Features

Data Protection Law and Practice (4th edition) 
Rosemary Jay
ISBN: 9780414024960
December 2012
Publisher: Sweet and Maxwell
£225 

Data protection is not a popular subject, even among lawyers. Most of us have been refused an answer to some innocuous question “because of data protection”. The Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA 1998 is badly drafted and obscure: for instance, it uses schedules to deal with matters of fundamental principle rather than supporting detail. 

Prospective jury members had better make their excuses good if they want to wriggle out of performing their time-honoured duty 

April 8, 2013: Jury: A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him – Henry Louis Mencken  

Last week, the jury was selected in the sensational trial of Jason Grimble and Moses Lane for the alleged murder of the disliked Claude Allerick, formerly one of Her Majesty’s (Circuit) Judges and sometime member of Gutteridge Chambers. A last-minute reprieve had come when our previously assigned judge finally read at night in bed one page too many of the voluminous Criminal Procedure Rules and slipped a disc. Fate then gave us the lovely Jonathan Hay to try our case and the deceptively relaxed George White QC, of Treasury Counsel, to prosecute us. 

Hannah Kinch provides an insight into the work of the Young Barristers’ Committee.  

The Young Barristers’ Committee (YBC) has been around since 1954, and is one of the main representative committees of the Bar Council. Under the Bar Council’s standing orders, our purpose is to “represent and promote the interests of young barristers”; that is, those under seven years’ Call, both nationally and internationally. To that end, the YBC comprises elected Bar Council members, as well as those who have been co-opted to ensure that the committee properly reflects the fact that we represent both employed and self-employed barristers, across every circuit, in every practice area. I chair the committee, supported by my vice chairman (Max Hardy); the YBC is 30 strong. 

Job title: Silk and head of the criminal team at 36 Bedford Row 

36 Bedford Row is a leading set of chambers with members practicing in six specialist areas of serious and complex crime, family law, employment law, civil litigation, public law and consumer law.  

Many congratulations on attaining silk this year. What do you hope the future holds for a silk at the Criminal Bar?
Success. I wouldn’t have applied for silk if I did not think that I could make it pay. If you’re good, well organised and prepared to put yourself about then there is still work out there to be had. As he handed me my Letters Patent last Wednesday, I asked the Lord Chancellor whether there would still be any publicly funded work for me to do after my appointment. He said that there would be and I intend to take him at his word. Given the further cuts to fees proposed in the most recent consultation paper, I wonder whether I should have actually asked the Lord Chancellor whether there would be any financially viable publicly funded work available for me to do in silk? 

Does the statutory regime governing the disclosure of convictions, cautions and warnings to prospective employers breach an offender’s right to privacy? Shereener Browne reports  

The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 saw an important principle enshrined in statute: that people who have committed certain offences some time ago should, generally speaking be allowed to keep those misdemeanours in their past. At the heart of this legislation was the recognition that an individual’s future should not be blighted by what may often have been an impulsive act made in the blush of youth. 

Desmond Browne QC reflects on the bravery of the lawyers and human rights workers in Zimbabwe in the light of the scandalous arrest of the country’s former Law Society president, Beatrice Mtetwa.  

Few can have missed the publicity accorded to the handshake between Robert Mugabe, the former Jesuit schoolboy and the new Pope Francis I. Meanwhile, back in Harare the votes were being counted in the constitutional referendum needed before a new election can take place, and Beatrice Mtetwa, a former president of the Law Society of Zimbabwe, was called to the assistance of a client whose home was being raided by the police. The date was Sunday 17 March 2013. 

Stephen Sedley considers attempts to settle the competing claims of European and national courts  

The states composing the Council of Europe, now 47 of them, have their own supreme court, the European Court of Human Rights, which – not unlike its US counterpart – has come under increasing fire for interfering unduly in member states’ affairs and trying to make one size of human rights compliance fit all. At a theoretical level there seems something wrong with this critique: one size should fit all, for the meaning and effect of fundamental rights cannot logically vary from one country to another. But at a practical level it addresses a real problem: decisions about legal processes framed at a level of generality large enough to embrace all member states may well be unworkable in some of them. 

The Bar Human Rights Committee has launched a report into the removal of the Sri Lankan chief justice, as Theodora A. Christou and Gráinne Mellon explain.  

The chief justice of Sri Lanka, Dr Shirani Bandaranayke, was impeached by the Sri Lankan Parliament on 10 January 2013 after a report from a parliamentary select committee of seven government ministers declared her guilty of misconduct. The removal came shortly after the chief justice twice ruled against the government on the constitutionality of a controversial piece of legislation, the Divineguma Bill. The removal also occurred despite a ruling by the Supreme Court that the impeachment breached the constitution and international criticism that the impeachment violated principles of international law concerning the independence of judiciary. 

Toby Craig reflects on Lady Thatcher’s passing, cuts, cuts and more cuts and the challenges facing the criminal Bar  

For whom the bell tolls...
A busy month in Westminster included the budget, the dreaded implementation of LASPO, the long-awaited consultation on criminal legal aid and an LSB grilling before the Justice Select Committee. We will get to all of those, but this month’s WW could only properly start in one place. 

A change in trial judge and an uncomfortable truth 

March 7, 2013: “To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.” - Albert Camus  

This last month may have had its meteorological ups and downs, but I have a scent of Spring. This may have had something to do with recent events in the trial of Jason Grimble and Moses Lane, who are alleged to have murdered Claude Allerick, formerly one of Her Majesty’s Circuit Judges and sometime member of Gutteridge Chambers.