Constitutional Roundtable
presents
Gavin Phillipson
University of Durham Law School
Stealthy Derogations and Judicial Deference: Redefining liberty and due process rights in counter-terrorism law and beyond
12:30 – 2:00
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Solarium (Room FA2) – Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
This paper examines the story of ‘control orders’ in the UK, as one of the most notable aspects of the legal response to the “war on terror” - the shift from a criminal justice response to the creation of a parallel preventive system. It argues that the executive has sought to redefine key human rights, at its worst in a way that amounts to covert derogation, and that both Parliament and the judiciary have been to an extent drawn into and made complicit in this. It seeks to use this story, in order to illustrate some broader constitutional points about the role of judges, Parliament and the rule of law in response to such exceptional measures. It argues that the minimisation of the ambit of rights, the spreading use of secret evidence, and the damaging constitutional impact of excessive judicial deference are of great significance beyond counter-terrorism law and the UK, in particular in illuminating the pitfalls in ‘dialogue’ as an interpretative approach to the Human Rights Act.
Gavin Phillipson has held a Chair in Law at the University of Durham since January 2007, having previously been a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London. He has published widely on a number of areas related to civil liberties, anti-terrorism, and free speech in journals such as the Cambridge Law Journal, Modern Law Review, Law Quarterly Review, and Public Law, and in the international collection Global Anti-Terrorism Law and Policy (eds, Ramraj, Hor, Raoch, 2005). He is co-author of two books and co-editor of a major edited collection. His areas of interest include privacy, media freedom, public protest, anti-terrorism law and the design and legitimacy of Bills of Rights, including the Human Rights Act (see especially his “Deference, Discretion and Democracy in the Human Rights Act Era” (2007) 60 Current Legal Problems 40-78). He has delivered a number of papers on these areas to international symposia and seminars in Dublin, Singapore, Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, Melbourne and Sydney and spoke at a major international conference, The Court of Public Opinion, at Duke Law School, USA in September 2007 and in Bari, Italy, The Relationship Between Justice and the Mass Media, in July 2008 as well as at a conference on international terrorism at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg in December 2009, The impact of contemporary security agendas against terrorism on criminal law and law enforcement. He has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Melbourne and New South Wales in Sydney and has taught on comparative law privacy courses on the LLM programmes at Melbourne, Kings College London and City University, London. His monograph, Media Freedom under the Human Rights Act (2006, OUP),is jointly authored with Professor Helen Fenwick and he is co-editor with Professor Fenwick and Roger Masterman, of a major edited collection, Judicial Reasoning Under the Human Rights Act (Cambridge: CUP, 2007).
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information, please contact Professor Lorraine Weinrib at l.weinrib@utoronto.ca or Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
