There has been a lot of commentary on the Report of the Bill of Rights’ Commission, and the ‘damp squib’ analysis of the Report (see Mark Elliott) as a whole is one most commentators appear to assent to (see eg Joshua Rozenberg for the Guardian here). My view in general is that the squib could reignite post-2015 if a Conservative government is elected, not in relation to the very hesitant ideas as to the possible future content of a Bill of Rights that the Report put forward, but in relation to its majority recommendation that there should be one (see further my previous post on the Commission Report here). If a BoR was to emerge under a Conservative government post-2015 I suggest that it would reflect the ideas of the Conservative nominees on the Commission which assumed a far more concrete form in the Report than the majority recommendations did (eg see here at p 192). This blog post due to its length is not intended to examine the probable nature of such a BoR based on those ideas in general, but to focus only on two aspects: the idea of curtailing the effects of an equivalent to Article 8 ECHR (right to respect for private and family life), and of requiring domestic courts to disapply Strasbourg jurisprudence under a BoR in a wider range of situations than at present under s2HRA (see Roger Masterman’s post on s2 on this blog here). In respect of the latter issue the potential impact of so doing will only be linked to selected aspects of Article 8 jurisprudence of especial actual and potential benefit to women.

Why concentrate on women as opposed to persons in general attempting to assert private or family rights against the state or non-state actors? That choice is partly due to the implications of EM (Lebanon) v SSHD in which the effect of deportation on the family life of a woman was found to be capable of creating a “flagrant breach” of Article 8. EM argued that such a breach would be created on the basis that shari’a law as applied to her in Lebanon would automatically grant custody of her child to the father, regardless of the child’s best interests, destroying the family life she enjoyed with her child. The basis for that finding is discussed further below. The successful claim in EM demonstrates that Article 8 can be deployed to prevent deportation to face specific instances of state-sponsored gender-based discrimination despite its apparently gender-neutral nature. The decision also led to an increased reliance on Article 8 in cases involving the deportation of parents; in that sense it lies behind the ‘attack’ on Article 8 by Martin Howe in the BoR Commission Report, in the Immigration Bill currently before Parliament, and by Dominic Grieve in 2010 (see my article, 2012 Public Law). Article 8 is concentrated on also because due to its particular ability to impose positive obligations on the state in relation to creating respect for private or family life it can require the state to create curbs on the actions of non-state actors particularly adverse to women (eg in relation to domestic violence: Hajduova v Slovakia) and ensure the efficacy of services that women in particular might need to access, such as to abortion (P&S v Poland). Women are, it is argued, more at risk than men from the actions of non-state actors within the private and family sphere (see intervention of Equal Rights Trust in Eremia and Others v Moldova on this point), so Article 8 has a particular pertinence for women (see further below), and unlike Article 14, which has not proved to have a strong impact as a means of advancing the interests of women due to its reliance on furthering formal equality (see eg Dembour Who Believes in Human Rights (Cam: CUP, 2006) Ch 7), Article 8 can address the substantive concerns of women, without the need for any reliance on a comparator.

Limiting the effects of a right to respect for private and family life in a BoR

In his separate paper in the Commission Report (A UK Bill of Rights) Martin Howe proposed limiting the effect of an equivalent of Article 8 in a new BoR by means of an accompanying clause. The clause would be to the effect that if legislation was passed determining the balance between respect for private life and various public interests, then the courts would not be able to give greater protection to privacy via the Article 8 equivalent than the legislation gave it. Such a clause would obviously be controversial since it would appear to oppose the principle generally underlying Bills of Rights – to protect persons against legislative power, thus countering majoritarianism. It would also attack the notion of universalism underlying Bills of Rights if the clause was aimed in part, which seems to be the intention, at limiting the privacy rights of non-nationals. It would disturb the carefully crafted compromise between Parliamentary sovereignty and protection for rights enshrined in the Human Rights Act, since in relation to this particular guarantee, Parliament would set out its limits in particular pieces of legislation, which would therefore be protected from the effects of mechanisms in a BoR equivalent to those of ss3, and 4 HRA – or at least such would be the intention. Thus, action by public authorities via an equivalent to s6 HRA infringing internationally recognised standards of respect for private life could be enabled by the clause, avoiding the possibility that once the legislation in question had been reinterpreted under an equivalent to s3 HRA, that would be found not to be required. Obviously this possibility raises many questions which cannot be addressed here regarding the appropriate separation of powers between judiciary and legislature and of the possible relationship between various parts of a BoR and the clause itself.

