Category Archives: Business and Law

The Justice and Security Bill – a threat to open justice

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Professor Bill Bowring of Birkbeck Law School, who is also a practising human rights barrister, writes about the potential impact of the controversial Justice and Security Bill.

The Justice and Security Bill, presently going through Parliament, threatens to take Britain back to the 17th century, through the regular use of secret evidence. The Coalition Government intends to expand the use of secret evidence to ordinary civil proceedings. As Liberty has pointed out, enactment of the Bill would be an unprecedented encroachment on the rule of law, and the principles of open and fair trial.

This controversial Bill is a panic reaction to the Labour Government’s defeat in 2010 in the Binyam Mohammed case. Binyam Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan and subjected by the US authorities to ‘extraordinary rendition’. He claimed that a confession that he had been trained by Al-Quaeda had been obtained by torture. Charges against him were dropped, after the US District Court of Columbia vindicated his claim that UK authorities had been involved in and facilitated ill-treatment and torture to which he was subjected while under the control of US authorities. He was released and arrived in the UK on 23 February 2009.

When he claimed damages, the UK Government attempted to exclude the evidence that he had been tortured, despite the fact that this was public knowledge in the US as a result of the judgment. On 10 February 2010 the Court of Appeal dismissed the Labour Government’s appeal against a series of Divisional Court judgments ordering that the Government was not permitted to exclude the information obtained from US sources. Jonathan Sumption QC, who is now a Justice of the Supreme Court, told the Court of Appeal on behalf of the Government that the Divisional Court’s decision was “unnecessary and profoundly damaging to the interests of this country”, and indeed that part of the reasoning of the Divisional Court was “irresponsible”. In fact all the information was already in the public domain.

Binyam Mohamed has now been paid a very large sum in compensation.

The Justice and Security Bill was introduced into the House of Lords on 29 May 2012 by Lord Wallace of Tankerness QC, a Liberal Democrat peer and Advocate General for Scotland. The Bill proposes a new Ministerial power to instigate, by application to the Court, a Closed Material Procedure (CMP), in cases where the Minister considers that disclosure of certain material would be damaging to national security. Until now, CMP has only been available in a very small number of specialist proceedings, such as in relation to “Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures”, and Control Orders. CMP takes place entirely in private; only the judge, the Government’s lawyers and a Special Advocate appointed by the Government for the litigant. The litigant and their lawyers are excluded. Unlike normal legal representatives Special Advocates are unable to disclose material to their ‘client’.

On 21 November 2012 Louise Christian of leading civil liberties solicitors Christian Khan chaired a public meeting at Garden Court Chambers, sponsored by the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers (of which I am International Secretary) and CAMPACC – the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities. The meeting was addressed by the human rights QC Dinah Rose; Richard Norton-Taylor, journalist on defence and security on The Guardian; Clare Algar, Executive Director of Reprieve; and Saghir Hussain Director of CagePrisoners. The theme running through the meeting was that open justice is a central principle of British law, and the right to a fair trial is a centuries-old feature of the common law and is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.

I agree with the practising lawyers organised in the Bar Council and the Law Society that secret trials and withholding evidence are the standard practices of repressive regimes. The Bill if enacted will erode core principles of justice. The UK’s international reputation for fair trials will be significantly damaged.

Professor Bowring and Birkbeck Law School work closely with solicitors like Christian Khan, and the barristers at Garden Court, for example in the Law School’s annual week-long event “Law on Trial”.

A Time for Entrepreneurs

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Andrew Atter, Birkbeck’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence, writes about the current opportunities for entrepreneurship in London.

As we draw to an end of Global Enterpreneurship Week, you might be forgiven for being overwhelmed by all the hype. Everywhere you look there are conferences and workshops. President Clinton delivers his key note speech at Entrepreneurs 2012 today. And, as you flick through papers, millionaires promise to share their secrets of success. Who said there’s no free lunch!

What does all this mean?

Well, behind the entire buzz, is a very serious point. As anyone who has seen the expression on Mervyn King’s face will have realized, as a society we face years of stagnation and low growth.

This means for students and alumni, work opportunities, job prospects and career growth through traditional corporate structures will be far more limited than in the past. As both an economy, and as individuals, we will all need to access new markets and create new products and services. This is what Entrepreneurs do: they take initiatives that create wealth and opportunity, for themselves and the society around them.

