In R. (Pro-Life Alliance) v. British Broadcasting Corporation [2003] UKHL 23, [2003] 2 W.L.R. 1403, the House of Lords held that the broadcaster's decision to prohibit a Party Election Broadcast by an anti-abortion group was a lawful exercise of its general duty not to transmit offensive programmes. This duty applies to all terrestrial broadcasters and exhorts them to ensure that their transmissions “do not include anything which offends against good taste or decency or is likely to be offensive to public feeling” (para. 5(1)(d) of the Agreement between the BBC and the Secretary of State for National Heritage dated 25 January 1996 and section 6(1)(a) of the Broadcasting Act 1990).

Two recent decisions have considered the extent to which injunctions might indirectly impose restrictions upon third parties. The issue was most famously (and controversially) explored by the House of Lords in the Spycatcher case (Attorney General v. Times Newspapers Ltd. [1992] 1 A.C. 191), where it was held that a third party would be guilty of contempt if he deliberately did an act that undermined the purpose for which the injunction had been imposed in the first place; and this, notwithstanding that the injunction was not directly binding, could have a significantly inhibiting impact upon freedom of expression.

In Attorney General v. Punch Ltd. [2003] 2 W.L.R. 49, the Attorney General obtained an injunction against David Shayler, the former MI5 officer, and Associated Newspapers, restraining publication of information relating to the security services pending a breach of confidence action being brought against Shayler. A proviso permitted publication of material that had been consented to by the Attorney General.

R. v. Manchester City Council, ex p. Stennett [2002] UKHL 34, [2002] 4 All E.R. 124 is the latest in a series of cases concerning the welfare of vulnerable members of our society and the scarce resources available to public authorities to meet those individuals’ needs. Earlier examples include the education of a child with special needs (R. v. Essex CC, ex p. Tandy [1998] 2 All E.R. 769), essential non-nursing care for the elderly or infirm (R. v. Gloucestershire CC, ex p. Barry [1997] A.C. 584), accommodation (R. v. Sefton BC, ex p. Help the Aged [1997] 4 All E.R. 532) and even access to potentially life-prolonging medical treatment (R. v. Cambridge AHA, ex p. B [1995] 1 W.L.R. 898). Ex p. Stennett concerns the welfare of another vulnerable group, those who have been compulsorily detained under the Mental Health Act 1983.

The prospective buyers of a waste treatment plant (“Reprotech”) wished to use the site to generate electricity from the waste produced. They asked the Chief Planning Officer of the local council whether this would be a material change of use, for which planning permission would be required, and were assured that it would not. After they bought the land, the council insisted that the Officer lacked authority to make such a determination and required a formal application for planning permission; this was met by local opposition. Must the buyers make such an application and suffer a reduction in the value of the land if the application is unsuccessful, or should the public bear the consequences of the unauthorised act of the Officer? This was one of the questions facing the House of Lords in R. v. East Sussex County Council, ex p. Reprotech (Pebsham) Ltd. [2002] UKHL 8, [2002] 4 All E.R. 58. Their Lordships denied that there had been a “determination” for the purposes of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, s. 64, upon which Reprotech sought to rely, but the obiter discussion of the proper role of estoppel in public law is the focus of this note.

There can be few minoritieswith the possible exception of those who are suspected of involvement in international terrorism, whose due process rights are currently suspended under Part IV of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001who suffer greater unpopularity than asylum-seekers. Yet these are the very groups for whom enforceable human rights are most essential, in order that they may protect themselves against the tyranny of the majorityand of its elected representatives. This proposition is vividly illustrated by the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, section 55(1) of which provides that the Secretary of State “may not provide or arrange for the provision of support such as food and shelter for asylum-seekers if he is “not satisfied that the claim was made as soon as reasonably practicable after the person's arrival in the United Kingdom”.

The applicability to administrative decision-making of Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (which requires that the determination of a person's “civil rights” should be by an “independent and impartial tribunal”) is somewhat vexed. First, it is often uncertain when an administrative decision determines “civil rights”. And, secondly, since non-compliance at first instance may be cured where the person aggrieved has access to a court of “full jurisdiction”, it is important but often uncertain to know what “full jurisdiction” is in the circumstances. The full tale is told in (2001) 60 C.L.J. 449 (Forsyth) and in Wade and Forsyth, Administrative Law, 8th edn. (2000) at pp. 441-444. Those unfamiliar with these technical issues should read a standard account before turning to Runa Begum v. Tower Hamlets London Borough Council (First Secretary of State Intervening) [2003] UKHL 5, [2003] 2 W.L.R. 388 (H.L.).

