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Retired police officer wins injury pension ruling

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:40:00 GMT

High court overturns Home Office guidance in landmark legal case that could add £80m to police authorities' bills

Police authorities may have to find tens of millions of pounds extra to fund their pension liabilities after a retired inspector won a landmark legal challenge preserving his income.

The ruling by a court in Leeds overturns Home Office guidance that permitted a review of the pensions of injured officers once they reach retirement age and resulted in lower payments.

One estimate suggested it could add £80m to police authorities' bills. A high proportion of police authorities had accepted the guidance.

The test case was brought by Edward Crudace, 67, who served with Northumbria police. He was seriously injured when arresting a prisoner and was forced to retire from the force.

His injuries meant he could not work and he was awarded a substantial injury pension. When he reached the age of 65, however, it was cut by Northumbria police, relying on the Home Office guidance, leaving Crudace with a severely reduced income.

David Lock QC of No5 Chambers, who represented Crudace, argued that the Home Office guidance was unlawful because it led to police injury pensions routinely being reduced to the lowest level when former officers reached the age of 65.

In a high court ruling in Leeds, Judge Behrens reversed the cuts to Crudace's pension and ruled that the Home Office guidance was unlawful because it was inconsistent with the statutory scheme under which the pensions were paid.

The judgment, he acknowledged, would enable other former police officers who had had their pensions reduced in a similar way to apply to police authorities for the decisions to be reversed and for their pensions to be restored.

Crudace's solicitor, Ron Thompson, of the law firm Lake Jackson, said: "This judgment opens the door for thousands of injured police officers who have had their pensions reduced unlawfully to apply to have the decision reversed. When the decision is reviewed they will be entitled to a pension at its proper level and, in many cases, to a substantial backpayment.

"The right thing for police authorities to do now is to identify every former injured police officer whose pension has been wrongly reduced, and to agree to review each one. I hope that the Home Office recognises that the fault for this misconceived guidance lies with officials at the Home Office rather than individual police forces. The cost of putting this debacle right ought to be met by the Home Office and not individual police forces."

Crudace said: "I always knew that my pension had been wrongly reduced but Northumbria Police Authority refused to accept this, and have wasted thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money attempting to defend an unlawful decision.

"I know there are many former police officers who have been injured serving their communities in the same position as me. I hope they will be able to use this landmark decision to get their pensions restored to the level they are entitled to."

The Home Office declined to comment. A spokesperson for Northumbria Police Authority said: "[We] and Northumbria police, along with a number of other authorities and forces, implemented Home Office guidance concerning the granting of injury awards in addition to pensions. The guidance stated that once a retired officer reached state pension age then the force could review their injury award. Following judicial review proceedings the high court has ruled that the guidance is wrong in law.

"Northumbria Police Authority and the force have a duty to ensure the most effective use of public money and acted in good faith when following this guidance. We now welcome the clarity provided on this issue by the high court. As a matter of urgency we will be reviewing all the decisions made in light of this judgment and will be contacting anyone affected personally.

"We also recognise the valuable contribution all our retired officers have given to the community and this in no way should be underestimated."

Mike Barker, the deputy chief executive and solicitor of Northumbria Police Authority, said: "We are still assessing all of the implications of the ruling at this stage and are looking at the impact this may have on the budget."

Obama-appointed US trade adviser linked to illegal deal in Congolese gold

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 16:01:39 GMT

UN report says Kase Lawal knew he was dealing with the wanted warlord Bosco Ntaganda

A US trade adviser appointed by Barack Obama orchestrated a deal to buy gold worth millions of dollars from a wanted Congolese warlord, according to a UN report.

Kase Lawal, a Nigerian-born US oil tycoon, transferred millions of dollars to the notorious rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda between December 2010 and February 2011 as part of the deal, the report by the UN's Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) states.

If true, this would be a contravention of UN resolutions banning individuals or organisations from financing illegal armed groups in the wartorn eastern DRC.

The UN report says Lawal, the chairman and chief executive of the Houston-based oil firm Camac, was aware he was paying Ntaganda.

Obama put Lawal on the US advisory committee for trade and policy negotiations in September 2010, just months before the deal with Ntaganda.

All efforts to reach Lawal failed. Camac said it had no comment on the allegations, but said: "Camac is a law-abiding company and we disagree with the representations made in the report." The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Ntaganda has been wanted by the international criminal court (ICC) since an arrest warrant was issued in 2006. He funds his exploits by smuggling natural resources in the mineral-rich country, and faces allegations of recruiting child soldiers and presiding over mass rapes and murder of civilians by his troops in the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP).

The CNDP militia has since integrated into the Congolese national army but its soldiers continue to obey rebel command structures.

Ntaganda, like many rebel leaders in eastern DRC, funds his activities by smuggling natural resources.

The UN says "gold is among the sources of financing most readily available to armed groups".

According to the report, while Lawal was initially under the impression that he was buying gold from an owner in Kenya, he did not abort the deal when he learned Ntaganda was the true owner.

Instead, the UN report says Lawal merely "appeared relieved to finally be engaging directly with the true owner of the gold".

The report says Lawal financed the deal while Edward Carlos St Mary, a Houston businessman and friend of Lawal's, carried out the transaction in DRC. The deal was proposed to the two men by Dikembe Mutombo, a Congolese former NBA player with the Houston Rockets, and three of his relatives.

Despite paying, Lawal never received the gold. St Mary flew to Goma in DRC to finish the deal in a Camac-leased jet, but the passengers were arrested by Congolese presidential security officers as they tried to take off with the gold in February 2011.

St Mary and two Camac employees were charged with money-laundering and illegal transport of a banned material, because at this time the Congolese government had banned mining of gold, tin and coltan in the provinces where the minerals trade was affected by illegal armed groups. The three men were released in late March after Camac's Kinshasa representative paid $3m (£1.9m) in fines.

Substantial sums of money were involved from the start. The report says Lawal told St Mary he had lost "$30m as a result of the whole ordeal, including transport fees, fines, bribes" and the payments for the gold.

Jason Stearns, a former Group of Experts co-ordinator, said: "This is a fine example of the rank disregard of international law by major international companies and businessmen.

"Lawal knew Bosco Ntaganda was involved in the deal, so he was knowingly doing business with a man wanted by the ICC. On top of that, there was a Congolese mining ban in place at the time. And finally, he's probably violating a UN arms embargo on the region."

A source close to the UN who asked to remain anonymous said: "The whole thing was a scam. It's likely the Congolese were always going to arrest [St Mary and the others] and keep the money and the gold. The charge of illegal transport of a banned material was a pretext for the arrests.

"In reality, the Congolese authorities and Ntaganda worked together to ensure full payment was made for the gold, that the gold never left the DRC, and that the arrested men would have to pay a series of heavy fines to secure their release."

St Mary agrees. Speaking to the Guardian from Houston, he said that at one stage he nearly pulled out of the deal, only to be put on the phone to Zoé Kabila, the president's brother, who reassured him the gold dealers were "legitimate". That was before he knew Ntaganda was involved.

Later, in Goma, St Mary said Ntaganda was arguing with Joseph Kabila, DRC's president, on the phone. "They were arguing over how to split the cash," he said. "Even when I first met Ntaganda, he told me he'd just spoken to Kabila and that we'd be able to leave with the gold with no problem."

When the story first broke in early 2011 Lawal tried to pin the blame on his friend St Mary. Since then, relations have soured between the two men, yet St Mary defends Lawal's decision to push ahead with the deal. "Mickey [Lawal – Kase Lawal's brother, also in Goma] and I told [Kase] Lawal that the owner of the gold was Bosco [Ntaganda].

"But by the time we found that out I think our lives were in jeopardy. To try to pull out then could have cost us our lives. In those circumstances, what else can you do? There was no out.

"There was only one way to go: try to do a deal and get the hell out of there. The problem was the authorities and Bosco were partners in this, and we didn't know that until it was too late."

Conflict persists in eastern DRC, despite a 2003 peace agreement to end a bloody war. Numerous rebel groups and militias operate in the region and there are regular attacks on civilians, including massacres and mass rapes.

Collaboration between Kabila and Ntaganda during the recent presidential and legislative elections lends weight to the accusations.

"Bosco and the CNDP have allegedly been involved in election fraud while campaigning for Kabila's Majorité Présidentielle [coalition]," said Stearns. "Allegations include ballot-stuffing, stealing people's identities and intimidation. It's all been happening in CNDP-controlled areas."

