Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of law at Swansea Law School
You might find it difficult, not to mention dangerous, to get to see a real meeting between an irresistible force and an immovable object. But if you’re looking for the next best experience over Christmas, you could well take a look at the ballooning legal spat between Poland and the EU. To remind you of
Court decisions don’t often call for three cheers, but today’s Court of Appeal determination in the Harry Miller case is an exception. Essentially the judges have told the police to rewrite the rules on recording what they see as hate incidents. However technical this looks, this is actually an enormous blow in favour of the
You could almost hear the rejoicing in Whitehall on Friday morning when the High Court cleared the way for Julian Assange to be extradited to the US, rejecting a plea that he was too mentally frail. The man has, after all, been a thorn in the administration’s side for 11 years: 18 months contesting his
Reading the Duchess of Sussex’s press release after the Court of Appeal upheld her privacy case against the Mail on Sunday, you might be forgiven for thinking of C.S. Lewis’s Last Battle. Meghan talked of her part in the fight between right and wrong, her brave struggle against ‘deception, intimidation, and calculated attacks’, and how
Poland’s legal wrangles with Europe show no sign of ending. Back in September, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal determined that some parts of EU law might be contrary to the country’s constitution. Now the tribunal has lit another firework: doing the same in respect of the European Convention on Human Rights (the ECHR). Is this just another round in
Rather like Germany with its ill-starred ‘Drive to the East’ in the 19th and 20th centuries, one suspects the EU is quietly regretting its keenness to absorb most of the states of eastern Europe in the early 2000s. If not, events in Poland and Hungary this week may well persuade them. For a long time,
The hounding of Kathleen Stock – who left Sussex university following a concerted campaign against her by trans rights activists – was a disgraceful indictment of freedom of speech on campus. But one remedy for preventing a repeat – the so-called ‘Stock amendment’ to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, now passing through the Commons – isn’t
‘You can’t libel the dead’ is burned into the consciousness of any serious journalist or writer. It provides much-needed comfort: however tactful you have to be about the living, once someone has died you can say what you like about them without getting sued. Or can you? Seven years ago the European Court of Human
For many years, the EU has posed as a kind of overbearing imperial leviathan, which insists its law has to prevail over that of the states that make it up. Now its bluff appears to have finally been called: the Polish constitutional court in Warsaw ruled yesterday that some EU laws are in conflict with the country’s constitution. Understandably, Brussels
The Supreme Court judgment striking down a couple of Acts of the Scottish parliament has been greeted with typical outrage from the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon has been busy fulminating that she is now ‘unable to fully protect children’s rights’. But the First Minister shouldn’t be surprised by this legal defeat: there was little chance of it going any
Private members’ bills don’t normally make for exciting reading. They give MPs and peers a chance to let off steam if they have a bee in their bonnet, and more importantly to lay down fairly cheap political markers. Most sink without trace, since the government through its control of the Commons legislative timetable has an
In a few hours’ time, comedy fans in Sheffield will take to the streets in protest. Their cause? Not Brexit, or climate change, but the decision to ban Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown from performing a gig in the city. Chubby, who is not to everyone’s taste, is best described as the North’s answer to Bernard Manning or
Liberals have always set great store by laws and declarations. It was joked about Lord Loreburn, the liberal Lord Chancellor in the years before the First World War, that if told the Germans had landed he would immediately have taken steps to obtain an interim injunction from the Chancery Division requiring an immediate withdrawal. These
If you suggest to an English politician that your home should be your castle to use as you like, he will probably nod. Tell that to a member of the SNP ruling class in Bruntsfield or Kelvingrove, however, and they will take any such view as a challenge to be overcome. A couple of years
When Eton master Will Knowland was sacked last year over anti-feminist views contained in a YouTube video which he refused to take down, alumni and others rightly called out Eton’s small-mindedness and intellectual conformism. If the best-endowed schools in the land can’t stomach unorthodox opinion, what hope for UK education generally? They were, of course,
It’s not often that a brass plate sparks a diplomatic incident, as happened this week in Vilnius. Lithuania invited Taiwan to establish a ‘Taiwan representative office’ in the capital. Beijing told Vilnius that the name was unacceptable, and ordered the government to replace the word ‘Taiwan’ with ‘Taipei’ or ‘Taipei City’. Lithuania held its ground,
You could describe the UK planning system as a giant whispering gallery where landowners, pressure groups and developers all seek to bend policy their way. One such group is Unesco, an organisation with an inveterate habit of telling the British administration what to do about particular places in Britain and threatening consequences if it is disobeyed. You
As if Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and other places were not enough, last week we had another local authority child sex abuse scandal, this time from Lambeth. The child sex abuse inquiry’s damning report concluded that for years councillors and local authority managers in the borough were too indolent, too concerned with politics, and at times
Officially the European Union may be a union of sovereign states. But its Commission increasingly has the air of an imperial chancellery, or perhaps the headquarters of some vast conglomerate giving instructions to the directors of its far-flung subsidiaries. The Commission’s annual Rule of Law report, published last week, is a case in point. It
When European governments openly disobey courts, ears prick up. When two courts simultaneously contradict each other on the same day and descend into an unseemly shouting-match, all bets are off. Welcome to the mad world of Poland’s legal relations with the EU. The ruling Law and Justice Party in Poland, PiS, is cordially detested in