The decision of the International Court of Justice in LaGrand that its provisional measures under Article 41 of the ICJ Statute were binding (Judgment of 27 June 2001) resolved a question which had occupied international lawyers for many years. The question of the legal effect of provisional measures granted by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) recently arose in Mamatkulov and Abdurasulovic v. Turkey (Judgment of 6 February 2003). Like the International Court, the ECHR has the power to “indicate interim measures, but this power is not derived from a provision in its constitutive instrument, the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, but rather from Rule 39 of the Rules of Court. On the basis of earlier jurisprudence (Cruz Varas v. Sweden, Judgment of 20 March 1991, Series A, No. 201; Conka v. Belgium, Decision of 13 March 2001), it had been thought that interim measures indicated by the ECHR were not mandatory, but in Mamatkulov, the ECHR effectively reversed this position and held that its interim measures had binding force.

A Note on the legality of the mandatory life sentence in (2002) 61 C.L.J. 5 concluded that once the gap between the Government's rhetoric and the reality was recognised, the mandatory life sentence could no longer be justified. After a bit of kicking from the European Court of Human Rights (see Stafford v. UK (2002) 35 E.H.R.R. 32, (2002) 61 C.L.J. 508), the House of Lords has at last recognised that the Home Secretary's involvement in fixing the “tariff” can no longer be justified. Nearly six months after their Lordships issued a declaration that the existing legislative provisions were incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, it appears that the Home Office has still not decided what to do. We should expect late amendments to the already dense Criminal Justice Bill 2002, but at the time of writing (April 2003) the proposed amendments have not been published despite the fact that the Bill has reached its Report stage in the House of Commons.

The dramatic terrorist attacks in the United States in September 2001 all too clearly illustrated the threat posed by international terrorism. Understandably, politicians are provoked into taking tough measures to protect their citizens from terrorist enemies. In times of danger the civil liberties implications of such measures can easily play second fiddle to security needs. Indeed, we need look no further in our jurisprudence than the discredited majority decision in Liversidge v. Anderson [1942] A.C. 206. Recently, Lord Woolf has warned that “the mistakes which have been made in the past, in relation to internment of aliens at the outbreak of war, should not be forgotten” (A v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2002] EWCA Civ 1502 at para. [9]).

On 10 October 2002, the International Court of Justice adopted the judgment on Land and Maritime Boundaries between Cameroon and Nigeria (Cameroon v. Nigeria), in which it ruled on sovereignty over certain territories disputed between the litigating parties and also delimited the land and maritime boundaries between them. The differences dealt with in the case followed from the long-standing disagreements between Cameroon and Nigeria which—as is not uncommon—went back to the legal framework established by colonial powers.

In 1983 the Turkish community in Northern Cyprus declared the independence of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Following UN Security Council Resolution 541 (1983) which declared the purported secession from Cyprus invalid, the TRNC has remained unrecognised by all States except Turkey, on which it is heavily dependent, militarily and economically. The TRNC and the Government of Cyprus-controlled area of Cyprus are separated by a buffer zone under a UN peacekeeping force. Authorities on both sides restrict movement through the buffer zone.

Graham Greene's Brighton Rock is the tragic story of a murderer who marries an innocent girl, with the sole aim of preventing her giving evidence against him. Fact can be as strange as fiction—as the decision in R. (Crown Prosecution Service) v. Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages [2002] EWCA Civ 1661, [2003] 2 W.L.R. 504 dramatically shows.

Mr. J was the prime suspect for a brutal double murder. Miss B, his long-term cohabitee, made statements to the police which gave them crucial information. While J was in prison awaiting the trial in which Miss B was billed as the star prosecution witness, B first tried to retract her statement—and when this failed to persuade the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to remove her from the witness-list, J and B announced that they were getting married.

In November 2002, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) applied for permission to seek an advisory declaration (by judicial review) on whether it would be illegal for the British Government to take military action against Iraq. The Divisional Court (Simon Brown L.J., Kay and Richards L.JJ.) gave CND permission to apply for declaratory relief on the basis of the importance of the issues before the court and the skill and cogency of CND's arguments, and agreed that the application was not premature. But the court refused the declaratory relief sought, holding that the question was non-justiciable and, on the basis that it concerned a question of international law and not English law, was also outside the jurisdiction of the court: CND v. Prime Minister of the UK and others [2002] EWHC 2759 (QB).

