Tag: Luton

The conclusions will come after all the facts are available, but here are some early thoughts:

First, quibble with the headlines. For the benefit of Times readers, half past seven is not rush hour in Luton town centre. The only people around are those few of us with early starts in London (I aim to reach Canary Wharf for 08:30), and preparation for the business day: cleaning windows, stocking shops, etc. The most coherent account of what happened was that a window cleaner who had been working at M&S was attacked while using the ATM at the Town Hall end of George Street.

The (premature) conclusion is that this was a freak. It’s extremely rare for a police officer to be fatally stabbed while dealing with day-to-day street crime. I wouldn’t like them to go into life-or-death mode every time there’s a fight in the high street. If firearms are around they go into full combat mode and that’s a different matter – it’s a whole lot more dangerous for them and they have to be extremely cautious, which is unpleasant but reasonable. But I would hate to see them acting more “militarily” and less humanly whenever someone has a knife. It would cut them off further from the population and perhaps in net even make them more at risk.

Of course, if I in my comfortable safe job say that the risk of this happening is so small that the police ought to continue to run it – that is, that there should be no reaction of a general kind (changes to procedures, etc.), I must – and do – accept that the specific reaction to this death can be large. After all, if it’s so rare, then we can afford it. I will make sure I remember the name of Jonathan Henry, and remember that he left a family who deserve special respect in Luton, for years to come. Attacks on the police are more serious crimes because they threaten to separate the police from the public in the way I discussed above.

I don’t know whether the large-scale investigation taking place of what seems a straightforward event is just overkill, or a routine response to the use of the baton round, or a routine investigation into how an officer came to be killed. In any case, it is OK. The figure I saw on the ground at 7:35 looked pretty comprehensively disabled, but having been under-cautious the police would have had to jump to being over-cautious.

If the figure on the ground was PC Henry, then there was a screw-up, because one ambulance was already leaving, and another waiting. But I’m over-speculating now. I’ll continue to follow the story as the facts come out.

A year ago I wrote:

I’m less interested in whether religious traditions should override school uniform policies, than in the bizarreness of the legal argument that the Appeal Court used.

Their finding seems to be that the School erred by not considering whether their uniform policy breached the pupils’ human rights. If they had considered it, they could have decided, as the lower court did, that the uniform policy was fine, and they would have been OK. They lost because they didn’t have a piece of paper on file saying that they had taken human rights into account.

[…] This trend of legal and regulatory requirement is intensely stupid and irritating. It replaces restrictions on actions and policies with thought crimes. I mean that precisely; the fault of Denbigh School was not in its actions but in the way it decided its actions.

Yesterday Lord Bingham of Cornill ruled:

31. Thirdly, and as argued by Poole in his article cited above, pages 691-695, I consider that the Court of Appeal’s approach would introduce “a new formalism” and be “a recipe for judicialisation on an unprecedented scale”. The Court of Appeal’s decision-making prescription would be admirable guidance to a lower court or legal tribunal, but cannot be required of a head teacher and governors, even with a solicitor to help them. If, in such a case, it appears that such a body has conscientiously paid attention to all human rights considerations, no doubt a challenger’s task will be the harder. But what matters in any case is the practical outcome, not the quality of the decision-making process that led to it.

Lord Hoffman concurred:

68. […] In domestic judicial review, the court is usually concerned with whether the decision-maker reached his decision in the right way rather than whether he got what the court might think to be the right answer. But article 9 is concerned with substance, not procedure. It confers no right to have a decision made in any particular way. What matters is the result: was the right to manifest a religious belief restricted in a way which is not justified under article 9.2? The fact that the decision-maker is allowed an area of judgment in imposing requirements which may have the effect of restricting the right does not entitle a court to say that a justifiable and proportionate restriction should be struck down because the decision-maker did not approach the question in the structured way in which a judge might have done. Head teachers and governors cannot be expected to make such decisions with textbooks on human rights law at their elbows. The most that can be said is that the way in which the school approached the problem may help to persuade a judge that its answer fell within the area of judgment accorded to it by the law.

What more need I say?

Links:

High Court case
Court of Appeal case
Law Lords case
2005 statement by Luton council
Previous posts: 1 2 3 4

I’m stil reading through the documents in the Denbigh case, but I’m very impressed by the available resources.

The judgements in the original case, last year’s appeal, and the new appeal are easily findable on BAILII, which apparently is a charity devoted to presenting publicly available legal information. The Lords’ judgement from yesterday is on the House of Lords website.

Also notable is how clear and readable, without any special legal knowledge, the judgements are. The legal profession has a reputation for obscurantism, but in the case of judges giving judgements, at least, that seems to be entirely undeserved.

All this is as it should be, of course, but worth noting.

High Court case
Court of Appeal case
Law Lords case

BAILII

I have found the actual Appeal Court judgement on the Denbigh School case:

http://www.courtservice.gov.uk/judgmentsfiles/j3114/sb-v-headteacher_denbighighschool.htm

Update: URL moved

It bears out, so far as I can see, my interpretation in my previous post:

75. The decision-making structure should therefore go along the following lines:
1)Has the claimant established that she has a relevant Convention right which qualifies for protection under Article 9(1)?
2)Subject to any justification that is established under Article 9(2), has that Convention right been violated?
3)Was the interference with her Convention right prescribed by law in the Convention sense of that expression?
4)Did the interference have a legitimate arm?
5)What are the considerations that need to be balanced against each other when determining whether the interference was necessary in a democratic society for the purpose of achieving that aim?
6)Was the interference justified under Article 9(2)?
[…]
81. Nothing in this judgment should be taken as meaning that it would be impossible for the School to justify its stance if it were to reconsider its uniform policy in the light of this judgment and were to determine not to alter it in any significant respect. Matters which it (and other schools facing a similar question) would no doubt need to consider include these:
Whether the members of any further religious groups (other than very strict Muslims) might wish to be free to manifest their religion or beliefs by wearing clothing not currently permitted by the school’s uniform policy, and the effect that a larger variety of different clothes being worn by students for religious reasons would have on the School’s policy of inclusiveness;
Whether it is appropriate to override the beliefs of very strict Muslims given that liberal Muslims have been permitted the dress code of their choice and the School’s uniform policy is not entirely secular;
Whether it is appropriate to take into account any, and if so which, of the concerns expressed by the School’s three witnesses as good reasons for depriving a student like the claimant of her right to manifest her beliefs by the clothing she wears at school, and the weight which should be accorded to each of these concerns;
Whether there is any way in which the School can do more to reconcile its wish to retain something resembling its current uniform policy with the beliefs of those like
the claimant who consider that it exposes more of their bodies than they are permitted by their beliefs to show.

In other words, the school didn’t write the correct arse-covering memos before deciding to apply its school uniform policy.