How the government won but also lost the court case on Rwanda removal policy

19th December 2022

Today the High Court handed down its judgment in respect of the many legal claims brought against the Rwanda removal policy.

On the face of it, the government of the United Kingdom appear to have won – and that is certainly how the judgment has been reported:

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But.

In two ways the government has not won, and indeed this may not be a welcome judgment for the government.

Let me explain.

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The wide legal challenge was to the policy.

In effect the policy is as follows: the Home Secretary can decide that asylum claims made in the United Kingdom should not be determined here, and that instead the persons who have made those claims should be removed to Rwanda to have their asylum claims determined there.

A legal challenge to any policy is always difficult – almost impossible.

This is partly because courts do not like intervening in matters of policy, as opposed to reviewing particular rules and individual decisions.

It is also partly because to say that a policy is unlawful means, in effect, that every possible rule made under that policy and every possible decision made under that policy will be unlawful.

And it is partly because policies can be adapted and modified so that the possibility of the policy itself always being unlawful can be avoided.

A policy is always the hardest target to hit in the administrative law courts.

It was therefore no great surprise that the High Court in this case – with a bench comprised of the two most experiences judges in administrative law matters – rejected the challenge to the policy as a whole.

And so, the government “won”.

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The government, however, also lost.

In the eight individual cases under review, the High Court decided that the removal decisions be quashed and the Home Secretary take the decisions again with proper regard to individual circumstances.

Look at the final paragraph carefully:

That paragraph indicates that the government lost on nineteen particular decisions in this case.

Nineteen.

Each of those nineteen decisions was legally flawed: every single one.

The policy may well be lawful – but in not one case was the policy lawfully applied.

And so the the government lost all the individual cases.

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Now we come to the real defeat for the government.

The import of the High Court decision is that in respect of each removal to Rwanda under the policy, the Home Office has to apply the policy in a robust and reasoned manner to the individual circumstances of each case in each of the decisions to be made.

Otherwise the removal will be successfully appealed or reviewed.

But for page after page of this judgment there is a catalogue of Home Office errors in respect of each of the cases.

The impression one forms reading the judgment as a whole is that, with the resources and administrative competence available, the Home Office simply is not capable of making all the individual decisions so that many removals to Rwanda are likely.

For the legal issue with decisions which need to be made on individual circumstances is that each decision can be appealed or otherwise legally challenged according to those circumstances.

Or to put it another way: the government has legally saved its Rwandan removal policy at the expense of making the lawful implementation of that policy extraordinarily resource-intensive and financially expensive.

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Of course, this judgment may be appealed by the claimants – though it seems at first read a strong judgment by two highly regarded judges in this field, and I do not think an appeal would be likely to succeed.

And so perhaps the policy under challenge may actually be implemented – though it seems there are no current plans to send any asylum seekers to Rwanda.

But.

Even if this policy is one day lawfully implemented – if – it will be always be an administrative and financial drain of the highest order on the Home Office and thereby the taxpayer.

Many will say that the policy is immoral and should be dropped on that basis alone.

Being immoral, however, does not make a policy unlawful.

But a policy being lawful also does not make it practicable.

The government and its supporters may raise a cheer that the policy is itself has been held to be not unlawful.

But today’s judgment means that – like the chartered flights to Rwanda last summer – the lawful implementation of the policy may never really get off the ground.

 

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How the campaign to stop the United Kingdom government from making it more difficult to prosecute war crimes was won

16th December 2022

Sometimes legal things do not always end badly.

Two years ago, in 2020, I did a video for the Financial Times on how the United Kingdom government was then making it more difficult for former United Kingdom service personnel to be prosecuted for war crimes.

The government was in 2020-21 using a Bill to make it more difficult for any historic civil or criminal legal action to be brought against former service personnel and – for some reason – torture and war crimes would be among those offences that would be made more difficult to prosecute.

Whatever that reason was, it was not a good reason.

There are certain offences so grave that there should not be formal or effective immunity for those who commit those crimes.

And this was not about battlefield or front line operations, but about the treatment of civilians or captives.

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Many – including serving and former military personnel – were deeply unhappy with this proposed immunity.

And the fine people at Freedom from Torture and at other campaign groups put together an impressive and persuasive campaign against the proposed legislation:

The pressure mounted, and the Bill’s progress through Parliament was getting trickier.

