Category: Human rights
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Bernard Keenan and Ewan Smith: Proscription, Proportion and Palestine Action – Part 2
Introduction Part 1 of this post explained the central problem in the Ammori litigation. We summarized why the Divisional Court ([2026] EWHC 292 (Admin) thought the Home Secretary’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action was unlawful, and why the Court of Appeal ([2026] EWCA Civ 721)) reversed that decision. We also highlighted how each court approached…
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Chris Rowe: Requalifying Article 8: The Immigration and Asylum Bill
The Immigration and Asylum Bill is the government’s third attempt to directly change how judges interpret and apply Article 8. Below I assess the likely impact of the proposed changes in the context of the previous reform efforts in 2012 and in particular 2014. I argue that (a) as previously the Bill does not require the courts to decide Article…
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Lewis Graham and Leah Trueblood: A right to information in domestic law: five points of interest for public lawyers
In a recent decision, the Upper Tribunal (‘the UT’) has found that the operation of section 44 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (‘FOIA’) breaches the right to access information under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’). The decision will obviously be of interest to lawyers working in the field…
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![Crash Krylova: Trans People in Prison: For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers [2026] CSOH 59](https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/crash_wigley.jpg)
Crash Krylova: Trans People in Prison: For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers [2026] CSOH 59
Introduction On 19 June 2026, the Outer House of the Court of Session handed down judgment in the case of For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers [2026] CSOH 59 (“For Women Scotland 3”). This piece is intended as a critique of that judgment, exploring the relevance of the Equality Act 2010 and the Schedule 22(1)…
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Hleb Buziuk: Downward Self-Correction: The AGNI Reference and the Mirror Principle in Reverse
The literature on section 2 of the Human Rights Act 1998 has largely been preoccupied with a single direction of travel: how far domestic courts may go beyond the Strasbourg case law, or against it. Those are the questions behind Ullah, behind the refusal to follow Strasbourg in Horncastle, and behind the long debate over whether there is a ‘ceiling’ on domestic rights…
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Tom Mullen and Charlie Peevers: A Legal Black Hole in UK Waters? The Case of the MV Bella 1
The Facts On 7 January, United States military forces, supported by British forces, intercepted the oil tanker originally known as the Bella 1, then renamed the Marinera, in the Atlantic Ocean south of Iceland. The ship was sailed towards the UK, arrived in the Moray Firth on 13 January and anchored there in UK territorial…
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Rob Mullins: “Biological Sex”, Social Segregation, and the Freedom to Reassign Sex
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers [2025] UKSC 16 (“FWS”), there has been much public debate about the lawfulness of policies adopted by employers and service providers that permit trans people to access toilets and changing room facilities in their acquired sex. To date, the issue of the lawfulness…
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Michael Foran: Human Rights, Gender Recognition and Single-Sex Spaces
In For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, the Supreme Court held that references to ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 pertained to biological sex. In doing so, it affirmed the default common law position, first explicitly stated in Corbett v Corbett and later upheld in Bellinger v Bellinger, that sex means biological sex unless legislation otherwise dictates. The Gender…