Such a clause as proposed by Howe could be deployed to limit the current impact of Article 8 in deportation decisions. Dominic Grieve has seen the decision in EM (Lebanon) as one that has resulted from a judicial desire to shadow Strasbourg under the HRA and go beyond Strasbourg (‘Proposals for a British Bill of Rights’ 8th March 2010 British Academy AHRC Forum). He had already indicated that this is a problem that he sees as one that could be remedied under a BoR (on conservativehome blog). Howe appeared to have in mind the case of SSHD v Respondent which concerned an Iraqi asylum-seeker, Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, who had brought about the death of a child, Amy Houston, in a driving accident, and fled the scene. He should have been deported previously, in November 2002, once his asylum application had failed but there were delays, meaning that he obtained a chance to establish family life in the UK (see comment here). An immigration tribunal later refused the application to deport him on the basis of his right to respect for his family life under Article 8 ECHR, a decision upheld on appeal (SSHD v Respondent). In a letter to the father of the girl in January 2010, Cameron promised that a future Conservative government would repeal the HRA, which he held responsible for the decision (reported in the Guardian). When the Court of Appeal refused leave to appeal the decision, the Immigration Minister Damian Green said “I will be raising the wider issues highlighted by this tragic case with the Justice Secretary for consideration by the commission on UK human rights law which the Government will be establishing later this year” (see BBC report). In October 2011 Grieve said: We think that the domestic courts have placed too much weight on the family rights of foreign criminals and we intend to redress the balance in the Immigration Rules (speech at Lincoln’s Inn, see transcript).

Theresa May recently said in the Mail on Sunday that new guidance approved by Parliament for judges had made it clear that a foreign criminal’s Article 8 right to a family life had limits, but she accused the judges of ignoring them. She said she now wanted to introduce a law to require most foreigners guilty of serious crimes to be deported so that Article 8 could apply to block deportation only exceptionally. The amended Immigration Rules set out an extensive, framework providing a definition of the Article 8 balancing factors, but in Izuazu (Article 8 – new rules) Nigeria the Upper Tribunal found that the new Immigration Rules do not adequately reflect the Secretary of State’s obligations under Article 8. In the recent Queen’s Speech the government promised to “give the full force of legislation to the policy we have already adopted in the Immigration Rules. The courts would therefore be required to properly reflect the balance given to the public interest when ruling on immigration cases”. In other words, the government intends to use primary legislation based on the Rules to change the weight given to the public interest under Article 8(2) when balanced against the rights of the individual in immigration cases under Article 8(1), “to limit the use of Article 8” (Adam Wagner in the New Statesman, and Mark Elliott on the UK Human Rights blog). A clause in a BoR expressly limiting the effect of a right of respect to private and family life would clearly appear to bolster such a change, as could the changes to the s2HRA equivalent put forward by Conservative nominees on the Bill of Rights Commission, considered below.

If a clause on the lines proposed by Howe was introduced in a new BoR it would protect provisions of the Immigration Bill intended to prevent judges from relying on Article 8 in relation to the deportation of non-nationals who have committed offences in the UK, but who may claim that respect for their family life under Article 8 will be breached if they are deported. But Howe’s clause would also apply to any future legislation that sought to make itself ‘Article 8-proof’. In other words, any legislation passed in order to limit the effect of an Article 8 equivalent in a BoR would, under a clause similar to the one proposed by Howe, prevent courts taking a more expansive view of the application of the Article 8 equivalent than the legislation itself allowed. The attempt to re-balance rights, downgrading Article 8 in relation to Article 10, in the HRA s12(4), signally failed (see for example Lord Justice Sedley in Douglas v Hello; Campbell v MGN). However, s12(4) did not direct judges to pay attention to the scope of Article 8 or 10 as delimited by specific pieces of legislation; further, had s12(4) been taken literally it would have conflicted with a well-established strand of Strasbourg jurisprudence which does not give Article 10 presumptive priority over Article 8 (see eg Von Hannover).

