[2026] UKSC 16 – 2nd June 2026 Key words Public Law; Human Rights; Mental Capacity; Consent to confinement; Art.5 ECHR Overview The Attorney General for Northern Ireland sought an answer as to whether a amendment to the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards Code of Practice was compliant with the protection of physical liberty afforded by article […]
[2026] UKSC 8 – 26 February 2026 Key words Criminal Law; Human Rights; Freedom of Expression; Art.10 European Convention on Human Rights; Terrorism Offences Overview Appeal of Case [2024] EWCA Crim 1597 The case concerned an appeal based on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) against convictions for expressing support for a proscribed organisation, […]
[2025] UKSC 38 – 12 November 2025 UKSC/2023/0123 Keir (Appellant) v His Majesty’s Advocate (Respondent) (Scotland) Key words Criminal Law; Criminal Procedure; Human Rights; Art.6 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) right to fair trial Overview Conjoined appeals relating to the fairness of sexual offences (including rape) trials. Both defendants sought to appeal convictions on […]
[2025] UKSC 16 – 16 April 2025 Key words Public Law; Equality Law; Personal Determination; Employment Law; Discrimination, Transgender people’s rights Overview Appeal of Case [2023] CSIH 37 The review concerned guidance relating to the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018. The guidance was that for the purposes of monitoring the composition of […]
Time and temporality are central to anti-discrimination law, which is fundamentally shaped by assumptions about the past, present, and future. Anti-discrimination law looks back by listing grounds shaped by past injustices, operates in the present as courts reinterpret and assess past facts in light of the present, and keeps the future open through categories like […]
Human dignity is about human life. However, explaining in detail the meaning of human dignity as a legal concept is difficult since it is hard to pinpoint exactly what is most salient in human life, and what aspects of that are recognized in the sphere of law. The methodology of clarifying the legal concept of […]
The challenges in determining what constitutes an inequality have led some courts to both implicitly and explicitly look to the justification-stage when assessing whether there has been a breach of women’s equality rights. Courts around the world, including in South Africa, India, the UK, the US and Canada, will analyse, for example, whether the law […]
Fifty years after the Carnation Revolution, Portugal offers an important constitutional lesson: democracy cannot survive on elections alone. Free elections are indispensable, but democratic endurance depends equally on a wider ecosystem of rights that enable people to speak, organise, participate, and live with dignity. Portugal’s democratic success since 1976 owes much to the protection of […]
Since 1996, conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been marked by widespread sexual violence used deliberately as a weapon of war, including rape, sexual slavery, and forced pregnancy.[1] Once dismissed as an inevitable by-product of conflict, such acts are now increasingly recognised as serious violations of international law. Against this backdrop, […]
In recent decades, several countries have witnessed the rise of populist politics, both in established and ‘emerging’ democracies. From a public law perspective, populists tend to criticise the disconnection between ordinary citizens and the liberal-democratic institutions that are supposed to represent them. In their view, representative democracy is filled with slow, artificial, cumbersome and unnecessary […]