Lots to report this morning as courts clear the decks ahead of the Easter break.The meaning of ‘woman’When parliament used the terms “man” and “woman” in the Equality Act 2010, it was referring to biological sex, not acquired gender. That’s what the UK Supreme Court decided yesterday in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers
Joshua Rozenberg
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Supreme rulings
Is a person with a full gender recognition certificate recognising the holder’s gender as female a “woman” for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010?That’s the question five justices of the UK Supreme Court will attempt to answer this morning when they rule on an appeal by a campaign group called For Women Scotland…
Ukraine v Russia
Russia has been asked by the European Court of Human Rights to respond to allegations that it was responsible for 24 political assassinations or attempted assassinations between 2003 and 2020.1 They include the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 and the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018. Other victims…
Time to move on
Patrick Allen is to retire in September from Hodge Jones & Allen, the “personal client” law firm he co-founded 48 years ago and has run since 1977.Hodge, Jones and AllenThat was the year in which Allen qualified as a solicitor. Eight months earlier, he joined forces with Henry Hodge and Peter Jones to…
‘We act for Hamas’
The application by lawyers for Hamas to have its name taken off the UK’s list of banned terrorist organisations is the latest example of lawfare — the use of law as a weapon of war.Hamas lawyers: (L-R) Franck Magennis, Fahad Ansari and Daniel GrüttersThat’s the introduction to my column for the Telegraph…
The enforcers
Unpaid judgments delivered by all civil courts in England and Wales should be enforced by a new unified digital court, according to the Civil Justice Council.The council, whose primary role is to give advice on civil matters to the lord chancellor, the judiciary and the civil procedure rule committee, made its recommendation in a…
Room for improvement
Digitisation of the courts “fell short of its very laudable ambitions”, the courts minister said yesterday. But it had given the courts and tribunals service a foundation that she wanted to build on, while learning the lessons of what had gone wrong with delivery of the eight-year reform programme in England and Wales.“One of those…
Knight challenges Lords
The business executive Sir Philip Green will learn today whether he was denied his human rights when he was accused in the House of Lords in 2018 of “using non-disclosure agreements and substantial payments to conceal the truth about serious and repeated sexual harassment, racist abuse and bullying which is compulsively continuing”.Green lodged a complaint…
Disappointed judges
A senior appeal judge has expressed “deep disappointment” at the government’s failure to digitise the civil justice system of England and Wales during the course of an eight-year reform programme that ended last week.Sir Peter CoulsonSir Peter Coulson, who sits in the Court of Appeal as Lord Justice Coulson, added that potentially valid claims…
Policy or process?
Are pre-sentence reports part of the judicial sentencing process? Or is their deployment a question of policy for ministers and ultimately for parliament? It’s a question that has divided the judiciary and the executive over the past couple of weeks, upsetting the delicate balance between the major institutions of the state.Sir William Davis and…