Further limiting clauses might be needed. The equivalent of Article 3 would also support recognition of positive obligations, including in the contexts considered below, although the harm threshold is obviously high. Article 8 currently may be the gateway to Article 14, the freedom from discrimination guarantee (bearing in mind that the UK has not ratified Protocol 12). In other words, if Article 8 is engaged but no violation is found a violation of Article 14 might nevertheless be found of the two read together (Van Raalte v Netherlands). But a statute finding that an Article 8 equivalent could not be engaged in relation to a particular set of facts could also be interpreted to mean that the pathway to Article 14 was blocked. Further, even if a Conservative BoR was introduced limiting the impact of Article 8, challenges could still be brought at Strasbourg unless the UK withdrew from the Convention (recently raised as a possibility by Theresa May (BBC News), but domestically the possibilities discussed below of reliance on Article 8 could potentially be stifled, depending of course on the nature of the legislation that was introduced.

Evading Strasbourg jurisprudence under a BoR

While the government is bound under Article 46 ECHR to comply with the final decisions of the Court, as a matter of international law, the executive might well prefer to delay and procrastinate in response, or to bring forward legislation to Parliament which might represent a more minimal response to the Strasbourg decision than court-based findings would or might. Or a decision might be viewed as non-dispositive in a UK setting due to its fact-sensitivity. That tendency is evident in the Conservative predilection for proposing changes to s2 HRA to create greater leeway for courts to depart from Strasbourg, possibly partly with a view to creating more ‘wriggle-room’ in relation to the Article 46 duty.

There are signs that senior Conservatives prior to the 2010 election intended to use the BoR to seek to sever or weaken the connection with Strasbourg created by the HRA, s.2.  Dominic Grieve has argued that the HRA has been “interpreted as requiring a degree of deference to Strasbourg that I believe was and should be neither required nor intended” (Telegraph). Instead, he said, a new BoR would make it clear that British courts could allow for UK common law to take precedence over decisions by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (Equality and Human Rights Commission).  Grieve’s key speech on the ECHR in 2011 targeted s2 HRA as a failing section on the basis that it allows Strasbourg interpretations of the ECHR too much purchase in domestic law. In his separate paper in the Commission Report (here at p 257), Mechanisms of a UK Bill of Rights, A Speaight recommended change to the formula of s2, echoing Grieve. He did not consider that s2 should be retained in its current form since he wanted to ensure that Strasbourg jurisprudence could not be treated as binding. Therefore he did not consider that the words ‘take into account’ in s2 should be retained – since so doing might still lead judges to come close at times to following Strasbourg. Martin Howe in his paper stated that he agreed with Speaight’s proposals as regards the s2 mechanism.

Introducing a BoR with a clause directing judges to limit the impact of an Article 8 equivalent as determined by any particular piece of legislation might place them in a dilemma if they did not find themselves within a recognised current exception to the Ullah principle as regards applicable, determinative Strasbourg Article 8 jurisprudence. Thus also directing the judges to disregard such jurisprudence might appear to be necessary to safeguard such a clause.