And then, in April 2021, the government capitulated:

And so the Bill passed into law with the following exemptions:

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Two years later, as this blog set out yesterday, a full statutory inquiry has now been announced into illegal actions by service personnel in Afghanistan,

For such an inquiry to be announced there must be some significant prima facie evidence which has come to light, even if that evidence is not conclusive about any wrongdoing.

Yet just two years ago, the United Kingdom government was anxiously seeking to legislate so as to make it far more practically difficult for any historic war crimes to be prosecuted.

Thanks to the campaigners at Freedom from Torture and elsewhere, that legislative proposal was checked.

As the post on this blog also averred yesterday, it is difficult – legally, politically, culturally – for our armed services (and security services and police services) to ever be held to account for possible wrongdoing.

And the fact that there is sufficient information now available to trigger a full statutory inquiry (and this can be said without prejudice to that inquiry’s conclusions) means that those who campaigned against the exemption for war crimes were entirely right to do so.

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Why the inquiry announced into potential war crimes is interesting – very interesting

15th December 2022

Now this is something interesting.

Very interesting.

As reported by Joshua Rozenberg, a senior judge has been appointed to head a full statutory inquiry to “investigate into and report on alleged unlawful activity by British armed forces in their conduct of deliberate detention operations (DDO) in Afghanistan during the period mid-2010 to mid-2013”.

The terms of reference, which should be read carefully, are here.

There are usually formidable barriers to any such investigation taking place – legal, political, and cultural.

Of these, the cultural barrier is always the hardest to clear.

Any allegation of wrongdoing by our armed forces – and also our security and police forces – is usually first met by denialism: we are the goodies, and these things would not be done by us.

Then there is derision: how dare you criticise those in the battlefield and on the front line from the comfort of your armchairs.

(This response is often deployed even when the alleged wrongdoing is far away from the battlefield or the front line, and is in respect of the treatment of captive non-combatants and civilians.)

Next will come the misdirections: counter allegations and smears about ambulance-chasing lawyers and compensation-seeking clients.

(And, indeed, there can be bad lawyers, just as there can be bad soldiers and bad police officers and security operatives, for there is good and bad in every profession – it is just that some professions are more accepting of this possibility.)

Once these barriers of denial, derision and misdirection are cleared, and the facts and evidence are incontestable, then there will come the shrugs of “so what?” and the assertions of moral equivalence.

Such things do not matter, we will be told, and everyone does it.

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What there will rarely be is anyone actually being held properly to account.

The cultural presumption against any wrongdoing by our armed forces – and by our security and police forces – is so powerful that they hardly need any formal legal immunity.

But.

Something is up here which means the government is not even attempting to deploy denial, derision or misdirection.

Maybe the government knows that such things will not wash here.

The government has instead gone to appointing a highly-regarded judge with an outstanding reputation and given him the strongest possible legal powers.

This would not be done lightly.

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This inquiry will be worth watching carefully.

Perhaps nothing is afoot.

Perhaps there is nothing to see here.

But for some reason the government does not think that denial, derision or misdirection will be enough for disposing of this matter.

So this inquiry is interesting.

Very interesting.

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POSTSCRIPT – 16th December 2022

 

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Today 71 Members of Parliament supported a Bill that would have allowed the government to break international law on asylum seekers

14th December 2022

Earlier today, 71 Members of Parliament supported a Bill that would allow the government to send asylum seekers back to the countries from where they had most immediately come from, regardless of international law.

The Asylum Seekers (Return to Safe Countries) Bill is here.

You will see in the Bill there is this clause one:

It is not a well-drafted Bill.

Look at that clause one again, and see if you can spot the term “asylum seeker”.

You will not find it in the substantive and operative text, but only in the title of the clause.

Nonetheless, clause four of the Bill defines “asylum seeker” as follows:

(This is therefore a shoddy bit of legislative drafting: defining a term and then not actually using it in the substantive and operative provision is a howler.)

But let us pretend that the drafter of the Bill had got it right and included the defined term in the substantive and operative provision, rather than just in a title of a clause.

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As it stands, my understanding is that whether an asylum seeker has come from a “safe country” may affect the credibility of an asylum application:

This means it is a factor that goes to the exercise of the discretion of the decision maker on the asylum application.

But.