A Goma resident who wished to remain anonymous said: "Bosco and his men are a very visible presence … they put a lot of pressure on people to vote for their favourite candidates."

Fraud was so rife that the Congolese electoral commission annulledelection results in some areas.

The FA has made a mess of the John Terry case | Mark Perryman

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:52:17 GMT

Taking away John Terry's armband but letting his trial be delayed isn't the way to show that racist abuse is a serious charge

The FA's decision that John Terry should no longer be England captain is the right one, but for the wrong reasons.

Any suggestion that he might be distracted from the job at hand, leading England at Euro 2012, simply doesn't add up. Terry is captaining Chelsea week in, week out, with no obvious impact on his ability to put in the crunching tackles and well-aimed headers, plus the gutsy leadership on the pitch he is rightly renowned for. Likewise, if it is suggested his England captaincy under the cloud of the forthcoming trial for racist abuse might harm the image of English football, then what is he doing captaining one of the most high-profile teams in our League and about to recommence their Champions League campaign too?

No, today's decision by the FA is a model of indecisive action. The alleged incident took place at a game in October 2011. Almost two months later the Crown Prosecution Service decides there is sufficient evidence for a case to answer. Another two months on and finally the case came to court this week only for it to be announced that the trial will be delayed until after Euro 2012, on July 9 – nine months after the alleged incident.

Various reasons have been given for the delay, the main one being that Terry, Anton Ferdinand and the various witnesses likely to be called were too busy playing football. The danger is that this seems to suggest the offence of racist abuse of a player isn't that serious, and can wait until the end of the season to be sorted out. But it is unlikely this would be a drawn-out case – it should take a week or a fortnight at most – and if it had gone to trial at the end of this month, when England are due to play a friendly match, perhaps only one or two games at most would have been missed. Why couldn't the FA have had a loud word in the ear of both clubs – whose concerns over players being called both for the defence and prosecution influenced the judge's decision to postpone the trial – and made it clear that they expected this issue to be dealt with quickly, and that dragging it on would do nobody any favours.

Instead we have today's messy decision, for which the only plausible explanation is that the FA fears that if Terry were convicted, England would have been captained at the Euros by a proven racist.

This case should have been dealt with in the same way any public servant accused of racial abuse would be treated: immediately suspended on full pay and given the opportunity to clear their name as quickly as possible. A Premier League footballer, particularly one who represents his country too, should be no different from a teacher, a nurse, or a policeman. They take all the riches earned via becoming a "role model"; and should therefore accept the responsibilities too.

Decisive leadership by the FA would have helped force the pace of both the investigation and date of the trial from the start. We've been treated instead to anything but.

And where does this leave us now? Most thought football had moved on decisively from the racism it indulged in the 1970s and 1980s. The game even seemed ready to grapple with the complexities of exclusion that, for instance, have left us with just two clubs out of the 92 in the Premier and Football Leagues with black managers. But instead we are left questioning whether football is as serious about kicking out racism as we once thought it was.

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The secret of winning a place to study law

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:37:35 GMT

Many applicants hate the National Admissions Test for Law even more than interviews, but you don't need legal knowledge in order to tackle either

Fifteen years on, I still shudder at the memory of my unsuccessful interview for a place to study law at Cambridge. If only my curtain-haired 18-year old self had been more like the accomplished student who excels in the mock interview video on the Oxford law faculty's website.

How does she do it? At the end of the clip, the interviewer, law tutor Ben McFarlane, singles out for special praise the student's capacity for "looking carefully at words and drawing fine distinctions, building up an argument and applying that to examples", while emphasising how the university is testing for motivation, reasoning ability and communication skills rather than prior knowledge of the law.

I vaguely recall being similarly advised before my interview all those years ago. But like many Oxbridge law rejects, I failed to consider properly what these criteria meant in advance. One of the consequences of this was that every time my interviewer asked me a legal question, as McFarlane does frequently in the mock interview video - without expecting an informed response - I panicked.

It wasn't just the interview I fluffed; I bombed on the written test, too. These days, the test has been formalised, with the specimen questions on the Cambridge law faculty website a good example of how legal conundrums don't always require a QC to answer them. One begins ominously:

Section 1
(1) A person who is not a party to a contract (a "third party") may in his own right enforce a term of the contract if—
(a) the contract expressly provides that he may, or ...

Overcome the initial impulse to freak out, though, read on a bit, and all the question is asking is for some rules to be applied to some facts. In its own way, it's no more complex than one of the more esoteric debates on Match of the Day about whether or not a striker has strayed offside.

The point about prior legal knowledge not being a prerequisite for Oxbridge exam and interview success is an important one. But legal knowledge shouldn't be confused with an understanding of the fundamental aspects of how society works - which is helpful for would-be Cambridge undergraduates, as illustrated by the first question in the Cambridge specimen test essay section. It states:

"Judges should be given no discretion in sentencing criminals: all criminal penalties should be fixed by statute. The exercise of discretion in sentencing requires an exercise of moral judgment by the judge, and judges in a modern democracy should not be allowed to exercise moral authority over their fellow citizens." How far do you agree? Give reasons for your answer.

Clearly those with a basic grasp of the mechanics of democracy, in particular the separation of powers doctrine, are at an advantage here.

This is one of the many areas in which the Cambridge test differs from the National Admissions Test for Law (LNAT) used by Oxford and several other top universities (LNAT is completely separate to the Oxford oral interview). LNAT steers well clear of anything that could be construed as legal, focusing instead on themes like feminism and imperialism. As such, the scores it generates seem less vulnerable to manipulation by the coaching of students in advance. Still, a familiarity with publications like the Economist – to whose editorial style the passages in the LNAT comprehension section bear more than a passing resemblance – can't hurt those sitting the test. A example of its mixture of multiple choice questions and essays is available here.

Despite the efforts of LNAT setters to make it accessible, most students aren't keen on the test. Summing up the general sentiment in a post on my blog LegalCheek.com, law student Jack Harris, who took the exam in 2008, describes LNAT as "pain, suffering and misery." Indeed, many are so averse to the idea of sitting the test - which was introduced in 2004 - that they deliberately do a non-law degree, then convert to law via the Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL).

Surely, though, in the future more will simply grit their teeth and face LNAT as the trebling of university fees creates a strong incentive to minimise the number of years spent in higher education. There is already some early evidence of this trend: Ucas figures released earlier this week – which recorded an overall decline of 8.7% in numbers applying to university - showed the fall in applications for law undergraduate courses (3.8%) to be significantly lower than average. GDL numbers, meanwhile, have dropped substantially over the last few years.

Of course, there are plenty of universities offering undergraduate law courses ranked highly by the Guardian that don't require candidates to sit the LNAT or attend an interview. Indeed, Harris (who got an average score on the test) chose to go to non-LNAT Queen Mary's (ranked fourth in the country for law), graduated with a first and is now studying for the bar with the aid of a large scholarship from Lincoln's Inn.

Alex Aldridge is the editor of LegalCheek.com

Letters: Law must prioritise children's rights

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:00:03 GMT

Much has been written in the media recently about fathers being denied the right to have a full and meaningful relationship with their children because of inadequacies in the legal framework (Divorced fathers to get more access to children, 3 February). For 90% of divorcing and separating couples, the courts are not needed because they are able to reach agreement between themselves, or with the help of a solicitor. For others, the dispute becomes so bitter that a court has to intervene to decide on the important and emotionally charged questions of how the child's time is divided between the parents and their respective homes, on schooling, holidays and so on.

The starting point for the courts is and must continue to be the rights of the child. For parents the issue is – or should be – their responsibilities, not their "rights". Where court processes are necessary, they must be speeded up. Sadly for children, cuts in family legal aid and in family court services will lead to greater delay. So there is much to be put right – but that will not be achieved by prioritising the rights of adults over the rights of children.
Desmond Hudson
Chief executive, Law Society

• Mindful of recent cases where children and their mothers have been killed by fathers, it is not ministers who should brace themselves for a backlash – in their case from single mothers. It is the vulnerable children who will be endangered by the decision of the government to bow to the misleading demands of Fathers4Justice for greater access for fathers, regardless of risk, and in doing so ignoring the recommendations of the independent review for no change to the existing law.
Gillian Dalley
London

Abu Qatada in court seeking bail

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 04:21:00 GMT

London hearing to decide whether radical cleric should be freed after extradition to Jordan was blocked by Europe court

A radical Muslim cleric described as a grave threat to Britain's national security could walk free on Monday.

