Law Subject Extension: Constitutional Law: Part 1
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).

The first of these three videos sets the scene by explaining the background to and the effect of Part 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/24/part/4/enacted) (which has since been repealed). The legislation was enacted at speed, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and provided for the indefinite detention, without charge or trial, of suspected foreign terrorists who could not lawfully be deported. Although imprisoning people in such circumstances breaches the right to liberty in Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights (http://www.echr.coe.int/NR/rdonlyres/D5CC24A7-DC13-4318-B457-5C9014916D7A/0/Convention_ENG.pdf), the UK Government argued that the right to liberty could, in effect, be suspended under Article 15 of the Convention, on the ground that there was a "public emergency threatening the life of the nation".

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-1.pdf