Law Subject Extension: Constitutional Law: Part 3
Channel: Cambridge Law Faculty
Date: 2013-04-29

Dr Mark Elliott discusses the Belmarsh Prison case (http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/2004/56.html) - more formally known as A v Secretary of State for the Home Department - which was decided in 2004 by the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords (the forerunner of today's United Kingdom Supreme Court).

This final video considers the effect of the judgment of the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords in the Belmarsh Prison case. The Law Lords concluded that the right to liberty remained effective and that the powers to detain foreign terror suspects under Part 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/24/part/4/enacted) breached that right. The Law Lords therefore issued a "declaration of incompatibility" under section 4 of the Human Rights Act 1998 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/contents). Although that did not require Parliament to repeal (i.e. get rid of) the incompatible legislation, Parliament did in fact repeal it. It did so partly because the House of Lords' judgment had placed Parliament under political pressure to bring UK law into line with the rights recognized in the ECHR, and partly because there was the possibility of litigation in the European Court of Human Rights that might ultimately have compelled the UK, under international law, to amend British law. This highlights the fact that that understanding UK public law involves grappling with the relationships between national and international law, and between law and politics.


There are three videos in this series:
- Part 1: https://youtu.be/a_BOYxQtZLs
- Part 2: https://youtu.be/H6lCiMeworc
- Part 3: https://youtu.be/lQNPuXtI_i0

A document supporting this video is available at: http://resources.law.cam.ac.uk/documents/heplus/constitutional-law-subject-extension-material-3.pdf