- In my column two months ago, I argued that the Government’s view of the main Iranian opposition group – “once a terrorist, always a terrorist” – simply would not wash.
Now, the Lord Chief Justice has agreed. Refusing the Home Secretary permission to appeal against a ruling that struck down a ban against the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran, the Court of Appeal said that, in reality, there was no “reliable evidence that supported a conclusion that [the] PMOI retained an intention to resort to terrorist activities in the future”.
The Iranian regime took little notice of the ruling from the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission last November, after being assured that the Home Secretary would get it overturned on appeal.
In the end, Jacqui Smith did not – so she must now lift the ban on the PMOI and unfreeze its funds, a decision with immense symbolic as well as practical importance.
- Judges should talk direct to children caught up in family disputes instead of hearing the child’s views second-hand, England’s senior family judge said this week.
Delivering the Lionel Cohen Lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Sir Mark Potter said the conversation with the child should preferably be held in the judge’s private room, with the parties’ solicitors – but not the parties themselves – sitting unobtrusively in a corner.
The president of the High Court Family Division was pleased to hear that there were already pilot projects along similar lines in Jerusalem and Haifa.
“In that respect,” he added, “Israel is ahead of the United Kingdom.” Britain’s problem, Sir Mark added, was persuading the Government to pay the cost of training judges to speak to children.
- The Tricycle Theatre, on the London fringe, is becoming an extension of the law courts. Sir Michael Burton, a High Court judge, is currently appearing with a team of lawyers in a charity performance of To Kill a Mockingbird.
On May 18, Vanessa Redgrave and Philippe Sands, QC, will appear in a dramatisation of Sands’s new book Torture Team to raise money for Reprieve, which represents detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture.
- I have been covering this beat for long enough to remember the Law Commission recommending the abolition of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in 1985. “Of course, we know the Government will never agree,” the commission told me at the time. “It’s far too controversial.”
But the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, which is due to become law today, finally does away with blasphemy. God moves in mysterious ways.
