Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters

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Even his gripe (fully justified in my view) about the absence of ­parliamentary oversight amounts to very little, since the Opposition’s support for even tougher measures ensured that they would be voted through anyway. Wagner’s explanation for this curious evasion is that, not being an epidemiologist, he is unqualified to pronounce on the question of justification. This is something that we often hear, but it is ­specious, as he must surely realise.

Mr Muhammed Ali v The Home Office [2019] – Successfully acted for a man with severe mental health issues was detained for over a month despite there being no possible justification for the Home Office doing so. while also complaining about constantly changing rules with ever increasing exceptions, and a “summer of micromanagement” in 2020. But of course when circumstances are constantly changing this is the only way to stay as close as possible to what’s precisely necessary. You can’t be against both rough simple rules that apply equally, and precisely targeted, calibrated measures—unless you’re against both. To be fair Wagner himself identifies these tensions in his thinking and is right, of course, that there are human rights considerations favouring one approach in some circumstances, and others favouring the other. He concludes that human rights thinking needs to be at the heart of emergency response; but really what this all shows is that human rights can’t tell you what you need to do. He admits that when he says— AB, R (On the Application Of) v Secretary of State for Justice [2019] EWCA Civ 9. Acted for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (led by Caoilfhionn Gallagher QC) intervening in the Court of Appeal in this case about the prolonged detention of a minor in solitary confinement

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My only slight criticism I would have of this excellent book is that I would like to have seen more comparative work about the countries that did manage a more accountable approach. This is mentioned briefly but I would have been interested in much more. Mr. Ricardo Orlando Saunders v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] successfully acted for the Appellant in an Article 8 ECHR appeal against the refusal to grant him leave to remain – the Tribunal ruled that he was deeply involved in his family’s lives and so should be granted leave

Wagner is at pains not to criticise them. The fault lay in the mass of emergency regulations which the Government kept issuing in its frantic bid to control the spread of Covid until the public could be vaccinated against the deadly virus. When it comes to protests, Wagner said it would have been unthinkable a year ago that they would be banned as the Sarah Everard vigil was, with the effective support of ministers and courts, despite the right to protest being protected by the Human Rights Act. After the second world war and the horrors of the Holocaust, the world experienced a too-brief moment of clarity. If we want to avoid the inevitable self-destruction of our species through hatred and war, we must reorganise our societies around the principles of human rights. Sands achieves the almost-impossible by making the development of the legal concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide read like a propulsive thriller. He achieves this by interweaving the story of the murder of his own family during the Holocaust with that of the Nuremberg trials, when the living leaders of the Nazi regime were prosecuted immediately after the war. He notes a process of "follow the science", where decisions were taken but Covid-19 Cabinet Committees based on advice from the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts presided over by four ministers which were highly secretive. [1] :163Inquest into the death of Tyrone Givans (2019) – Acted in this inquest in which the jury concluded there had been multiple failings in caring for a profoundly deaf prisoner who hanged himself ( Press coverage) barrister, rather likes the European Convention on Human Rights ( ECHR); it is a codified bill of rights , after Referring to the policing bill, which grants powers for Priti Patel to define what constitutes “serious disruption” by demonstrators, he said: “The home secretary should be kept as far away from the right to protest as possible.”