Abu Qatada, who is being held at Long Lartin high-security prison in Worcestershire, will apply to be released on bail as he fights deportation to Jordan.

Lawyers for the home secretary, Theresa May, are expected to oppose bail while British diplomats continue to seek assurances from the Jordanian authorities that evidence gained through torture would not be used against him.

Such evidence is the main reason Qatada, once described by a Spanish judge as "Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe", won an appeal to the European court of human rights in January. The judges ruled that sending Qatada back to face terror charges without such assurances would deny him his right to a fair trial and be a "flagrant denial of justice".

May has vowed Qatada, held for six and a half years, will be kept behind bars while she considers all legal options to send him back. The Home Office has said he "poses a real risk to national security".

At a hearing in central London, Qatada's defence team will urge an immigration judge to release him. The judge, Mr Justice Mitting, has said: "Six and a half years of detention requires the eligibility for bail to be considered urgently.

"I accept that it's possible that negotiations with the Jordanian government may produce a rapid solution but past experience ... leads me to believe that is likely to be an unrealistic expectation."

The Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) will hold a full bail hearing on Monday morning.

January's verdict is the first time the Strasbourg-based court has found that an extradition would be in violation the right to a fair trial as required by the European convention on human rights, which is enshrined in UK law under the Human Rights Act.

The home secretary has three months to lodge an appeal with the court's grand chamber.

The Henry Jackson Society thinktank has said the ECHR ruling "undermines national security" while the former home secretary David Blunkett said Qatada was "extraordinarily dangerous and we don't want him on our streets".

Qatada, 51, is also known as Omar Othman. He featured in hate sermons found on videos in the flat of one of the 9/11 bombers.

Since 2001, when fears of the domestic terror threat rose in the aftermath of the attacks, he has challenged and ultimately thwarted every attempt by the government to detain and deport him.

Law lords ruled almost three years ago that he could be sent back to Jordan and Lord Phillips, now president of the supreme court, said torture in another country did not require the UK "to retain in this country, to the detriment of national security, a terrorist suspect".

But the European went against that judgment, agreeing with a 2008 decision of the UK court of appeal that there were reasonable grounds for believing Qatada would be denied a fair trial in Jordan.

The 'human safari' is an outrage to tribal feelings | Observer editorial

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:07:29 GMT

Unethical tourism needs to be stopped by stricter regulations and educating tourists

As the world has grown smaller while our passion for novelty has expanded, our curiosity about different cultures, particularly those relatively untouched by what we deem "civilisation", has grown exponentially. We come, we see and then we overrun wherever it is we have alighted.

The latest manifestation of our thirst for novelty as well as authenticity is causing some alarm – the "human safari". These are organised by unethical tour operators who exploit tribes in India, Central and South America and other corners of the globe who have hitherto had little contact with the outside world. The price paid for this type of tourism has been vividly described by Gethin Chamberlain in these pages over the past few weeks.

His reports on the Bonda tribe in the hilly regions of the state of Orissa in India and the Jarawa in the Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, have triggered a huge response from readers of the Observer. The degrading manner in which the tribal people are bullied into dancing for the amusement of convoys of visitors, and members of the police who have a responsibility to protect these people from exploitation, is further illustrated by video evidence on the Observer's website today.

Stephen Corry of Survival International, which campaigns on behalf of tribal people, rightly says: "Tribes are not cultural relics nor should they be treated like animals in a zoo… promoting tours by using derogatory terms such as 'primitive' and advertising their nakedness shows a clear lack of respect."

The national government of India apparently agrees. Recently, it has acted swiftly. Three tour operators have been charged with selling tribal tours "in an obscene manner". Two men face up to seven years in jail if convicted. Laws already exist to safeguard both tribes.

However, it is the failure in the application of such measures that is at issue. In 2002, the supreme court of India, for example, ordered that the Andaman trunk road that runs through the Jarawa tribal reserve should be closed. The ruling has been ignored.

The closure of the road would give choice back to the Jarawa as to how and when they wish to engage – or not – with the outside world. Stricter regulation of the tour operators working in both regions and the disciplining of rogue police would also set a valuable benchmark. However, this is not solely India's problem.

More than a billion tourists will be on the move across the world this year. International travellers and the tour operators that serve them also have a part to play. Some operators behave highly ethically protecting and strengthening indigenous communities. Others, however, are unrestrained in the ways they choose to satiate the fast-growing appetite for experiential adventures.

So where do we go from here? What is required, perhaps, is stricter regulations that cross national borders; tourists encouraged to become better informed and a much wider debate about what unethical tourism does both to fragile societies and those who pay to become spectators in the humiliation and decline of these tribal people.

Trial of judge Baltasar Garzón splits a Spain still suffering civil war wounds

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:06:50 GMT

Nearly four decades after Franco's death, Baltasar Garzón, the man who wants the regime's crimes out in the open, is the only person in the dock

When Josefina Musulén took the stand in Spain's supreme court last week it was, at last, a chance to tell her family's tragic story to a panel of judges. Her pregnant grandmother, married to an anarchist, had been taken away by General Francisco Franco's fascist-backed rebels during the civil war. Her family was informed she had been shot. "They were told a bullet had been fired into her pregnant belly," she said.

It was only after Franco died in 1975 that fellow prisoners told them her grandmother had been kept alive until she gave birth to a baby girl. Josefina's family has spent 33 years hunting for her. "We looked under every stone in Aragón," she said.

Antonia Oliver, whose grandfather was one of tens of thousands killed and secretly buried by Francoist death squads, best expressed the wishes of those still seeking the graves of lost relatives. "My grandmother died and my mother is now 87," she told the same seven judges. "All I want is to close her wounds with truth and justice."

But that will not happen. Spain's courts are not interested in these families, their pain or their thirst for justice. They are not interested at all, in fact, in the festering wounds left over by a civil war and four decades of dictatorship.

Musulén and Oliver would like to have been in court to accuse their grandparents' killers. They were there instead to defend the only Spaniard to be tried because of Franco's repression – the investigating magistrate and human rights crusader Baltasar Garzón. His decision to open a court investigation into 114,000 deaths enraged fellow judges, may cost him his job and reveals Spain's inability to achieve closure for an uncomfortable, violent past.

It is the wound that refuses to heal. Too many died away from the front lines of the civil war and in the brutal, vindictive repression of the 1930s and 1940s. And too many people recall the casual, institutionalised repression that inspired the fear dictators need to stay in power. Where victims are no longer alive to raise their voices, children and grandchildren have done so instead.

Spain has travelled light years since Franco died, ending 40 years of stultifying dictatorship. A tacit agreement to forget the past was, to begin with, maintained by a mixture of ingrained fear and determination to build a secure future. But that agreement is in tatters. And this one, unresolved matter casts a shadow over the country's otherwise remarkable achievements.

Spanish courts, led by the indomitable Garzón, have pursued dictators, torturers and human rights abusers around the globe, pioneering a bold use of international law. They chase Nazi criminals, jail Argentinian torturers and even had Chile's former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, arrested in London. Yet crimes committed on their own doorstep are untouchable.

Pedro Solsona, whose father was tortured and killed after agreeing to feed some anti-Franco guerrillas in 1947, recalls a Captain Lobo who spread fear through eastern Castellón in the 1940s. "He would beat shepherds and stop halfway to smoke a cigarette," he told El País newspaper last week. "He wasn't big or strong, just full of hate."

One of the ironies of the Garzón case, in which a far-right group called Clean Hands accuses the magistrate of bypassing Spain's 1977 amnesty law, is that people like this are finally being heard in court. In the upside-down world of Spain's relationship with its murderous past, then, it is the investigator who is accused of committing a crime. Men like Lobo have never been placed in the dock. "We victims did nothing to turn the spotlight on them afterwards. Spain's reforms had absolved their masters. Would it have been right to pursue the servants?" the writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán once explained, referring to 1970s police torturers in Barcelona.

Garzón's failed attempt at opening a case against Franco and his henchmen nevertheless set out a devastating narrative for the 1936 rightwing military rebellion that sparked a civil war and toppled an elected government.

