Law

Ministers were relieved today when the High Court ruled that the Work and Pensions Department’s back-to-work schemes are not ‘forced labour’ and do not breach human rights. The case had been brought by two people: Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wilson, who argued that the unpaid schemes they had been put on violated article four of the European Convention on Human Rights. Ms Reilly, 23, was given ‘unpaid menial work’ at Poundland, while Mr Wilson, 40, was told that he would be required to undertake 30 hours’ unpaid work each week cleaning furniture. Both had been subjected to sanctions for refusing to take part in the schemes, and were facing losing

It’s not often that three relatively small NGOs can change politics. So today’s parliamentary debate on the Defamation Bill is cause for considerable pride, among my former colleagues at Index on Censorship and their partners at English PEN and Sense about Science. In November 2009, we began a campaign to reform England’s unfair libel laws. The claimant cabal, those law firms who encourage the rich and famous, particularly those from abroad, to use London’s indulgent courts, assumed that the campaign would fizzle out. It didn’t, picking up steam as it went along. So today’s events should be a cause for celebration. They are, but only in part. The legislative process

News that Nick Clegg has brilliantly outmanoeuvred Cameron over the British Bill of Rights will come as no surprise to CoffeeHousers — we told you so last March. The panel was stuffed full of ECHR enthusiasts, balanced by Tories most of whose competence lay in other legal areas. Perhaps Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, the most clued-up of the Tory appointees, didn’t realise this when he joined the panel. He has twigged now, and has quit (or was eased out, depending on whose version of events you believe); observing that the ‘Lib Dem tail is wagging the Conservative dog’. As was evident from the start. Duschinsky made his j’accuse on BBC1’s Sunday Politics

The Commons will debate the UK’s controversial extradition treaty with the US and the European Arrest Warrant later today. The debate has been brought by Dominic Raab MP. He was on the Today programme this morning, explaining that he wanted to introduce a ‘forum clause’ to the UK-US treaty. Forum is a principle that could apply in cross-border cases like Gary McKinnon’s, which Raab has been championing. Raab wants to end the ‘sort of haggling between prosecutors behind closed doors’ that governs extraditions at present, and reform the process by placing it before open court in Britain. He argues that numerous other countries enjoy such an arrangement with the US,

A showdown with the EU may come sooner than we expect. The European Commission has today threatened to sue David Cameron’s government unless it starts letting EU citizens come here to claim benefits. Until now, any EU citizen could live here, but if they couldn’t find work, they were not entitled to claim benefits. This was widely accepted. Today, the EU has issued a statement saying: ‘Under UK law, certain social security benefits – namely Child Benefit, Child Tax Credit, State Pension Credit, Income-based Allowance for Jobseekers, Income-based Employment and Support Allowance – are only granted to persons with a “right to reside” in the UK. Other EU nationals have to