AFP – An order banning a teenager from wearing his trousers too low has been dropped because it breached his human rights, a court was told.
Ellis Drummond, 18, faced an anti-social behaviour order (ASBO) which included a ban on “wearing trousers so low beneath the waistline that members of the public are able to see his underwear”.
Telegraph – “Banning corporal punishment is the model that the Council of Europe would like countries to follow. You can call it ’pressure’ if you like, but we are not about to shove anything down your throats. It is a matter of time and understanding, and we think that time will prove that we are on the right side of the debate on whether to ban corporal punishment of children.”
Posted in Bureaucrats, Europe, UK
Tagged Bureaucrats, Children's Rights, Council of Europe, Europe, Politics, Spanking, UK, United Nations, Your Money
Daily Mail – A Pakistani paedophile who abducted and sexually abused two young girls cannot be deported back to his native country because it would breach his human rights, it emerged today.
Zulfar Hussain, 48, was due to be sent home when he is released from prison halfway through his sentence for plying two vulnerable girls with drugs and alcohol before having sex with them.
Guardian, Anthony Julius – As for the appropriations of, and accommodations with, liberal positions, the general abandonment of Marxist positions in favour of liberal or post-liberal ones is evident wherever one looks, but particularly evident, perhaps, among France’s political theorists. The “class struggle” between 1848 and 1936 encouraged people on the left to regard rights as mere abstractions, aspects of bourgeois ideology that concealed and legitimised the subordination of one class to another. But this supersession of rights by communism did not take place: on the contrary, it was by exposing the absence of “rights” in the Soviet Union and its satellites that communism was discredited.
A human rights discourse now dominates politics; there is a powerful human rights “movement”. It is the new secular religion of our time.
Posted in Bureaucrats, Europe, International, United Nations
Tagged Bureaucrats, Europe, France, Human Rights, Politics, Soviet Union, UK, UN
The Corner – Not in modern Britain. Her Majesty’s Constabulary are among the laziest, most overpaid, most obnoxious and most useless in the world. It was entirely predictable that, given the choice between taking on violent ne’er-do-wells or harrassing harmless old-timers with pocket knives, they’d choose the latter…
Posted in Europe, International, Law, UK
Perthshire Advertiser – A SERIAL sex attacker claimed yesterday that his Human Rights were being breached by being banned from watching porn on his computer.
Twenty-six-year-old Martin Jones, of St Catherine’s Road, Perth, was jailed for 18 months at the Sheriff Court in March of last year for stalking a 12-year-old girl in the city centre.
Bold ours.
Guardian – The pundits who predicted that the three main political parties were broadly agreed on reforming the Human Rights Act through a British bill of rights have been confounded. It is not the case that they all propose to amend it. Only the Conservatives pledge to scrap the HRA andreplace it with a UK bill of rights. When the Liberal Democrats publish their manifesto this morning they will line up with Labour in standing by the Human Rights Act. More intriguingly, given their consistent commitment to constitutional reform and individual rights, they will not express support for a UK bill of rights.
Times Online – Marcus Bebb-Jones, 46, murdered his wife Sabrina in 1997 and hid her body in a national park in Colorado, US prosecutors claim…
A British judge’s decision to extradite him was postponed after Ben Cooper, for the defence, sought assurances that Mr Bebb-Jones would not face the death penalty.
District Judge Howard Riddle, sitting at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, said today that if life without parole was imposed, it would fall short of inhuman and degrading treatment, and he was satisfied that extradition was compatible with Mr Bebb-Jones’s human rights.
Posted in Bureaucrats, Law, UK, USA
Tagged Bureaucrats, England, Human Rights, Law, London, Marcus Bebb-Jones, UK
BBC – Legislation aimed at tackling the problem internet piracy could breach European human rights legislation, Scottish solicitors have warned.
The Digital Economy Bill is being debated by MPs during its second reading in the House of Commons.