"The armed uprising of this date was planned and organised with the intention of bringing an end to Spain's form of government [and] attacking, detaining or physically eliminating people who held positions of responsibility," he wrote before the case was closed. Franco and his allies had carried out "the detention, torture, forced disappearance and physical elimination of thousands of people for political and ideological motives... a state of affairs that continued, to greater or lesser extent, after the civil war ended".

This simple exposition of history is outrageous to some – especially those who never had to answer for their role as Franco servants and, sometimes, to their descendants. A decade has gone by since the first bodies were pulled out of the ground as relatives summoned the courage to dig up the mass graves left by Franco's death squads. The first exhumations were amateur affairs, involving guesswork, rumours and crude holes scooped out by borrowed yellow diggers. But they sparked something big. Ten years and 5,500 bodies later, they are sophisticated archaeological digs, with DNA testing and public funds to help.

In Poyales del Hoyo, a village in the central province of Avila, I attended the 2002 reburials of Pilar Espinosa, Virtudes de la Fuente and Valeriana Granada – whose roadside grave had been dug up in nearby Candeleda. It was a tense affair, with the rightwing mayor absenting herself for the day, but the bones were finally laid to rest in the village graveyard. "One lot finished and the next lot got started," the mayor, Damiana González, later told me, referring to rightwingers from her own family killed by the left at the beginning of the civil war. As I dug deeper into the matter for a book, Ghosts of Spain, I found some people still lowered their voices when talking about those times.

Late last summer, I received a call from Candeleda. Virtudes's relatives had asked to move her body to the family niche. A new rightwing mayor removed the bones of Pilar and Valeriana and threw them into the cemetery's communal grave. I drove past the roadside monument erected on the site where they had been shot on a rainy December night in 1936. It had been defaced with graffiti. They include the Francoist slogan "Arriba España" and the yoke-and-arrows symbol of the far right Falange, whose members killed the women. A backlash had started.

Part of Pilar's family had emigrated to Britain. One of her great-grandchildren, the translator Yash Gosain, has since moved back. He was furious when he discovered Pilar's remains had been tossed into a mass grave and a protest was called. But the historical memory movement has attracted elements from Spain's hard left, whose vision of the past is black and white. "We are the grandchildren of the workers you could not kill" read a provocative banner. When Gosain tried to explain the reason for the protest, he was shouted down by the mayor's supporters. Later he was attacked on the street.

Paul Preston of the London School of Economics, one of the great historians of Spain, has added facts to the debate with his book The Spanish Holocaust, published next month. Preston sees 200,000 people killed away from the battlefront, with Franco's regime killing 20,000 more afterwards. "The collective violence in both rearguards by brutal perpetrators against undeserving victims justifies the use of the word 'holocaust'," he writes. "Its resonances of systematic murder should be invoked in the Spanish case, just as they are in those of Germany or Russia."

When I went to see Clean Hands boss Miguel Bernad, a former parliamentary deputy for the neo-Francoist National Front, he said Garzón's refusal to investigate the killing of several thousand pro-Franco prisoners at Paracuellos del Jarama, near Madrid, proved his hatred of the right.

But an aching gap separates the victims of the "two Spains", immortalised by poet Antonio Machado in his line to newborns: "May God protect you. One of the two Spains will freeze your heart." The victims of leftwing excesses obtained justice from Franco's regime – which happily sent those responsible to the firing squad. Franco's victims have never had recourse to justice.

A new edition of Giles Tremlett's Ghosts of Spain is published by Faber on 5 April.

Julian Assange case: QCs square up over 'judicial authority'

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:14:40 GMT

Dinah Rose QC v Clare Montgomery QC

For two days Dinah Rose QC and Clare Montgomery QC have contradicted one another over the precise meaning of the words "judicial authority", interspersing assertions with curt dismissals of "my learned friend's" argument.

The appearance of two of the most prominent women barristers as leading counsel in such a high-profile case is a reflection of the changing composition of the bar; more than a third of the profession is now female.

Montgomery, of Matrix chambers, is the longer established, having taken silk in 1996. Rose, of Blackstone chambers, who became QC 10 years later, is an authority on human rights and employment law. Last week she gave evidence to a parliamentary select committee on the government's controversial green paper of security and justice which proposes introducing secret evidence sessions into civil cases. This week, Rose drove her submissions through smoothly, with minimal interventions from the judges. Montgomery has a more abrasive, stacatto delivery. She dismissed her opponent's "rhetoric" and limited herself to forensic analysis of case law, statute and parliamentary interventions. Her stab at Dutch drew friendly mockery from Lord Mance. Montgomery's focus on detail and continual references to documents gave the judges more opportunity to cross-examine her, which allowed her to display her depth of knowledge of EU extradition law.

It was not the first time the supreme court had heard a case where the leading advocates are both women. By contrast they appeared before six males judges and the supreme court's only female judge, Lady Hale.

Undercover operation criticised by official watchdog | Rob Evans

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:58:15 GMT

The official police inspectorate criticised the covert infiltration of political groups this week, but it was probably a disaster waiting to happen for some years

So at last a key report into the undercover policing controversy was published this week. Dennis O'Connor, the head of the body inspecting the police, finally produced his delayed report yesterday after cancelling its publication at the last minute in the autumn.

Here was our take on O'Connor's report - we wrote that the clandestine operation that secretly deployed police spies in political groups for 40 years was severely criticised by the inspectorate which recommended a tightening up of the controls on such undercover operations.

We also reported on how Mark Kennedy, the spy at the centre of the controversy, was beaten up by his own police colleagues and how he was criticised by O'Connor.

The report has been written by an establishment figure, but given that, it is striking how he criticises the covert operation to infiltrate political campaigns. O'Connor concluded, for instance, that the undercover deployments were weakly controlled and led to "disproportionate intrusion" into the lives of the activists.

History tells us that any state operation which is hidden behind years of secrecy will almost inevitably lead to abuses. The controversy which has erupted over the past 12 months was probably a disaster waiting to happen for some years. As it happened, it was Kennedy who brought it to a head, but we understand that he was not the first of these undercover police officers to go out of control or awol.

O'Connor says that in future, these undercover deployments should be approved beforehand by an outside organisation, the Office of the Surveillance Commissioners.

Potentially this could mean that there will be fewer deployments in protest groups as police chiefs will have to justify them to some-one outside their cosy circle. Only time will tell.

O'Connor's report had little to say on one of the most explosive aspects of the controversy - undercover officers sleeping with, and even having children, with the activists they have been sent to spy on.

This was criticised by the eight women who have started legal action against police chiefs. They say that they were duped into forming long-term loving relationships with undercover policemen and suffered intense emotional trauma and pain.

In a statement, the eight said : "This report misses an opportunity to clearly and unequivocally outlaw any undercover operative from entering into and maintaining a long term intimate relationships whilst undercover".

"It is of concern that whilst the report recognises the psychological harm that may be caused to the police officer,

no mention is made of the harm they cause to the women with whom they enter such a relationship which is potentially far more serious. There can be no justification for such relationships and for the outrageous state intrusion on the privacy of those concerned nor for the serious emotional and psychological damage caused".

O'Connor criticised Kennedy on a series of counts, particularly for defying his instructions from his supervisors. Kennedy rejected the criticism, telling the BBC that he was "outraged" at the claim that he had not obeyed orders.

Is stop and search history repeating itself?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:13:00 GMT

I spent Thursday tramping round a piece of London where there is great and justified concern about violent youths, postcode rivalries and gangs. I spoke to a range of people, including several good citizens who are trying to sort the problems out. They had both very positive and very negative things to say about the police, depending on what sort of officer and what sort of police work they were talking about.

It was made plain by some that the intensive use of stop-and-search, especially when conducted by officers who weren't local or known, did not improve matters at all, especially when officers were arrogant or rude.

I'll be writing about the situation in the part of town in question in weeks to come. In connection with that project I've been doing looking into the Met's use stop-and-search in recent times. Here's an excerpt from a BBC News report from 1999:

The number of police stop and searches in London has halved since the Lawrence inquiry, according to an independent report...

The power of stop and search was introduced for all police in 1984. Since then, it has accounted for about 10% of arrests. But the high incidence of stop and searches among the black population has led to charges of police racism, and even police chiefs have admitted it is a "blunt instrument".

[An] interim report, compiled for the Home Office pending a full report in October, was based on seven pilot areas in London in which the police said newer, more systematic methods were used. The report shows the methods improved arrest rates, which rose to about 18%.