Gregg v. Scott [2002] EWCA Civ 1471 involved a claimant with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which was misdiagnosed by the defendant, who negligently failed to refer the claimant to a specialist. The claimant's condition was correctly diagnosed a year later, by which time his chance of survival had been reduced to 25 per cent.; if he had been treated when he had first visited the defendant, his chance of survival would have been 42 per cent. The Court of Appeal, by a 2-1 majority, upheld the trial judge's holding that because the chance of survival at the time of the defendant's negligence was below 50 per cent., following Hotson v. East Berkshire Health Authority [1987] A.C. 750, the defendant could not be held causally responsible. On appeal, two lines of legal argument on loss of chance as actionable damage were advanced, one emphasising remoteness, and the other causation.

Where a victim dies from the injection of a drug, is it possible to convict the person who supplied the drug of a homicide offence? The most obvious offence is constructive manslaughter, for which it is necessary to establish that the defendant committed an unlawful and dangerous act which caused death. This offence may have been committed where the supplier has injected the victim, as was recognised in Cato [1976] 1 W.L.R. 110. The unlawful act was there held to be the administration of a noxious thing, contrary to section 23 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, regardless of the victim’s consent to the administration; and it was this administration which caused the death. But what of the case where the victim injected himself? This was the scenario which was considered by the Court of Appeal in Dias [2001] EWCA Crim 2986, [2002] 2 Cr.App.R. 5.

The impact of the Supreme Court of Canada's decisions in Bazley v. Curry [1999] 2 S.C.R. 534 and Jacobi v. Griffiths [1999] 2 S.C.R. 570 continues to be felt across the common law world.

In those cases, the Supreme Court ruled that an employee's tort would be held to have been committed in the course of her employment if there was a “sufficiently close connection” between the employee's tort and what she was employed to do to make it “fair and just” that the employer should be held vicariously liable for the employee's tort. The Supreme Court went on to rule that such a connection would exist if and only if the work the employee was employed to do created or increased a risk that the employee would commit the kind of tort that she committed.

According to section 2(1) of the Homicide Act 1957 the defence of diminished responsibility is available where the defendant is charged with murder and he was suffering from abnormality of mind which “substantially impaired his mental responsibility” for the killing. The question for the House of Lords to resolve in Dietschmann [2003] UKHL 10, [2003] 2 W.L.R. 613 was how this defence should operate where the defendant was suffering from a mental abnormality, in that case arising from a grief reaction following the death of his girlfriend (who also happened to be his aunt), but where he was also heavily intoxicated at the time. Over the years a two-stage test has been developed by the courts to deal with such cases: see Egan [1992] 4 All E.R. 470.

The attribution of the tortious actions of a director to the company will operate to render the company liable. Does that attribution also operate to exclude the normal presumption that the director is liable for his own acts? Commonwealth courts have accorded primacy to the rules of company law and answered this question in the affirmative (Trevor Ivory Ltd. v. Anderson [1992] 2 N.Z.L.R. 517; Sealand of the Pacific v. Robert C. McHaffie Ltd. (1974) 51 D.L.R. (3d) 702). In England, the decision of the House of Lords in Williams v. Natural Life Health Foods Ltd. [1998] 1 W.L.R. 830 seemed to suggest that the answer would be no. In Standard Chartered Bank v. Pakistan National Shipping Corpn. (Nos. 2 and 4) [2002] UKHL 43, [2002] 3 W.L.R.1547 their Lordships have made this explicit: directors remain liable for their own wrongs.

If the criminal justice system malfunctions and causes someone damage, when can the victim sue the person responsible?

To this question, the traditional answer is “almost never. If the malfunction consists of imprisoning someone who was innocent, or prosecuting them without due cause, there is no civil liability except for acts done in bad faith; liability for merely negligent behaviour is excluded, on grounds of public policy. Where the malfunction consists of failing to catch a criminal who celebrates his continued freedom by causing further damageor in releasing one with similar effectthe same is true a fortiori, because the case is further complicated by issues of causation and novus actus interveniens. Thus in Hill v. Chief Constable of West Yorkshire [1989] A.C. 53 the House of Lords ruled that the Yorkshire police, however negligent, were not liable for their failure to catch the Yorkshire Ripper.

In Britvic Soft Drinks Ltd. v. Messer UK Ltd. [2002] EWCA Civ 548, [2002] 2 Lloyd's Rep. 368, affirming Tomlinson J. [2002] Lloyd's Rep. 20, carbon dioxide produced by Terra Nitrogen (UK) Ltd. was sold to Messer and resold to Britvic, who used it in the manufacture of sparkling drinks. The carbon dioxide was contaminated by benzene, but in such small quantities as to pose no danger to health. Even so, because of adverse publicity the drinks as a practical matter were unsaleable. Damages were awarded to Britvic against Messer under the Sale of Goods Act 1979, s. 14(3) as being unfit for the buyer's particular purpose. The case raises a couple of points of interest.