Guardian – Photographer Nadia Bettega worked with more than 60 individuals and groups to create the Changing the Face of Human Rights exhibition…
This exhibition is supported by is supported by the British Institute of Human Rights (BIHR) and it gives participants the opportunity to define how they and their community are represented and to explain the importance of human rights to their lives.
Guardian – One thing that keeps cropping up when I write about human rights is the fact that I’m a lawyer. “Human rights are just money-spinners for lawyers,” one Cif commentator wrote. Actually more than one. There is clearly a belief out there that the main accomplishment of turning human rights into law has been to enrich the legal profession.
Posted in Cash, Law, UK, Your Money
Tagged Cash, Human Rights, Law, Politics, UK, Your Money
Which – The Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg today rejected claims by a group of British pensioners for automatic increases to their UK state pension. It ruled that the UK government’s longstanding refusal to up-rate pensions received by expats in Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand did not violate their human rights.
Telegraph – The Government is attempting to block a decision to include troops fighting abroad in human rights legislation…
Mrs Smith’s legal team are expected to argue both that human rights laws apply to British soldiers wherever they are in the world and that, under those laws, the Government must take reasonable steps not to expose them to unnecessary risks.
Times Online – When Mr Justice Collins upheld the conclusion of the Oxfordshire Coroner, that sending a soldier into battle with defective equipment could breach his human rights, he referred to the Crimean War. “The failures to provide adequate medical attention in the Crimean War would be regarded, whereas the Charge of the Light Brigade would not, as a possible breach of Article 2,” he said.
WSJ – BRITISH expats living in Australia are anxiously awaiting a decision in the European Court of Human Rights tomorrow that could give them an extra $300 million in payments, after the British government froze their pensions.
Guardian – Another senior member of the Equality and Human Rights Commission quit this week as turmoil in the organisation intensified ahead of what is expected to be a devastating parliamentary report on it, to be published next week.
Tracy Allison, the commission’s director of finance, resigned on Wednesday with immediate effect….
It follows critical reports from the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee, which concluded that the formation of the government’s equality watchdog, after a merger of three separate equality groups, was “patently flawed” and cost the taxpayer almost £39m.
Economist – IF YOU are a youngish man who sits on a European corporate board, you should worry: the chances are that your chairman wants to give your seat to a woman. In January the lower house of France’s parliament approved a new law which would force companies to lift the proportion of women on their boards to 40% by 2016. The law would oblige France’s 40 biggest listed firms to put women into 169 seats currently occupied by men. Spain has also introduced a quota at 40%, to be reached by 2015. Italy and the Netherlands are contemplating similar measures. This week Britain’s government threatened to make companies report formally on their recruitment of female directors.
Posted in Bureaucrats, Europe, International, UK
Tagged England, Europe, France, Human Rights, Italy, Jobs, Law, Men's Rights, UK, Women's Rights
Telegraph – Human rights laws prevented the Home Office from keeping track of sex offenders’ email addresses, a policy that could have saved the life of a teenager murdered by a man she met on Facebook.
Ministers had proposed three years ago that convicted rapists and paedophiles should have to tell police about their internet use, in order to improve monitoring after their release from jail and stop them grooming new victims.
But the plan had to be shelved following a High Court ruling that the requirements of the sex offenders register breach the European Convention on Human Rights.
Posted in Bureaucrats, International, Law, UK
Tagged Bureaucrats, Human Rights, Law, Sex Offenders, UK
Independent – The serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, who was given 20 life sentences in 1981 for murdering 13 women – he was known as the Yorkshire Ripper because he mutilated his victims’ bodies with a sharpened screwdriver – has applied to the High Court for a ruling on how much longer he must serve in jail…
The original 30 years is up next year. News of his application to the court has outraged the survivors and families of those killed. Why did the judge not set a minimum sentence? Because it was not compulsory to do so until the law changed in 2003. Before then the judge made a recommendation, which was amended or endorsed by the Lord Chief Justice (who in Sutcliffe’s case recommended the minimum be increased to 35 years) and could be altered again by the Home Secretary.