The Metropolitan Police welcomed the figures, saying they showed stop and search could target the right people. Assistant Commissioner Denis O'Connor said the practice remains an "essential tool for community safety", but he said the police were trying to use it in a "more sophisticated" way.

Now here's the Guardian's Vikram Dodd, reporting last month on the Met's moves towards using stop-and-search in what commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe had previously called a "smarter" way:

As part of the reforms, senior officers will reduce by 50% the number of times they authorise an area to be the target of section 60 stops that do not require reasonable suspicion. They said more intelligence would be needed before this power could be deployed in the future.

The Met also said that the force's commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, wanted the arrest rate from all stop and searches carried out to increase from 6% (at this rate the lowest for an urban force) to 20%.

The question that comes to mind is why a fall to an arrest rate of 6% has been allowed to occur when 13 years ago one of 18% was cited as evidence that the tactic was being used in a "more sophisticated" way against the right people. "Smarter" now means getting the recent arrest rate up to 20%. How did it become OK for so many of the wrong people to be subjected to it?

The contexts for the two changes in the tactic's use are different: the reduction of stop-and-search in 1999 followed the Macpherson report while the adjustments being made now come amid concerns about legal challenges to the use of powers under section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. So has the commissioner made the latest change only reluctantly, or has he truly accepted that the Met's use of stop-and-search of late has not been smart at all? It would be helpful to be absolutely sure.

Gun experts raise doubts over Jeremy Bamber murder verdict

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:12:22 GMT

New review of ballistics evidence 'shakes safety of convictions' in 1986 Essex killings

Some of the world's most eminent ballistics experts have uncovered "the first evidence directly pointing to the innocence of Jeremy Bamber", convicted of a notorious multiple murder 27 years ago.

Bamber was found guilty in October 1986 of shooting his adoptive parents, June and Nevill, his sister Sheila Caffell and her six-year-old twins, Daniel and Nicholas, at their Essex farmhouse. He has consistently maintained his innocence, although his last attempt to win freedom was rejected by the Criminal Cases Review Commission 12 months ago. However, a new legal team has submitted evidence to the commission, the authority that investigates miscarriages of justice, claiming to have unearthed evidence that "shakes the safety of Bamber's convictions to their core".

Detailed reports, compiled by British and US medical and ballistics analysts, corroborate the initial police view that Bamber's schizophrenic sister Sheila Caffell committed the White House Farm murders in 1985. During the immediate aftermath of the killings on 7 August, detectives and the pathologist thought Caffell, 28, had murdered her parents and sons before turning the gun on herself.

Yet the theory was cast into doubt when three days after the shootings a cousin of Bamber found a silencer in a cupboard at the farm, apparently with Caffell's blood on it. Central to the prosecution case in the Chelmsford crown court trial was evidence that Caffell's blood was on the silencer; if so, she could not have shot herself then placed it in a cupboard downstairs. Jurors heard how the silencer was responsible for scratch marks on a kitchen shelf, allegedly made in a struggle between Bamber and his 61-year-old adoptive father.

The trial was unusual in that the jury were told the killings could have been carried out only by Caffell or Bamber. The issue of the silencer was vital in persuading the jury, with the judge instructing them the silencer "could, on its own, lead them to believe that Bamber was guilty".

Now the conclusions of a peer-reviewed pathology assessment of the evidence relating to Caffell's death, obtained by the Observer, appear to demolish the case against Bamber. They suggest that a silencer – so pivotal to Bamber's conviction – was never used. One report by David Fowler, chief medical examiner of the US state of Maryland, who has reviewed the files of more than 3,000 shooting homicides, states: "In my professional opinion, the [burn marks] complex just described of the lower entrance and two abrasions is consistent with the rifle not having a silencer."

Fowler believes no silencer was involved. His conclusion is supported by Ljubisa Dragovic, chief medical examiner of Oakland county in Michigan, and Marcella Fierro, former chief medical examiner of Virginia.

Leeds-based Simon McKay, Bamber's new solicitor advocate, said: "The evidence of three senior and respected pathologists that the wounds to Sheila Caffell are consistent with the rifle having been fired without the silencer fitted shakes the safety of Jeremy Bamber's convictions to their core."

McKay added: "The fresh expert evidence aligns itself with what police officers found at the scene on the morning of the killings and the combined views of those who assessed the position then: namely, and tragically, [that] Sheila Caffell murdered her family, then took her own life."

Evidence that the fatal wounds had been fired by a rifle without a silencer are corroborated by further fresh analysis of burn marks on Nevill Bamber's back. The findings are supported by firearms experts working for Dr John Manlove, an Oxfordshire-based forensic scientist.

Manlove states: "From its size and shape, this mark could possibly have been caused by the hot muzzle of a firearm, without a sound moderator." He says that further testing is required with the murder weapon, an Anschütz 525 rifle, to underpin his initial assessment.

Manlove's conclusions are corroborated by gunfire tests conducted last month in Arizona. A report by Daniel Caruso, chief of burn services at the Arizona Burn Centre and executive chair of the department of surgery at the University of Arizona, states: "In my professional opinion, the three wounds sustained by Ralph [Nevill] Bamber are consistent in size, shape and diameter with a threaded end of a model 525 Anschütz rifle barrel heated sufficiently to cause injury."

McKay is adamant that the CCRC has no option but to refer the case.

During the trial, the jury struggled to reach a verdict, requesting to see the evidence relating to the blood on the silencer, before returning with a 10-2 majority. McKay added: "A picture is emerging that exculpates Jeremy Bamber and implicates his sister." Until the finding of the silencer, he says, there was no reason to doubt the initial view of detectives that Caffell committed the murder then killed herself. The pathologist, Dr Peter Vanezis, added: "My examination did not reveal anything to contradict the suicide theory."

Although the burn marks were raised at the trial, McKay said they were dismissed as a "mystery". A senior forensics expert in 1985 raised the possibility that the rifle muzzle may have been responsible but no evidence exists that he pursued this line of inquiry. Bamber's lawyers have recently obtained a copy of a note from the Home Office database endorsing that tests were needed to ascertain how hot the silencer became after firing, but again no proof is available that this was pursued.

The Bundle: Extra, extra, extradition

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:32:24 GMT

This week's best news, comment, analysis, blogs and readers' views from Guardian law and around the web

He upset the FBI and the White House. Could he be about to overturn the European arrest warrant? Julian Assange's attempt to stop his extradition to Sweden over allegations of rape and sexual coercion reached the UK supreme court this week. The question for the justices was whether the Swedish prosecutor who issued the warrant is a valid judicial authority. No, argued Dinah Rose QC, citing the 376AD Codex lustinianus. Yes, said Clare Montgomery QC. "Hard to say which way it will go," tweeted Joshua Rozenberg, though "supreme court judges clearly want to avoid wrecking the system". Julian Knowles QC predicted an Assange win would make extradition to Europe difficult, if not impossible. (Video highlights from both sides are here.)

This week saw the launch of Guardian Law's interactive history of the supreme court - a work that's been a few months in the making and which nonetheless managed to include a picture of a group of lords sitting on the woolsack: and, as one of our erudite contributors pointed out, law lords never sat on the woolsack, even before they left Parliament. This has now been corrected. The timeline is very much a work in progress - with a video element still to launch - and next week we'll be inviting you to tell us what we shouldn't have left out and what deserved more space.

While Joshua was in Strasbourg last week he interviewed Sir Nicolas Bratza, the British president of the European court of human rights.

"Why, I ask him, is the human rights court seen in such a toxic way in Britain?"

"'Your guess is as good as mine on this,' he replied. 'I do find it very puzzling as to why there is this strong feeling. It's not just a feeling against the court or against the convention. It's a feeling directed more generally against the Human Rights Act.'

Sir Nicolas added that the 'democratic override' favoured by some Conservatives would be "totally destructive of the system".

Meanwhile, Alison Saunders of the Crown Prosecution Service gave an interview to the Guardian in which she described her "sleepless night" before the convictions for Stephen Lawrence's murder and discussed the problem of juries' reluctance to convict in rape cases.

Lord Prescott complained the media had been silent on the subject of the legal aid bill. We tweeted to urge him to bookmark @GdnLaw. He hasn't yet replied. But, as our legal correspondent Owen Bowcott reported from a conference on legal aid yesterday, Jonathan Djanogly has hinted at some concessions from the government.

