Human Rights in The United Kingdom - The UK Before The European Court of Human Rights

The UK Before The European Court of Human Rights

By the end of 2010, the European Court of Human Rights had, in 271 cases, found violations of the European Convention of Human Rights by the United Kingdom.. These judgments cover a wide variety of areas, from the rights of prisoners to trade union activities. The decisions have also had a profound effect and influence on the approach adopted by the UK to the regulation of activities which could potentially engage Convention rights. As one author has noted, "here is hardly an area of state regulation untouched by standards which have emerged from the application of Convention provisions to situations presented by individual applicants."

Notable cases involving violations of the Convention include:

• Criminal sanctions for private consensual homosexual conduct (Dudgeon, 1981);
• Refusal to legally recognise transsexuals (Rees, 1986);
• Different ages of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals (Sutherland, 2000);
• Parents' rights to exempt their children from corporal punishment in schools (Campbell and Cosans, 1982);
• Sentencing a juvenile young offender to be "birched" (Tyrer, 1978);
• Wiretapping of suspects in the absence of any legal regulation (Malone, 1984);
• Restrictions on prisoners' correspondence and visits by their lawyers (Golder, 1975);
• Routine strip-searching of visitors to a prison (Wainwright, 2006);
• Allowing the Home Secretary rather than a court to fix the length of sentences (Easterbrook, 2003);
• Admitting testimony obtained under coercion as evidence (Saunders, 1996);
• Keeping a suspect incommunicado in oppressive conditions without access to a solicitor (Magee, 2000);
• Extradition of a suspect to the United States to face a capital charge (Soering, 1989);
• Granting the police blanket immunity from prosecution (Osman, 1998);
• Shooting of Provisional Irish Republican Army suspects in Gibraltar without any attempt to arrest them (McCann, 1995);
• Killing of a prisoner by another mentally-ill detainee with whom he was sharing a cell (Edwards, 2002);
• Investigation of an unlawful killing by police officers conducted by the police officers who participated in the killing (McShane, 2002);
• Failure to protect a child from ill-treatment at the hands of his stepfather (A, 1998);
• Failure by a local authority to take sufficient measures in the case of severe neglect and abuse of children by their parents over several years (Z, 2001);
• Ineffective monitoring of a young prisoner who committed suicide during a short sentence (Keenan, 2001);
• Keeping a disabled person in dangerously cold conditions without access to a toilet (Price, 2001);
• Granting of an injunction against the Sunday Times for publishing an article on the effects of thalidomide (Sunday Times, 1979);
• Injunction against the Sunday Times for publishing extracts from the Spycatcher novel (Sunday Times (no. 2), 1991);
• Ordering a journalist to disclose his sources (Goodwin, 1996);
• Agreement obliging employees to join a certain trade union in order to keep their jobs (Young, 1981);
• Keeping a database of DNA samples taken from individuals arrested, but later acquitted or have the charges against them dropped (Marper, 2008).