I spoke at Stormont this week at the launch of the annual report of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. My theme was the need to look at the UK's membership of the European Convention on Human Rights not just through a domestic lens, but in the international context of creeping illiberalism and authoritarianism. [...]
The phrase "rule of law" has been used, on average, more than three times on every parliamentary sitting day over the past 10 years. But what does it mean? Has the UK anything to learn from the definition of the phrase by the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe, or from the experience [...]
Many people are more learned than I am in European human rights law, and many others more thoroughly immersed in UK national security. But having spent significant time in each of those worlds over the past 30 years, including through my work as Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation and as a practitioner in Strasbourg, [...]
The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill raises serious concerns for legal certainty and - more fundamentally still - for the role of Parliament in law-making. An excellent and impartial introduction to the Bill is in this report from the House of Commons library.My initial thoughts on the delegated powers in the Bill [...]
Ian Forrester, a Scottish QC who long practised law in Brussels, served as a Judge of the General Court of the European Union from 2015 to 2020. He delivered this farewell speech in the Court on 6 February. Both moving and informative, it contains Ian's reflections on Britain (and Scotland) in and out of Europe, [...]
The Prime Minister reported to the House of Commons last week that any further extension of the Article 50 notification period “would certainly mean participation in the European parliamentary elections”. I think she is wrong as a matter of law, and with five distinguished EU law experts (on whom, see further here), have written an [...]
Here is a further Opinion on the legal effects of the Prime Minister's Brexit deal. A sequel to the one published on Tuesday, it addresses the novel suggestion - attributed this week to the Attorney General - that the UK could pull out of the Northern Ireland Backstop either unilaterally, via Article 62 of the Vienna [...]
I was asked to advise the People's Vote Campaign, with Jason Coppel QC and Sean Aughey of 11 King's Bench Walk, on the legal effect of the package of measures announced by the Government and the EU on the late evening of Monday 11 March. In our Opinion, produced overnight, we concluded: It is crystal [...]
Generations of law students have grown up on Factortame - the Spanish Fishermen's case that for more than 25 years defined the UK's constitutional relationship with Europe. My own memoir of the case (in which I represented the Fishermen for 12 years) is to be published shortly in The European Advocate. Having helped me with that piece, [...]
The life of David Vaughan QC, a colleague in Chambers whom (though we were not related) I considered to be my father in the law, was celebrated yesterday evening at a Memorial Service in Temple Church, the central point of the community of barristers living and working in London. I was asked to give a tribute [...]