YOU MAY HAVE MISSED …

Alex Aldridge: The secret of winning a place to study law

Miguel-Anxo Murado on the investigation into Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón

Daniel Barnett argues the government's criminal compensation reforms are dangerous, vindictive and unnecessary

JOBS OF THE WEEK

Deputy director, British Institute of International and Comparative Law

Legal support manager, Shelter

Employment lawyer/writer, Thomson Reuters

BEST OF THE WEB

The New York Times urges senators to pass a law forcing those earning more than GBP1m to pay at least 30% of their income in taxes

Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker: The Caging of America

Ian Parker in the New Yorker: The Story of a Suicide

That's all for this week - though you can expect plenty of coverage of the Von Hannover ruling on privacy due from Strasbourg on Tuesday. Nick Armstrong of Matrix writes about the importance of R (KM) v Cambridgeshire County Council, which the supreme court will begin hearing on the same day. We'll also be tweeting from JUSTICE's discussion on surveillance and the right to privacy - and we've dispatched Joshua Rozenberg to report from a very exclusive legal institution. And get thinking of questions to ask our experts for our live Q&A on student pro bono next Tuesday.

Until next week,
@rosamundmtaylor
@mwolferobinson

Advice agencies in crisis: 'We will just disappear. No one will notice'

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:42:00 GMT

While campaigners will fight for agencies such as Citizens Advice Bureaux, who will fight for smaller organisations?

Advice agencies – which provide a lifeline to people in debt, or facing problems with their benefits or housing – are under financial pressure as never before. Demand for services is increasing, at a time when impending changes to legal aid threaten to remove funding for large swathes of social welfare law, and when many providers are also facing cuts in local authority grants.

The demand for social welfare law advice is especially acute in London, with its greater levels of poverty (28%, compared with 22% elsewhere in England), higher levels of debt, large numbers of people in temporary accommodation, and substantial migrant population.

When most people think of advice agencies, they think of the Citizens Advice Bureaux, whose national network of 394 outlets helps around two million clients a year. New research into advice provision in London by Legal Action Group confirms the strength of the CAB "brand" among people in the capital. When asked where they would go if they needed help, 40% of Londoners surveyed said it would be a CAB.

CABs are equally popular among politicians (and royals - Princess Anne is patron of the Citizens Advice charity). At the launch of LAG's research, Lib Dem peer, Lord Phillips of Sudbury emphasised that peers were united in their support for CABs and law centres (there are around 30 of the latter in the capital).

CABs somehow manage to combine an establishment (almost "blue rinse") image, with giving invaluable help to people who are unlikely to win many popularity contests, the poor and marginalised (debt and welfare benefits advice makes up around 60 per cent of its case load, nationally). One observer suggests that CABs have such political clout "because the wives of Tory MPs volunteer for CABs".

However, while CABs have long been the acceptable face of the advice sector, LAG's research also reveals – despite their high brand recognition - when it comes to actually seeking advice, most Londoners surveyed ended up at a range of different advice centres.

Many of these other agencies will have zero name recognition outside the immediate, often immigrant, communities, they serve and, therefore, have no one to champion the invaluable work they do. Which cabinet minister's spouse will speak up for, say, the Bosnia and Herzegovina Community Advice Centre in Willesden, north west London, which helps elderly members of the West Balkan community with housing and welfare benefits advice?

The strength of these local, independent agencies – diversity and specificity to their communities – is also their weakness when it comes to developing and fighting their corner. While the number of clients seen by these agencies individually may be small, it adds up. Advice UK, the biggest support network for independent agencies, has over 200 members in London. This means they have far more outlets than CABs and law centres combined. Its members help around 40,000 clients a year, many of whom, for reasons of language or culture, would find it difficult to get help from a more mainstream agency.

According to Chilli Reid, Advice UK's head of development, most of its members have just two or three staff, and an average annual income – mainly from local authority and other grants – of under £50,000. Some agencies, however, do wonders on rather less than that.

The Welwitschia Legal Advice Centre in Tottenham, north London, provides help with debt, housing, welfare benefits, employment and immigration problems to mainly Portuguese speaking people of African descent. With just one employee, the apparently indefatigable Pedro Lunguela, and a band of volunteers (who mainly help with administration work), it sees an estimated 2,500 clients a year. It does all this on a London Councils grant of £34,000, out of which it meets the cost of Lunguela's salary and all its running costs. "It's a struggle," he concedes.

The centre was set up in 1998 to help Angolan nationals, but now acts for clients from more than a dozen mainly African countries, who flock to its door from all over London (often after having unsuccessfully tried to get help elsewhere). Lunguela says:

"Yesterday, I had someone who had been evicted from her home, who had taken her documents to a CAB, but they couldn't understand each other."

(Most of Welwitschia's clients are Portuguese speakers, but Lunguela can also advise in English, Spanish and French.)

The demand for the centre's services is ever increasing, not least because of the financial downturn. Lunguela tries to conduct home and hospital visits when he can but, after having his phone turned off for an hour or so, can find up to 80 missed calls from clients on his phone. He managed a few days off over Christmas, but the peace only lasted until 27 December, when the calls started up again, he says. He is about to be joined by a part-time worker, paid for by Trust for London (coincidentally, the organisation which funded LAG's research), which he hopes will ease some of the pressure.

The centre survived a funding scare in August last year, but its income is only safe until October 2012, after which, it's anyone's guess what will happen. In his office, Lunguela has an increasingly fat file where he keeps the rejected applications for grants he made last year. Most, he says, were turned down because the competition for funds is now so fierce. In his less charitable moments, Lunguela admits to wondering whether funders aren't sometimes biased towards agencies serving a more mainstream clientele, rather than ones like his, which help people from countries many of us would struggle to find on a map (Angola, Cabo-Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Sao-Tome, among others).

"Sometimes I do ask myself that - when I see organisations which do the same work as us, sometimes seeing fewer clients than us, but they are winning grants of £150,000. There is no justice."

When three advice agencies with a national profile shut their doors last year because of funding and other difficulties - Refugee Migrant Justice, Immigration Advisory Service, and Law for All – leaving 20,000 clients in their wake, it made newspaper headlines and the Legal Services Commission was forced to step in and reallocate clients to other providers.

However, when smaller agencies like Welwitschia and others start being picked off one by one, who, other than their client base, would even notice? Agencies that are all but invisible precisely because the people they serve are among the most overlooked and most marginalised, are hardly likely to be missed by the rest of the world, so who will step in to help their clients?

It's a point not lost on Lunguela. If the centre he founded and which has helped thousands and thousands of people over the years who have nowhere else to turn is forced to close its doors when the money runs out in October, there will be no great splash.

"It will be like salt dissolving in water. We will just disappear. No one will notice," he says.

Fiona Bawdon is joint author of the London Advice Watch report and a freelance legal journalist

Family justice report author criticises plan to change divorce and custody law

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:47:51 GMT

David Norgrove says giving parents a right to shared access has caused long delays in custody cases in Australia

Legislating to ensure that both parents in a divorce retain the right of access to their children could cause severe problems in custody cases, according to the former Whitehall official who conducted a review on family justice.

David Norgrove, whose report was commissioned by the government and handed in last year, expressed dismay at comments made by the children's minister, Tim Loughton.

Loughton announced on Thursday evening that he was considering "all the options to help ensure that children can continue to have an ongoing relationship with both their parents after separation".

He added: "There is a familiar picture in the UK of parental separation leading to thousands of children losing meaningful contact with the non-resident parent, usually the father.

"This issue affects the lives of hundreds of thousands of children and it would be negligent not [to consider all options]. It is also right that we continue to encourage fathers to take responsibility as equal parents and to be fully involved with their children from the outset."

The government's formal response to the Norgrove family justice report is due to be published on Monday. The government will pledge an extra £10m for mediation services in a bid to reduce the number of cases going to the courts.

A working group is expected to be formed to examine potential changes to the Children's Act 1989 to embed the new rights.

Responding to Loughton, Norgrove, who chairs the Low Pay Commission, said: "The family justice system must deliver the best possible outcome for the children and families who use it, because its decisions directly affect the lives and futures of those involved and have repercussions for society as a whole.

"The family justice review panel thoroughly considered the issue of shared parenting and concluded the law should not be changed.