The Bill presented today goes beyond such issues of credibility, and requires that provisions be made for the asylum seeker’s immediate removal if they have arrived from a “safe country” – even if that is not where from where they are ultimately fleeing.

If you look at the scheduled list of “safe countries” you will see that it is unlikely for any asylum seeker to have arrived here – at least by boat – without coming from one of those listed:

Ireland, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Iceland – and all other geographically close countries – are “safe countries”.

And so if today’s Bill was passed into law, then any asylum seeker – even if they were fleeing from Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere – would be returned to the “safe country” from which they had most immediately left to get to the United Kingdom, regardless of the United Kingdom’s obligations under the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

The United Kingdom’s obligations under the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees apply regardless to the route by which the asylum seeker has reached our shores.

Even the current law sets out that a route here via “safe countries” only goes to credibility.

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Some may want to dismiss today’s vote – perhaps even scoff at it.

But it is significant.

I remember back in October 2011 the scoffing at the 111 Members of Parliament who voted against the government for a referendum on the European Union.

We are not scoffing now.

Similarly, 71 is not a trivial number of Members of Parliament.

And despite the government not supporting today’s Bill, the 71 Members of Parliament voted so as to enable the government to break international law anyway.

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There is something worrying with the readiness of Members of Parliament to support legislation that expressly enables the government to break its international legal obligations, whether it is the Northern Irish Protocol Bill or today’s Asylum Seekers (Removal to Safe Countries) Bill.

Yes, the Bill’s supporters lost – today.

But as in 2011, such a rebellion is perhaps a sign of things to come.

Today’s vote is not a good sign.

Brace, brace.

***

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The issue of payment for prisoners

13th December 2022

Again, here is the introduction to a thing about prisons I wrote at the Financial Times back in 2013:

Nine years later this unthinking or cruel general attitude toward prisons and prisoners remains as widely held as ever.

I blogged about the prisons issue recently, but today I saw a fascinating and informative post which should have the widest possible circulation.

The post is on the issue of payment for prisoners, and it is by Virginia Mantouvalou at the UK labour law blog.

Please click here and read it.

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The punishment of imprisonment, of course, should be imprisonment: that is, the deprivation of liberty.

But for many, it would seem that the imprisonment – the deprivation of liberty – is only the start.

Once the prisoner is inside the prison, the common view appears to be that the prisoner should be treated as badly as possible and that they must endure as brutal conditions as the State can get away with.

Any deviation from this extreme position is caricatured as being akin to prison being a “holiday camp”.

But, if the punishment is the imprisonment itself, there is – for example – no good or logical reason why prisoners should not be paid adequately for the labour they provide – especially for commercial enterprises utilising the available prison labour.

(Performing labour for inadequate or no payment, of course, has its own word.)

At the end of the linked post, Mantouvalou sets out what should happen:

“The leader of the UK prison officers’ union, Mark Fairhurst, said that prisoners should be paid the minimum wage for their workshop jobs.

“The Howard League for Penal Reform has made concrete recommendations on how to have ‘real work’ in prisons: they said that it is desirable for prisoners to work, proposed that it is acceptable for private employers to be involved, and emphasised that prisoners should receive real wages for their work, make national insurance contributions, contributions to a victims’ fund, and pay tax.

“The Guide to the European Prison Rules says that work must be useful, provide fair pay and include vocational training, that people should have some choice over the type of work, and that their working conditions (such as maximum hours and health and safety) should not be below those outside of prison.  It also says that pre-trial, people can be permitted but not required to work, while after sentence, they may be required to work subject to fitness.

“These and other related recommendations need to be taken up and explored seriously.

“At a time of labour shortages and while there is a push to employ more working prisoners to cover these, keeping them trapped in structures of exploitation while in prison and setting them up to fail post-release is unjust.”

There can be no sensible objection to any of this.

But it will not happen – at least not yet.

And this is because too many people prefer to either be unthinking or cruel when it comes to anything to do with prisons and prisoners.

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The loss of the practical approach to UK-EU relations

12th December 2022

Thinking and writing about Brexit (and, yes, the book is still going) has made me realise that it is less about “Remain” losing and “Leave” winning, but more about the loss – or absence – of something else.

What that missing something is not the “middle” – for that suggests that it is merely a compromise between two extremes.

It was a particular approach to dealing with and understanding the European Union and its predecessor Community.

