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Daily Mail drafting grounds at UKBA?
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The UK Border Agency just got permission to appeal from the First-tier Tribunal on these grounds, reproduced word for word in their entirety:
The Judge of the First-tier Tribunal has made a material error of law in the determination in the following way.
The judge has erred by failing to take into account a particular public interest factor.
(1) The panel has failed to refer anywhere in the determination to the expression of revulsion that the public are entitled to have taken into account with attendant weight ascribed in the proportionality assessment under Article 8. Even when taking into account as a primary consideration the best interests of the child, this interest will not always as a certainty outweigh the right of the public to rid its’ shores of a violent criminal who has been sentenced to x years and y months imprisonment for a knife crime.
There is no (2). The determination is in reality a very careful and well considered piece of grammatically correct work, although it is true that it lacks the glamorous hyperbole that the grounds of appeal demand. It is, to say the least, a little surprising that permission was granted on grounds that are so heavy on assertion and light on analysis.
I know there has been an influx of new blood at the UK Border Agency but I had not realised Paul Dacre was himself now crafting grounds of appeal.
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11 Responses
“Rid its’ shores..” That’s puce prose if not high purple. Ole!
There was a (2) but it was edited out “and in the alternative, should be panel fail to accept the submission that the miscreant be forthwith expelled from this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise then he should be taken from this place and … “
Who granted permission? Can I draft the Rule 24 Response?
Unlike The Telegraph and Daily Mail we’re not naming names here, at least in this case. I hope my colleague will be channelling Churchill in her response, though.
This HAS to be a wind up……
I kid you not, although the draughtsman might have been kidding but under orders to appeal, I guess. The joke is on the client, his family and the FTT judge that granted permission, though, unfortunately.
No seriously, the government is thinking clearly. The declaration is not law, as they know, but political calculation. The SSHD wants a show down with the courts. It’s important that the point goes up ASAP. If a rights group were to organise a relevant petition in the public interest, perhaps an applicant would get PTA on grounds that it should have specific mention in the judgment.
Surely the issue is not who is drafting these ludicrous grounds (after all, we all occasionally get instructed to argue things which require gritted teeth to hold back the butter that is not melting in our mouths), but who is granting permission? Or did the reviewing FTT judge find some other and rather more arguable flaw in the determination?
I have seen an appeal where the SSHD, as well as properly including in the R’s bundle ‘sentencing’ remarks confirming that an Appellant was clearly mentally ill and bore no criminal responsibility, also decided to put in reports from the Sun, Daily Mail and, yes, the NOTW. Active submissions made at the time that the news reports ought to be preferred to the sentencing remarks of a judge who had heard psychiatric evidence, as the news reports demonstrating the level of public revulsion at the incident. When appealed, the grounds stated that “the Appellant only escaped prison by pleading insanity”.
The problem is that the decision makers are starting to believe and adopt the crap the tabloids have written about them.
I’m only a layman, but since when has perceived “public revulsion” been a relevant factor for tribunals and courts whose job it is to interpret and apply the law as it stands?
This would be funny if it wasn’t so serious. The irony of the UKBA feeding “tasty” stories to the tabloids for years with the express intention of whipping up a frenzy of public revulsion, only to then rely on the same public revulsion they have whipped up is staggering.