exercises the power of the High Court when Section 15 of the Tribunal, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007 comes fully into force. There has already been considerable resistance to this idea, and we wait to see when the time is chosen. In this article we consider some of the difficulties that this might give rise to.
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Only the cynical would doubt that the government had the best of intentions in raising the age of both parties to a marriage from 18 to 21 with the stated aim of tackling the acknowledged evil of forced marriage. Read more...
In our earlier article Supreme Court for the "Superior Court"? we predicted that the issue of whether, and if so on what basis, the Upper Tribunal was susceptible to judicial review would have to be settled by the Supreme Court. That has proved to be the case. Read more...