The approach can be seen in the works of the late economic historian Alan Milward.

See this from an obituary:

“Rejecting both past and present myths about the EU he argued that, far from being a federal project to transcend the nation state, it was (and is) a complex instrument aimed at maintaining the viability of nation states in Europe… 

…his approach calls into question the ‘founding myths’ of European unity associated with the names of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, while convincingly demolishing one of the long-standing clichés of anti-EU rhetoric in the UK, namely that the EU is a unifying federal project….

…here is what Alan considered a lazy cliché, though it is still widely held in some British political circles: that the EU was the result of an aggrandising federal strategy promoted by such figures as Schuman and Monnet, and reflecting a Franco-German accord aimed at domination by erasing national states. Alan pointed out that all these rather abstract approaches failed to account for the dynamics of the EU, and instead he conducted a detailed examination of the strategies and negotiations that had led to expansion…

….The ‘Eurosceptic’ nightmare of an encroaching federal project was in Alan’s view a serious misrepresentation of the record.

But if Alan Milward was uncomfortable reading for Eurosceptics he was no easier for Europhiles.”

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Milward, tongue-in-cheek, even entitled a chapter in a book as follows:

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Milward’s general approach was not an extreme view – indeed Milward was one of the official historians of the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Communities.

It is also a view I associate with the primary architect of the form which the Single Market finally took, Arthur Cockfield.

Appointed to the European Commission by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Cockfield is in my mind the most significant Conservative politician of the 1980s, after the prime minister who appointed him.

As I once said on this blog, Lord Cockfield pushed forward the Single Market in a practical and sustainable way, rather than through grand design and heady rhetoric.

My January 2017 FT piece on Lord Cockfield is here.

In that I said about how he approached the Single Market:

“In 1985, Cockfield (with the full support of the then commission president Jacques Delors) produced his famous white paper in a matter of weeks, and so sound and thought-through was its content that it was used as a blueprint thereafter.”

Cockfield looked at what worked, and what would work, at a national level, and then moved on practically from there.

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The European Communities and then the European Union were not necessarily a grand federalist project, as wanted by some of its founders and as feared by its opponents.

It was (and still is) “supranational” – and so beneath the cloak of heady rhetoric, it was the means by which national interests could be and were promoted and reconciled.

For the United Kingdom, our membership record was in part rebates and opt-outs, so effective were we in promoting our (perceived) national interests.

And our policy on European integration was about putting aside the absolute positions of both sides and, well, just practically getting on with what worked for the United Kingdom.

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But.

By 2015-16, this sensible pragmatism was no longer in the political ascendency in the United Kingdom.

Which is odd, in a way, as the failure of the grandiosely titled “Constitutional Treaty” was ten years or so in the past (though many of its provisions were added by amendment to the existing Rome and Maastricht treaties), and there were no new major treaties in the offing.

It is this absence of a thing – rather than the presence of “Remain” and “Leave” – which is, in my view, a key to understanding Brexit.

And it is harder to explain something not being there than it is to explain what was there in 2015-16, and thereafter.

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“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

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What is going to now happen with the Bill of Rights?

9th December 2022

You really would need a heart of stone not to laugh like a drain:

This blog has previously compared Dominic Raab’s quest to repeal the Human Rights Act with Captain Ahab’s quest to get Moby Dick.

And it would appear that Raab is going to fail, again.

It looks likely that his “Bill of Rights” – which was to repeal the Human Rights Act and to make it more practically difficult to rely on the European Convention on Human Rights  – will be dropped.

As it is, there has been no legislative movement on the Bill since 22 June 2022, which is now almost six months ago:

The Human Rights Act 1998 will still be there, and Dominic Raab may soon not be.

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But.

Those generally supportive of the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights should not be tempted into complacency by the apparent dropping of the Bill.

There are many ways a canny government can subvert human rights protections – subtle, hidden ways.

All that has failed here is a loud and clumsy frontal attack.

In a way, such performative proposals are the easiest to deal with, as they often collapse from their own absurdity.

The Home Secretary Suella Braverman is also no friend of the European Convention on Human Rights, but she and her Home Office of lawyers will come up with less obvious proposals in upcoming legislation.

The convention itself is fairly safe as part of our domestic law, as the Good Friday Agreement expressly requires convention rights to be directly enforceable in the courts of Northern Ireland.