Using Article 8 ECHR to advance women’s interests

Under one strand of feminist thinking it might be argued that the ECHR in general has little to offer women (see for discussion Grabham and Hunter ‘Encountering Human Rights’) due to a judicial approach to it that values modes of thought that may marginalise women and which pays little attention to ideas about feminist legal method (see Samuels ‘Feminizing  human rights adjudication’), combined with the difficulty of using specific cases to address complex social problems. But, as a number of writers have pointed out, especially recently (see Bauer Documenting women’s rights violations by non-state actors), human rights principles can be used as a campaign tool in influencing and mobilizing public and community opinion, and the use of campaigning methods by feminist advocacy groups as instanced in the recent successful campaign to remove gender-based hate speech from Facebook, does not preclude mobilising legal channels as a complementary means of disrupting existing social norms adverse to women via deployment of such principles, allowing gender-specific variants of rights’ violations to be recognised. At the same time the difficulties facing women who seek to use the ECHR should not be under-stated, and Article 8’s protection for family life is gender neutral at face value, meaning that it can also be invoked in ways that could put women and girls at risk, by discouraging state actions interfering with family life that are designed to protect vulnerable women (for example, claims by family members convicted of offences relating to domestic violence, including ‘honour’ murder, that post-sentence they should not be deprived of access to surviving family members in furtherance of their family life, as occurred, albeit unsuccessfully, in Ahmad v Brent).

The possibility of using a BoR to limit the effect of a guarantee of respect for private and family life, combined with a degree of decoupling from the Strasbourg jurisprudence, could have various adverse effects which have been considered elsewhere; this blog’s concern is with the possibility that developing opportunities to safeguard and advance women’s interests using Article 8 ECHR might be stifled. So it proceeds to ask – in what ways does and could Art 8 especially benefit women and girls?  This blog obviously cannot offer by any means an exhaustive list; also each of these matters is complex and has already spawned quite an extensive literature in itself in relation to international human rights’ law, so they can only be touched on here.

Preventing deportation to face adverse treatment based on gender

EM (Lebanon) (FC) (Appellant) (FC) v SSHD concerned a woman who had suffered domestic violence from her husband; as Lord Bingham noted, he had ended her first pregnancy by hitting her on the stomach with a heavy vase, saying he did not want children (para 22). As the Lords found, under shari’a law as applied in Lebanon, during the first seven years of life, when a male child is cared for by the mother, the father retains legal custody and may decide where the child lives. The transfer to the father at age 7 is automatic: the court has no discretion in the matter and is unable to consider whether the transfer is in the best interests of the child. As a result, Lord Bingham pointed out, women are often constrained to remain in abusive marriages for fear of losing their children (para 24). The evidence was that no family life had been established in Lebanon between the child and his father or his father’s family; it was found that the father had shown no interest in him. The applicant had managed to leave Lebanon with her son and resisted deportation from the UK on the basis of her Article 8 right to respect for family life; as this was a ‘foreign’ case, she had to show that a flagrant violation of Article 8 would arise due to the impact on her family life if she was returned to Lebanon, taking into account that the only family life that had been established was between mother and son. The Lords agreed that on return to Lebanon both the appellant’s and AF’s (her son’s) right to respect for their family life would be flagrantly violated in the sense of being ‘completely denied and nullified’.

Expulsion to face the risk of extremely serious adverse treatment on grounds of gender – ‘honour’ murder (see A.A and others v Sweden) or FGM (Omeredo v Austria) – has been found to fall within Articles 2 or 3. But their status as unqualified or non-materially qualified rights inevitably carries with it the need to show a high threshold of harm, and so places women under serious evidential difficulties, meaning that bringing the claim also under Article 8 (alone and/or combined with Article 14) may be advantageous in such instances.

Domestic violence – requirement of effective investigations and prevention

Bevacqva and S v Bulgaria concerned a woman who had been attacked on a number of occasions by her husband and claimed that her requests for a criminal prosecution were rejected on the ground that it was a “private matter’. The Court found a violation of Article 8 due to the failure of the state to adopt the measures necessary to punish and control the violent behaviour of her husband. A somewhat similar situation arose in Hajduova v Slovakia the applicant’s husband had been detained in hospital for psychiatric treatment after he attacked her in public and threatened to kill her. She moved to a refuge with her children. Her ex-husband was released, without having undergone the required treatment, and renewed his threats. Reiterating that Slovakia has a duty to protect the physical and psychological integrity of individuals, particularly vulnerable victims of domestic violence, the Court found a violation of Article 8 in that, although the applicant’s ex-husband had not assaulted her following his release from hospital, her fear that his threats might be carried out was well-founded and the authorities had failed in their duty to ensure his detention for psychiatric treatment. A similar outcome was reached in Kalucza v. Hungary which concerned Hungary’s failure to protect Ms Kalucza from her violent former partner. The Court found a violation of Article 8 since the Hungarian authorities had not taken sufficient measures to provide her with effective protection against him, despite criminal complaints lodged against him for assault, repeated requests for a restraining order against him and civil proceedings to order his eviction from their flat.