Looked at through the lens of an entrepreneur, the conditions for starting new businesses are good. According to the FT, new company formations rose by 2% last year, and HEFCE report that knowledge transfer from universities increased by 7% in 2010-11. The UK economy overall might be stagnant, but that is not true for London, and certainly not true for the M11 and M40 corridors linking London to Cambridge and Oxford.

Entrepreneurs with sharp business plans, focused on early sales growth, can get funding. And, the good news is that businesses formed in recession tend to be leaner, meaner and more sustainable that fanciful creations funded by bank debt in boom times. I speak from experience.  A business I founded in the post dot.com crash is still going strong, whereas a business launched at the peak in 2007 became an out of control, over complicated monster, and had to have the plug pulled out.

So, beware of the hype generated by charlatans and snake oil salesman, but also don’t be out off by the Mervyn Kings of the world.

Birkbeck students are situated at the nexus of the greatest concentration of financial, technical and creative resources on the planet, in one of the world’s most entrepreneurial societies. To prove it, next time you have a Dhall Curry at the farmers market in Torrington Square, just reflect on the simple fact that someone put the formula Students+Curry+Lunch = Opportunity together before you did. In other words, someone ate your lunch.

To avoid that happening again, simply join the Birkbeck Enterprise Hub (aka Starts Hub), join a Coaching Seminar, attend a CEO Workshop, and start making things happen for yourself and those around you!

A 21st century Berlin Conference on Africa

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This post was contributed by Professor Patrick McAuslan, from Birkbeck’s School of Law.

In July I went to the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio on Lake Como to discuss with 19 other panjandrums the issue of why planning law reform in Africa is so difficult to achieve. Most of the experts were from Africa which certainly made a change from the Berlin Conference of 1885 but seven were, like myself, non-African although with varying degrees of ‘expertise’ in planning issues in Africa. To state the fact of the workshop however is to invite some critical reflections. Why Bellagio? If we had wanted to puzzle out why planning law reform is so difficult to achieve in Africa, wouldn’t it have been better to be somewhere in Africa – preferably in a less salubrious part of a city in Africa – than in a palatial mansion set in some 37 acres of grounds in Lake Como in north Italy? What was our authority to issue a pompous communique to the world at the end of our deliberations saying that urgent action was needed on planning law reform in Africa? Who will pay any attention to us and our proposals to divide up countries and cities in Africa as of old, via planning laws and zoning codes?

After all, as I pointed out in my introductory paper to the workshop, UN-Habitat has been based in Nairobi in Africa for over 30 years, had an excellent African Executive Director of the agency for 10 years yet when planning law reform was actually undertaken by several states in the very region where Habitat is based, not a blind bit of notice was taken of the precepts it has been urging on governments, ever since the UN City Summit of 1996, of the need for a more inclusive, open and participative planning system: the same old centralised, top-down, semi-authoritarian planning systems were provided for, which the colonial powers had introduced some 50 or more years ago. It may be, as was urged upon us at the workshop, that it is a little too facile to see the issue purely as one of the elites v the masses, as elites are not by any means all of one mind, have different interests and may differ from each other quite sharply. Nor can the masses be seen as united in their misery but such a blunt analysis is, in my view, likely to be more relevant than an over-sophisticated approach to the problem. Fear of the urban masses lay behind colonial urban planning and government: that same fear permeates the thinking of the elites that have taken over the upper income salubrious areas of cities in Africa now.

I can give one absolutely classic illustration of this. When I first went to Dar es Saalam in 1961, Selander Bridge divided the African and Asian areas of the city from the European area in Oyster Bay and was an effective barrier to movement from the former areas to the latter area. The bridge was very narrow; sea was on one side, swamp was on the other. There was talk then of the need to widen the bridge. There were no impediments in the way; no housing to remove; no people to relocate. 51 years on, nothing has changed; the old narrow bridge is still in place and still provides a bottleneck and impediment to movement from the African low-income areas of the city to the African high-income areas. Selander Bridge performs the same function today as it did all those years ago. The elites in their cars may complain about the traffic jams, the delays in commuting but if they were serious on the need to do something about the problem, the bridge would have been widened two or three decades ago. But they don’t want it widened: Oyster Bay and the newly developed areas towards the University of Dar es Salaam are in effect a gated high income community with Selander Bridge acting as the gate.

Ultimately, what’s needed is not workshops of the elite in a palace in Italy but an African urban spring with the masses coming out to dismantle the system and set about developing a fairer system of urban governance catering to the needs of the majority.