There is thereby little-to-no chance that the convention will be taken out of our domestic law.

And there now seems little chance that the Human Rights Act, which gives effect to the convention in our domestic law, will itself be repealed.

But in the two or so years before the latest date for the next general election – January 2025 – there is a great deal ambitious ministers can do try to do with more focused legislation.

So while we can afford a moment at this festive time of merriment to have a hearty cheer at the apparent failure of the Bill of Rights, we must stop the cheering when the Christmas decorations come down.

And be braced, braced for the new year.

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Law vs Lore

8th December 2022

When I decided to start a Substack I also had to decide what to call it.

I could not call it “law and policy” as that is the name of this blog.

Dear old folkloric wizard “Jack of Kent” is safely dead and buried.

And so I settled on “law and lore” as that put together two things which not only interest me but also are more closely connected than many people realise.

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Let me explain.

Many of those reading this blog will not be lawyers and so have had little need to look up the raw black-letter texts of the law – in statutes, case reports and elsewhere.

Even those of you with the unfortunate affliction of being a lawyer, will not always have read the black-letter texts of every law about which you will have a view or an understanding.

And in society generally, a great deal of the law in practice is what people believe it to be – or should be.

“You cannot do that.”

“I cannot do that.”

“That is not allowed.”

“I have my rights.”

“Technically you are not allowed to do this.”

“Technically if you do this you don’t break a law.”

And so on.

Entire areas of law are, in practice, mini belief systems where people are confident about what the law is, free from ever looking it up: data protection, health and safety, consumer rights, Magna Carta.

And on the political plane, belief is (or was) a great deal of our uncodified convention: a general sense of balance and self-restraint.

This all fascinates me.

I have often wondered what an alien looking down would work out about our laws and legal system just by watching what people do and do not do.

Would such a Martian’s account correspond to what our legal texts say about the law?

And so my view is that to understand law in practice, one has to have an understanding of lore, which I see is helpfully defined online as “a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth”.

This is not to say that it is consciously invented: those with strong opinions about the law usually believe that they are actually correct.

Sometimes there is a close relationship between law and lore – in, for example, mercantile law, the practices of business folk often give rise to enforceable legal obligations.

And sometimes there are stark discrepancies: for example, data protection in practice often has no relationship with data protection as set out in law.

I would like to explore this distinction between law and lore more in future posts in particular areas.

Let me know if you have any ideas for subjects of such posts.

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How three Bills now before Parliament tell us the story of Brexit

7th December 2022

Here is a story about three Bills.

The Bills are not chaps called William, but legislative proposals placed before the Westminster parliament by the government of the United Kingdom.

Taken individually – and especially taken together – these three Bills tell a tale.

They tell the story of Brexit.

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The first Bill is the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill.

This is a proposal that would enable the government of the United Kingdom to break the exit agreement it signed with the European Union.

This agreement was signed in a rush, so as to “get Brexit done”.

This was the agreement which, if you recall, was promoted by the-then prime minister Boris Johnson as an “oven-ready deal”.

And this was the agreement which sought to square the rushed Brexit with no commercial border in the island of Ireland.

(An alternative way of addressing the same problem, with the “backstop”, was rejected when Theresa May was prime minister.)

The current Bill is an attempt to somehow unwind this solemnly agreed position.

Many think this Bill has no good purpose – indeed, many regard the Bill as having no purpose other than to placate some government supporters.

And it certainly is a rum thing for any government to so openly proclaim its lack of good faith in entering international agreements.

The Bill, therefore, tells us about the lack of thought and preparation of the government of the United Kingdom in how it approached Brexit.

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The second Bill is the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill.

The Bill shows us that the government of the United Kingdom, having got Brexit done, does not know what to do with it.

This is the proposed legislation promoted by Jacob Rees-Mogg which would automatically repeal all European Union law still in force.

It does not matter whether that law is useful – or even essential.

It does not matter if the law was negotiated by the United Kingdom and serves to protect certain public interests.

The retained law is going to be repealed automatically anyway.

There is no good reason for this silly Bill.

The only reason it exists is to show that the British government is doing something – anything – with the supposed “Brexit opportunities”.

And as no concrete, discrete opportunities have been identified, it is doing this daft and potentially dangerous thing instead.

