The UKCLA Blog
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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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Robert Craig: Uncomfortable, But Not Unconstitutional – The Transition to a New Prime Minister
Despite Keir Starmer’s landslide majority just two years ago, the former Prime Minister announced his resignation from the premiership on 20 July. The departure of yet another prime minister, in short order, follows a series of political misjudgements that saw his support in both parliament and country drain away. The only candidate to replace Mr…
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Ben Yong: The Civil Service: A Public Good, Not the Enemy Within
Reform Party MP Danny Kruger is concerned. The UK, he says, has ‘a bloated, paralysed centre of government and a mutinous bureaucracy’; and that ‘Real power is held not by the elected government but by the permanent Civil Service’. So he has set out some proposed changes for the civil service should Reform become the…
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Joanna Bell: The Immigration and Asylum Bill (Part 1): a proposal to rewire the relationship between asylum appeals and the Home Office
The system which handles appeals against the Home Office’s asylum and immigration decisions looks set, once again, to be overhauled. If enacted, Part 1 of the Immigration and Asylum Bill would replace the existing First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum chamber) (FTIAC) with a new body known as the Independent Immigration Appeals Authority (IIAA) (clause 1).…
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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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Bhavya Johari – The Political Constitution’s Broken Promise: Arms, Sanctions and Accountability after Al-Haq
In September 2024, the Government suspended around thirty arms export licences to Israel, having found a clear risk that United Kingdom equipment might be used to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law. It exempted one category, creating a carve-out for components made in the United Kingdom for the F-35 combat aircraft, which continued to…
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Hleb Buziuk: Independent by Assertion: The Immigration and Asylum Bill and the Re-Departmentalisation of Adjudication
On 13 July 2026, the Immigration and Asylum Bill is scheduled to receive its second reading in the House of Commons. Public attention has fixed on Part 2 and its Article 8 clauses. This post is about Part 1 (clauses 1-16 and Schedules 1-3), which has attracted less commentary but may prove the more consequential.…
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Announcement: UKCLA Blog Summer Break
The UKCLA blog will shortly take its annual summer break, running from Friday 17 July to Monday 24 August. Thank you to all of our authors and readers in the first part of 2026. Se-shauna Wheatle, Leah Trueblood, and Paul Scott.
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Aaditya Bajpai: Not a Ministry of Truth: The State’s Positive Duty to Prevent Algorithmically Amplified Misinformation from Triggering Rights-Harming Violence
Introduction “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”. This line is credited to Mark Twain, but the thought is older. Jonathan Swift complained three centuries ago that falsehood flies while truth comes limping after. What has changed since Swift is not human credulity but infrastructure. The…
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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…