Posted in Bureaucrats, International, Law, UK
Tagged Crime, Law, Peter Sutcliffe, UK
AP – British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Thursday he would move to block private groups from launching war crimes prosecutions against visiting foreign dignitaries, following a controversy inflamed when an arrest warrant was issued for former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
Brown said that Britain’s principle of universal jurisdiction — a wide-ranging legal concept that allows judges to issue warrants for nearly any visitor accused of committing war crimes anywhere in the world — was being abused.
Posted in Europe, International, UK
Tagged Bureaucrats, Human Rights, Israel, Law, Politics, UK, Unisersal Jurisdiction
[Guardian, Peter Salmon, BBC Chief Creative Officer] A snail could crawl the entire length of the Great Wall of China in just slightly more time than the 200 years it will take for women to be equally represented in parliament. That was just one of a series of striking statistics from the Equality and Human Rights Commission in their Sex and Power report published last week.
It added that women hold just 11% of FTSE directorships, with the judiciary and others also strongly criticised. At the BBC, the figures are a bit better – almost 38% of all senior managers are women – but it does bring into sharp focus the challenge the whole media industry is facing to improve diversity among its workforce.
…
We seem to be moving in the right direction, increasing opportunities for people from ethnic minority backgrounds at most levels.
We will transfer large numbers of staff from London but we will also recruit many new faces – a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to add something substantially new to our gene pool of talent, to change the BBC’s DNA a little.
Posted in Bureaucrats, International, UK, Your Money
Tagged BBC, England, Media, Peter Salmon, Television, UK
More from the Who’s In Charge Around Here? file.
What do striking airline pilots in the UK have to do with human rights in Europe? Not a lot. But hey, if the forum’s there, might as well exploit it.
That EU thing was a great idea.
[Business Travel World] The British Airline Pilots’ Association (Balpa) is to take cases to the International Labour Organization (ILO), the European Committee on Human Rights and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for an alleged breach of rules following the union’s dispute with British Airways over its European subsidiary OpenSkies.
The union says it is raising the cases with the organisations because the UK Government has done nothing to clarify the law on strike action following its High Court tussle with British Airways.
Posted in Bureaucrats, Europe, International, UK, Your Money
Tagged British Airways, EU, European Court of Human Rights, European Union, Human Rights, UK
[Independent] The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.
Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a “lawful excuse” to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of “lawful excuse” under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.
[Times Online] A senior police officer who visited the annual 9/11 memorial service in New York two years ago has been castigated for attending a Cornish village fete dressed as Osama bin Laden.
Chief Superintendent Colin Terry’s choice of fancy dress was described as “unacceptable” by his own police force after he took part in a parade at the Grampound Carnival wearing robes and a rubber mask representing the al-Qaeda leader.
Mr Terry, who is on secondment to the Foreign Office, made the bizarre outfit choice just a few days before the seventh anniversary of the September 11 attack. It is understood that in 2006 the officer travelled to Ground Zero for the fifth anniversary service held at the site where the World Trade Centre was hit by two hijacked planes.
[Telegraph] MEPs want TV regulators in the EU to set guidelines which would see the end of anything deemed to portray women as sex objects or reinforce gender stereotypes.
This could potentially mean an end to attractive women advertising perfume, housewives in the kitchen or men doing DIY.
Such classic adverts as the Diet Coke commercial featuring the bare-chested builder, or Wonderbra’s “Hello Boys” featuring model Eva Herzigova would have been banned.
The new rules come in a report by the EU’s women’s rights committee.
Swedish MEP Eva-Britt Svensson urged Britain and other members to use existing equality, sexism and discrimination laws to control advertising.
She wants regulatory bodies set up to monitor ads and introduce a “zero-tolerance” policy against “sexist insults or degrading images.”
Posted in Bureaucrats, Europe, International, UK, Your Money
Tagged EU, Europe, UK, Women's Rights
Down With Everybody 