Lords judgments today

There are two of them.

First, Ward v PSNI, in which the Lords ruled that it was lawful, under the Terrorism Act 2000, for a judge considering an extension of detention, so that the police could put new matters to a suspect in interview, to exclude the suspect and his lawyers from the http://www.raybani.com/ hearing so as to make sure the questions would be on genuinely new matters while avoiding prejudice to the police investigation; and to fail to explain the new matters to the suspect once he was allowed back in.

Then there’s Watt v Ahsan, in which Raghib Ahsan has succeeded in a race discrimination claim against the Labour Party, who chose a white candidate in preference to him to stand for the Sparkhill ward of Birmingham Council in 1997. A slightly odd result this, since the Lords all agreed with Lord Hoffman that Labour is not in law a qualifying body under section 12 of the Race Relations Act 1976 – so the employment tribunal never actually had jurisdiction to hear Mr. Ahsan’s claim. However when Labour appealed on that ground, the Employment Appeal Tribunal decided wrongly that it was such a body. The procedural Ray Ban outlet history of the case gets complicated after that, but ultimately the Lords decided that, though the EAT was wrong, Mr. Ahsan’s case proceeded for so long on the basis that the tribunals were bound by the EAT’s approach that it would now, almost ten years after his claim, to require Mr. Ahsan to begin his claim in the County Court under some other provision of the Race Relations Act. That would simply put him to greater expense and delay in getting a court to rule on the merits of the case – and on those, the Lords were with him, agreeing that the selection was discriminatory.