Dominic Raab had to reach back over 10 years and find a case which would be dealt with differently today because of the multiple changes to the law since then to make the deportation of people with criminal convictions easier
For those interested in civil injunctions against protesters, we were just granted permission to appeal the costs order in this case to Court of Appeal; important point about whether legal aid costs protection should apply in protester injunction cases bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/…
Currently even if you are granted legal aid in a civil contempt case involving a persons unknown injunction you don't get the usual "football pools" protection order under s.26 of LASPO because of a weird quirk whereby this is criminal legal aid granted in a civil court.
So an impecunious protester can get a £50k costs bill, on top of a prison sentence, and have no protection from costs at all as any other legally aided party in the civil courts would get (no enforcement without further order of the court).
The thing with statutory inquiries is they are generally deeper and more effective than non-statutory inquiries - because the chair has power to force people to give evidence. A non-stat inquiry relies on the good will and open cooperation of the institution being investigated.
I have acted in 6 statutory inquiries (I think) and two non-statutory inquiries. The latter can work but it really depends on whether the institution you are investigating has any incentive at all to stonewall or hide things. But you don't know what you don't know so it can fail
A statutory inquiry can take longer because it's more thorough but even that is not clear - e.g. a non-statutory inquiry can have far less resource, back end and also may have to spend lots of time making up its own procedures which in a 2005 Act inquiry are off the shelf
This is a highly illiberal measure. Preventing people exercising their free-speech rights in advance because they are ‘disruptive’ is fraught with risk for a democratic society. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…
It is understandable that in the heat of the moment people want to “crackdown” on disruptive protests, but protests are by definition disruptive. This law would, I assume, authorise the detention of a protester to prevent them attending a protest. That is illiberal.
This government is already attempting to pass laws which criminalise “noisy” protests. Our law is already finally balanced to protect free-speech and ensure police have powers to prevent illegal conduct arising from protest. These new laws tip the balance in the wrong direction.
I hesitate to try and analyse this at all, but I do think it is important that the Met Police Officer, Cousins, fraudulently used *Covid laws* as the means of abducting Sarah Everard. I imagine (though this is speculation) that he did so because he knew they were so wide...
... and poorly understood by the general public that he could convince both Sarah and any witnesses (who apparently saw the fake arrest and assumed she had "done something wrong") that they applied even though Sarah was doing absolutely nothing wrong, walking alone...
Agree this is an interesting case which shows in practice how difficult it now is for a religious organisation to discriminate against homosexual people - the direction of travel in the past decade's case law has been clear
This is an important para - the wider point (which the European Court of Human Rights has been making for years) is that it's difficult to imagine any justified discrimination against homosexuals even where religious doctrine authorises it