Jonathan Mitchell QC

The increasingly important issue of Unaccompanied Asylum Seeker Children (UASCs), children under 18 who are not cared for by any adult in this country, is the topic of a seminar on Friday 5th June 2009 organised jointly by the Glasgow Immigration Practitioners’ Group, the Murray Stable, and the Scottish Refugee Council. Continue Reading »

The nascent Scottish Human Rights Law Group is intended to bring together Scots lawyers and those working in and around the law in Scotland with an interest in human rights issues. Its website, in the course of development, is ambitiously intended to provide a database of law reports, articles, textbook updates, and other items, categorised by area of law and by Convention article; there will be ‘contributing editors’ for particular sections, each responsible for updating his or her assigned area of the law and in a position to receive comments, submissions, and suggestions for updating from other parties/members of the group. The proposed categorisations, which are flexible, can be seen by browsing its sidebar. Continue Reading »

Following last year’s sham consultation, from which even the judiciary were excluded until they heard of it by chance, and a set of responses which even the Home Office could only describe as “mixed”, the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal has today circulated some of its “stakeholders” to inform them that the tribunal will be merged into the unified tribunal structure early next year: no earlier, it says, than February 2010. My thanks to the anonymous correspondent who passed a couple of its internal circulars to me, including a set of FAQs, supposedly from the Tribunals Service but pretty obviously written by the Home Office, as to the move. Continue Reading »

A guest post by Aidan O’Neill QC

Jonathan Mitchell writes: In the first guest article to appear on this site, Aidan O’Neill QC, a leading advocate in human rights litigation in Scotland, who successfully acted in Somerville v Scottish Ministers, argues that the proposed introduction of a one-year time limit on human rights claims under the Scotland Act is a wrong move and concludes “this is being done without any public consultation, in what looks like a helter-skelter rush to change the constitution to the Scottish Government’s advantage before anyone apparently notices the implications of what is being done“. Update: the day this was published, the Justice Committee recommended that the draft Scotland Act 1998 (Modification of Schedule 4) Order 2009 be approved. Over to Aidan: Continue Reading »