This second Bill, therefore, tells us that not only did the government rush through Brexit without proper preparation, but it also has no idea what will follow Brexit.

(In this, this second Bill is akin to the rushed and disadvantageous “international trade agreements” which were also signed so as to show “Brexit opportunities”.)

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The third Bill is the Bill of Rights Bill.

This legislation is not directly about the European Union, but it tells us everything about the need for there to be new “European” courts and laws for the government to attack.

Brexit was simply not enough, and so the next target is the European Convention of Human Rights.

This third Bill shows the need for Tories to have a perpetual war with “Europe” (even if not the European Union) that has been unsatisfied by Brexit.

The Bill itself is not a good piece of legislation, and it has been roasted by judges and Conservative politicians.

It seeks to repeal the Human Rights Act, and to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to rely in domestic courts on their rights under European Convention of Human Rights.

This third Bill, therefore, tells us that Brexit was not really about the European Union, but about trying to satisfy (but failing to satisfy) the endless demand of some government supporters for confrontation and retreat with something European.

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If Brexit was worthwhile, then it would take only one good government Bill to show the benefits of Brexit: for the United Kingdom government to show what it could do with its new autonomy from the European Union.

But there is no such good Bill.

Instead there are these three misconceived and illiberal Bills, each trying to do something pointless or needless.

Each in their way, and when taken together, telling us all we need to know about Brexit: that the exit was rushed and botched, that the exit has provided no practical benefits, and that that the exit will never be enough for many of those who supported it.

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What is the remedy? And why this question matters in public interest litigation.

6th December 2022

The Good Law Project has lost another court case.

This was the use by government of WhatsApp, about which there was political controversy.

But.

Towards the end of the judgment there are these two paragraphs (emphasis added):

70. In the light of our conclusions, both the appeal and the Good Law Project’s claim for judicial review should be dismissed. We should, however, record that when permission to apply for judicial review was granted the Good Law Project had made a serious allegation (based on claims from the former Chief Advisor) that fake meeting records and notes were being made. Such conduct, if proved, would have been unlawful on a number of different public law grounds. The conduct was not, however, proved and the allegation was dropped without clear notice to the Ministers or to the court, as appears from [15]–[18] of the judgment of the Divisional Court.

“71. Thereafter the focus of the claim shifted to the breach of the eight policies. It was not, however, clear, at least until the draft order was produced on the second day of the appeal, exactly what relief was being sought. It is true that the particulars of the policies and the evidence suggesting breaches of the policies were not available at the time that the claim form and statement of facts and grounds were prepared. It is, however, also right to note that the policies and the evidence about breaches were disclosed by the Ministers and became known during the proceedings. The Good Law Project amended its statement of facts and grounds accordingly. But the claim for relief remained unparticularised in the amended Statement of Facts and Grounds. The fact that a claimant is unable or unwilling to particularise the relief that they seek, may be an indication that the claim should not be pursued.“

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This is a problem for a great deal of seemingly public interest litigation – and not just with this particular claimant.

(I think the GLP do some good things, though I am not an uncritical fan.)

There is a newsworthy wrong – a public grievance – and so somebody goes to court.

It is almost as if going to a court is an end in and of itself.

Litigation as theatre, or as therapy, or as a proxy for politics.

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But.

From a practical lawyers’ perspective, that approach is back-to-front.

As a trainee and as a junior litigation solicitor, I was taught to always think backwards from the remedy.

The primary questions were: What is the actual remedy your client is seeking? And how do you go about obtaining that remedy?

Turning up to court with a sense of “what do we ask for now?” means, in my view, there has been a failure in litigation tactics or strategy.

Of course: sometimes where you can show there is a plain wrong, a judge may come up with their own remedy.

This is the sort of thing Denning used to do.

But a claimant or applicant must always be conscious as to what they are actually asking for from a judge.

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This is not a problem about a particular claimant.

It is instead a wider problem about politically charged, crowd-funded and/or pressure group brought claims.

“We think this is wrong, so we are going to court!” is not sufficient.

What are you going to court for?

What are you asking the judge to do?

For as the judge here pointed out: “The fact that a claimant is unable or unwilling to particularise the relief that they seek, may be an indication that the claim should not be pursued.”

Public outrage does not mean, by itself, that a judge can grant a remedy – or even find any legal breach.

It is not always the case that where there is blame there is a claim.

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