These cases succeeded under Article 8, although it is readily arguable that some cases of domestic violence should rather raise issues under Articles 2 and 3, as in Opuz v Turkey which concerned the ‘honour’ murder of the applicant’s mother, who had tried to support the applicant, and repeated ‘honour’ crimes in the form of serious assaults and death threats against the applicant. The Court noted that the national authorities were reluctant to interfere in what they perceived to be a “family matter”. Turkey was found to have violated Article 2 due to its lack of due diligence in taking preventive operational measures to protect the life of the mother and therefore in failing in their positive obligation to protect the right to life of the applicant’s mother within the meaning of Article 2. Turkey was also found to have violated Article 3 due to its failure to take protective measures in the form of effective deterrence against serious breaches of the applicant’s personal integrity by her husband.

A number of highly significant findings were made in this context in the very recent case of Eremia and Others v Moldova. The judgment found that while the authorities took some steps to protect the first applicant from her violent husband, A, a police officer, over a period of time, the steps were not effective and there was reluctance to take the matter seriously enough. In other words, the failures in the case were redolent of the familiar failings in the previous domestic violence cases considered. But not only were breaches of Articles 8 and 3 (on the basis of the state’s positive obligation to protect persons from inhuman treatment) found, but the Equal Rights Trust, intervening, persuaded the Court to treat domestic violence as a form of gender-based discrimination under Article 14 read with Article 3.  The second and third applicants were the daughters of the first applicant; they complained successfully under Article 8 of the psychological effects of witnessing their mother being physically and verbally abused at their home, while being unable to help, and of verbal abuse on the part of A. The decision represents an important breakthrough in this jurisprudence since the gendered nature of domestic violence – its disproportionate and particular impact on women – was recognised under Article 14, as was the impact of such violence on children forced to witness it, under Article 8.

Recently in the UK the IPCC reported adversely on the police investigation into the murder of Maria Stubbings who was strangled in Chelmsford, Essex, in December 2008 by her former boyfriend Marc Chivers (see main findings here). Essex police knew he had killed before, and that he had served time in prison for assaulting Stubbings, but the IPCC found that they had failed to recognise the seriousness of the danger to her. As a number of journalists have recently pointed out, the Macpherson inquiry found that the police had failed “to provide an appropriate and professional service” with “processes, attitudes and behaviour” harmful to the minority ethnic community when it reported on the murder of Stephen Lawrence (see eg this recent report in the Guardian). Maria Stubbings’ family have called for a similar inquiry into failings in police investigations into domestic violence. The threat and actuality of a possible action under Articles 8,2,3 domestically or at Strasbourg, based on the jurisprudence cited, would be likely to aid campaigns focussing on this issue.

Conclusions

This blog has suggested that limiting the effects of a guarantee of respect for private and family life in a BoR, combined with seeking to create departure from relevant Strasbourg jurisprudence, could in future stifle the impact of nascent developments in human rights principles under Article 8 ECHR that reduce gender-based harm to women. So doing could also potentially derail the effect of Article 8 in domestic Constitutional terms, given that the UK has a good record on procedural propriety but traditionally a poor one on privacy. Clearly, such an attempt might fail: the fact that judges were operating under an instrument termed a BoR might encourage an activist approach that sought to circumvent attempts at giving the ‘public interest’ the opportunity to negate a right in certain circumstances – the converse of the Strasbourg approach. Nevertheless, it is worth drawing attention to Howe’s proposed clause, and to the general interest shown by senior Conservatives in minimising the guarantee of respect for private life.

 Helen Fenwick is Professor of Law at The University of Durham.