The supreme court has had a busy week, delivering two key judgments. Firstly they ruled that the families of three soldiers who were killed in Iraq in poorly-armoured Land Rovers – and those killed in a friendly fire incident can sue the Ministry of Defence for negligence. Joshua Rozenberg writes that the majority ruling is likely to be greeted with dismay at senior levels within the MoD, explaining:
The families’ most important success was to establish that the human rights convention applies to soldiers serving on foreign battlefields. Article one of the convention requires the United Kingdom to secure the rights and freedoms of “everyone within their jurisdiction”.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) had argued that Iraq was outside the jurisdiction of the UK government. But the human rights court has previously ruled that jurisdiction can exist whenever a state exercises authority and control over an individual.
The supreme court justices also dealt a blow to the government’s enthusiasm for secret courts as they quashed an anti-terrorist sanctionimposed on an Iranian bank and dismissed the intelligence involved as irrelevant. The case was the first time that the UK’s highest court had sat in closed session, after request from the Treasury. Lord Neuberger, on a separate judgment, said that in future, appeal courts should go into closed session “only where it has been convincingly demonstrated to be genuinely necessary in the interests of justice”.
The president on the court had previously challenged government reforms to legal aid in a strongly worded speech on Monday evening. Hewarned the cuts would “drive out the best lawyers” and could threaten access to justice for all, particularly “the poor, the vulnerable [and] the disadvantaged”.
Oh, and the Naked Rambler Stephen Gough has been jailed (again) for breaching asbo