"If the government has decided to legislate, I regret that and it will be vital to find words that avoid the difficulties encountered in Australia." The experience of the Australian courts was that a right to shared access for both parents caused long delays in custody cases, he added.

The pressure group Fathers 4 Justice has demanded equal rights of access for both parents, but the government has dismissed the possibility of granting equal childcare time for separated mothers and fathers.

Commenting on the expected changes, Desmond Hudson, chief executive of the Law Society, which represents solicitors, said: "Children are at the heart of family justice and their welfare must remain paramount.

"Delays in care cases amount to a national disgrace – children most in need of society's care are being failed. The recommendations in the Norgrove review could contribute significantly to reducing these delays, if properly funded and implemented.

"The government's response will be critical in ensuring that a balance is struck between improving efficiency in the courts, while ensuring that this is not at the expense of the welfare of children.

"The government response will come at a difficult time for the family justice system. Cuts in legal aid fees will mean fewer family lawyers available to help people; cuts in legal aid eligibility will mean more people going to court unrepresented, taking up huge amounts of court time, just when court staff and facilities are being cut dramatically – all leading towards more, not less, delay."

Paul Auster hits back at Turkish PM

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:41:32 GMT

After Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the novelist 'ignorant', Auster reiterates protest against country's free speech prohibitions

American novelist Paul Auster has hit back after the Turkish prime minister described him as "an ignorant man".

Auster, author of the acclaimed New York Trilogy, told Turkish paper Hurriyet earlier this week that he refused to visit Turkey because of imprisoned journalists and writers. "How many are jailed now? Over 100?" Auster, a popular author in Turkey where his new book Winter Journal has just made its first appearance, said. "Us Democrats got rid of the Bushes. We got rid of [former vice president Dick] Cheney who should have been put on trial for war crimes. What is going on in Turkey?"

Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was quick to respond, saying on Wednesday, in what was described as a "mocking" tone: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come or not? Would Turkey lose any grandeur?"

Erdogan also criticised Auster, the grandson of Jewish immigrants, for visiting Israel. "Supposedly Israel is a democratic, secular country, a country where freedom of expression and individual rights and freedoms are limitless. What an ignorant man you are … Aren't these the ones that rained bombs down on Gaza? The ones that launched phosphorus bombs and used chemical weapons. How can you not see this?" said the Turkish prime minister. "This gentleman can't see the repression and rights violations in Israel … This is serious disrespect to Turkey."

The war of words continues with a statement issued by Auster, in which he says that "whatever the prime minister might think about the state of Israel, the fact is that free speech exists there and no writers or journalists are in jail".

"According to the latest numbers gathered by International PEN, there are nearly 100 writers imprisoned in Turkey, not to speak of independent publishers such as Ragip Zarakolu, whose case is being closely watched by PEN Centers around the world," said Auster.

Zarakolu was one of more than 40 free speech activists detained in Istanbul in November, prompting international protests. The founder of Belge Publishing House and a member of Turkish PEN, Zarakolu has released controversial books documenting the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during the first world war. Seven Swedish MPs have now applied for him to be awarded the Nobel peace prize, a move supported by the International Publishers Association.

Act on Acta now if you care about democracy and free speech | David Meyer

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:48:14 GMT

The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement could criminalise internet users globally. But it hasn't been ratified yet …

Acta is the latest copyright enforcement scheme to cause alarm among digital activists. Given its reach, this is understandable.

The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement is, despite its name, effectively an international treaty that forces signatories to criminalise "commercial-scale" copyright and trademark infringement. Some of it covers knock-off merchandise, but most applies to the digital world as well. Many of Acta's provisions already exist in countries such the US and the UK – for example, it makes sure courts can block or take down infringing websites – and the idea is ostensibly to bring the rest of the world in line.

However, some elements would go further than existing laws in most of the countries that sign up. Acta criminalises activities such as breaking the digital locks on rights-protected files, or even distributing tools to help people do so. Stripping the artist information from a music file becomes a crime, as does decrypting content that has been scrambled for copyright protection. Acta also codifies the flawed idea, in calculating damages from so-called piracy, that every unlawful download represents a lost sale.

One reason for the heightened attention being paid to Acta is the recent derailing of the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Protect IP Act (Pipa) in the US. These bills were, in many ways, more dangerous than Acta – Sopa wanted to alter the DNS, the core of the internet – but the spirit is the same. After winning a round against the US bills, citizens and activists are raring to take on a new challenge.

Acta was the brainchild of the US and Japan. Its formulation began in 2007, outside the frameworks of the World Trade Organisation and without the involvement of China, India and other countries that are major sources of pirated goods. Because it was technically a trade agreement, negotiations took place behind closed doors, with the only look-in afforded to citizens' groups or even elected representatives coming via a series of leaks.

Through conduits such as WikiLeaks, it became clear that the US in particular was pushing for signatories to create "three-strikes" laws that could be used to kick repeat file-sharers off the internet. The EU pushed back and this provision was removed, along with a requirement that ISPs and other online service providers snoop on their customers. The criminalisation of camcorder use in cinemas is also no longer mandated in Acta.

But what remains is troubling on several counts. Acta ostensibly targets big players, but, when it comes to its application on the internet, its definition of "commercial-scale" infringement is loose enough to also cause trouble for individuals. According to Acta, criminal and civil enforcement procedures "shall apply to infringement of copyright or related rights over digital networks, which may include the unlawful use of means of widespread distribution for infringing purposes".

Given that "widespread distribution" is the essence of the internet, this could be interpreted as a go-ahead for cracking down on small-scale infringers, or even people who post a copyrighted image or parody of it on their blogs. Sites and blogs that carry Google Ads could arguably also be seen as "commercial activities for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage", another way in which Acta defines commercial scale.

Those defending Acta maintain that it would not bypass free speech and privacy safeguards in places such as the US and EU. The document itself regularly refers to a need for "freedom of expression, fair process, and privacy" in the way enforcement is carried out, but only in accordance with the laws of the signatory country. Some of those countries, such as Morocco, are not noted for providing a strong right to free expression. Even if Acta's apologists are to be taken at their word, the implications could be unpleasant for free-thinking citizens in many parts of the world.

It is no longer possible to change the contents of Acta, as it has been finalised. However, Acta is now, for the first time, in its democratic phase. Although 30 countries, including the US and UK, have signed Acta, no one has yet ratified it. The treaty may have been negotiated by governments and bureaucrats, but most of the signatories now have to get Acta through their legislatures. The process varies from country to country, but the document is finally in the hands of elected representatives.

Those who want to see Acta defeated need to go to their MPs, MEPs and congresspeople and ask them, facts in hand, to vote against its ratification. Even though elements of Acta may be needed to combat large-scale copyright and trademark infringement, it can be argued that the risks associated with the whole are too great. Elected representatives may be receptive – they themselves were shut out of the Acta negotiations and, after the Sopa protests, they are well aware that voters dislike heavy-handed copyright enforcement.

Agreements such as Acta are entirely driven by one side: the rights-holders. These players have a genuine grievance, in that the internet poses an overwhelming threat to their old business model. The copyright-versus-technology debate is worth having, and soon. But resolution has to come through genuine discussion between the content industry, lawmakers and the public.

The structures to allow this open debate will hopefully come, but not before the debate is reset. Right now, citizens have a rare and possibly brief opportunity to call for that to happen.

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Ethiopia's human rights record poses awkward questions for its aid donors | Mark Tran

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:09:59 GMT

With jail terms for journalists and legal constraints on the activities of civil society groups, Ethiopia doesn't appear to be ticking the good governance boxes required of donors

UN human rights experts have expressed their dismay at what they see as the continuing abuse of anti-terrorism legislation to curb freedom of expression in Ethiopia.

The blunt criticism from the UN may not be so easy to shrug off by a regime usually impervious to foreign criticism. It recently brusquely dismissed a Human Rights Watch that accused the government of forcibly relocating thousands of people in the Gambella region.

The UN, however, is no mere NGO. Even though its criticism on Thursday may be water off a duck's back for Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia's prime minister and strongman for almost two decades, it does pose awkward questions for Ethiopia's aid donors. The EU development commissioner, Andries Piebalgs, last year unveiled the EU's agenda for change, putting human rights at the heart of its development policy.

One of the Department for International Development's (DfID) biggest bilateral aid programmes is with Ethiopia – £331m on average a year until 2015. The UK also places importance on human rights, and DfID recently suspended budget support for Malawi partly on governance grounds after the Malawian government cracked down on demonstrations and passed a bill to make it easier for the government to place restrictions on opponents without legal challenge.

