Law Subject Extension: Constitutional Law: Part 2
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).

In this second video, the judgment of the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords in the Belmarsh Prison case is considered. The issue for the House of Lords was whether Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights (http://www.echr.coe.int/NR/rdonlyres/D5CC24A7-DC13-4318-B457-5C9014916D7A/0/Convention_ENG.pdf) could be invoked so as to (in effect) suspend the right to liberty normally granted by Article 5 of the Convention, thereby avoiding any clash between that right and the Government's powers under Part 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/24/part/4/enacted) to detain certain foreign terror suspects. The House of Lords had to confront two key questions: whether there was a "public emergency threatening the life of the nation", and, if so, whether indefinite detention of foreign suspects was a necessary and lawful response to it. While eight of the nine judges in the House of Lords acknowledged that there were a public emergency, a clear majority refused to accept that the steps taken in response to it had been shown to be necessary.


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-2.pdf