A DFID spokesperson said: "The prime minister, the foreign secretary and the secretary of state for international development have all raised concerns with Prime Minister Meles over the recent arrests of opposition leaders and journalists."

In Ethiopia's case, human rights experts spoke out after three journalists and two opposition politicians were given sentences last week ranging from 14 years to life imprisonment under Ethiopia's anti-terrorism laws. This follows the sentencing of two Swedish journalists to 11 years in prison last December, although they are expected to be given clemency and released. Even Meles realises that throwing foreign journalists into jail is not good for the country's image.

Ethiopian journalists may not be so lucky. UN experts are particularly concerned about the case of Eskinder Nega, a blogger and human rights defender who may face the death penalty if convicted. Nega has been advocating for reform on the issue of the right to assemble peacefully in public. Another 24 defendants are scheduled to appear in court in March, for various charges under the anti-terrorism law, several of whom may face the death sentence if convicted.

"Journalists play a crucial role in promoting accountability of public officials by investigating and informing the public about human rights violations," said Frank La Rue, the UN's special rapporteur on freedom of expression, who emphasised that "they should not face criminal proceedings for carrying out their legitimate work, let alone be severely punished. Ethiopia has an obligation to fully guarantee all individuals' right to freedom of opinion and expression under international human rights law".

UN criticism of Ethiopia coincides with a case that went before Ethiopia's supreme court on Friday. The court is considering a petition by the human rights council (HRCO), Ethiopia's oldest human rights organisation, to admit an appeal against the freezing of its bank accounts. The accounts were frozen after the introduction of the charities and societies proclamation (CSO) law, adopted by the Ethiopian parliament in 2009, ostensibly to regulate domestic and international NGOs.

The law prohibits human rights organisations in Ethiopia from receiving more than 10% of their funding from foreign sources. As a result of the restrictions in the CSO law and the freezing of its accounts, HRCO has been forced to close nine of its 12 offices and cut 85% of its staff.

In the words of one Ethiopian who runs an NGO, the CSO law – a similar measure is being considered in Cambodia – has strangled civil society.

"Ethiopia's once vibrant civil society has been severely decimated due to various legal and other impediments to its work imposed by the government," said Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project, and other groups in a statement. "The CSO law is just one in a series of laws passed since 2008 to give legal grounding to restrictions on freedom of expression and freedom of association."

The Ethiopian government accuses Human Rights Watch and Amnesty of misrepresenting the facts.

"As the government has repeatedly pointed out the law draws largely on laws in the developed world. It is not over-broadly defined nor is it vaguely worded as they claim," it says. "It should also be noted that the fact that someone represents the media or a political party does not exempt them from being responsible for what they do or from being tried by the relevant court if they give cause."

Be that as it may, what puzzles even regime sympathisers is why the Ethiopian government feels the need to muzzle dissent when Meles – respected by western governments for his competence and seen as an important ally with neighbouring Somalia in turmoil – is master of all he surveys.

The political opposition is toothless after many of its leading figures have given up and gone abroad. In legislative elections in 2010, Ethiopia's ruling party and its allies won more than 99% of the vote.

In a punchy speech at the recent African Union summit, Meles, who has been prime minister since 1995, made clear that his preferred model of development was China's.

Meles said: "China, its amazing re-emergence and its commitment for a win-win partnership with Africa, is one of the reasons for the beginning of the African renaissance."

Ethiopia may look east for inspiration, but western aid is not peanuts. EU aid to Ethiopia from 2006 to 2013 is €644m, covering food security and rural development, road infrastructure and, yes, governance.

"The EU supports Ethiopia's development strategy, notably in the agriculture and infrastructure areas, and poverty has declined over the last years," a EU commission spokesman said. "In the framework of our co-operation, there are no 'forbidden' topics. We have a regular political dialogue with the government, which covers all issues, including human rights, good governance, and freedom of expression."

Court confirms German immunity from claims by Nazi victims

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:23:47 GMT

International court of justice says Italy's supreme court violated Germany's sovereignty with 2008 ruling on reparation

The UN's highest court has confirmed that Germany has legal immunity from being sued in foreign courts by victims of Nazi atrocities.

The international court of justice said that Italy's supreme court violated Germany's sovereignty in 2008 by judging that an Italian civilian, Luigi Ferrini, was entitled to reparations for his deportation to Germany in 1944 to work as a slave labourer.

Germany argued that the Italian ruling threw into doubt a restitution system put in place after the Nazis' defeat that has seen Germany pay tens of billions in reparations since the 1950s.

The 15-judge ICJ said in a 12-3 ruling that the Italian case violated Germany's long-standing immunity, which has been recognised in international law.

"The action of Italian courts in denying Germany immunity … constitutes a breach of the obligation owed by the Italian state to Germany," the court president, Hisashi Owada, said.

Rulings by the ICJ are final and binding on states.

German representatives argued last year that if the court sided with Italy, it would open the floodgates for restitution claims by individuals around the world, a situation it tried to avoid in negotiating reparation accords with Israel and with countries that had been occupied during the war, and with specific groups such as the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany.

The ICJ rejected Italy's argument that states' immunity did not apply in cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by one country's army on the territory of another country.

Italy's chief representative in the case, Paolo Pucci di Benisichi, said the result helped clarify the limits of states' legal immunity.

"We are not disappointed," he said. "Of course, I would have preferred a judgment that was closer to our line of defence."

He said Rome probably would not have launched the case at all had it not been for the fact that Italians interned by Germany during the war were not included in existing reparation schemes.

The court's judgment noted with "surprise and regret" that Germany had excluded such victims from compensation.

Although Italy was a German ally during the second world war, many Italians were deported by Nazi forces, interned in camps and used as slave labourers.

Rome's case was supported by Greece, whose citizens have similar claims against Germany.

MPs call for new law to make stalking a criminal offence

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:06:59 GMT

Pressure grows for stalking to be recognised as an offence in England and Wales, and for longer sentences to protect victims

Victims of stalkers could win new protection following completion of a major inquiry, which will this week recommend that a specific offence of stalking be created to combat the problem.

An all-party parliamentary group is to publish a report into its six-month investigation, arguing for a change in legislation that will see perpetrators given substantial prison sentences for any abuse, whether emotional or physical, that has been endured by their victims. The findings pre-empt a separate Home Office inquiry, which completes its consultation on how to protect stalking victims today.

Support for a new law in England and Wales is growing. David Cameron has already conceded that there is a gap in the current protection for stalking victims, while Home Office ministers Theresa May and Lynne Featherstone are understood to be sympathetic to demands for new legislation.

Elfyn Llwyd MP, chairman of the parliamentary group – which heard evidence from lawyers, psychologists, academics and the parents of murdered stalking victims – said: "We are very firmly of the view that there needs to be a change in the law. We've looked at other countries, such as the way Scotland has done it, and they have a law which resulted in several hundred successful prosecutions in the first year."

Llwyd, a former barrister, said it was critical that any changes to legislation be accompanied by an awareness campaign to ensure that crown prosecutors, police and the probation service begin to take the issue seriously. Of the estimated 120,000 cases of stalking each year, 53,000 are recorded as crimes by police and only one in 50 of these leads to an offender being jailed. High-profile cases include that of Clare Bernal, shot dead by her stalker in 2005 as she worked at the Harvey Nichols department store. Her murderer had been due in court the following week for harassing her.

"We need a commitment from government that the police are aware of the insidious and dangerous thing that stalking is," said Llwyd. Researchers recently found that two-thirds of victims said the police and prosecutors did not take their complaints sufficiently seriously.

One of the organisations driving the campaign for a new stalking law has been the probation union Napo, whose research indicates that thousands of perpetrators, mainly men, are not being dealt with seriously enough by the criminal justice system.

Harry Fletcher, the union's assistant general secretary, said: "The courts are not dealing with stalkers properly. Very few receive custodial sentences and those that do are not in prison long enough to receive treatment or rehabilitation." The union is concerned that prison sentences handed down to stalkers are so short that rehabilitation and treatment is impossible. Just 20 stalkers a year are jailed for longer than 12 months for putting a victim in fear of violence, Napo said.

Laura Richards, of the charity Protection Against Stalking, said: "We know first hand that, for too long, victims have suffered in silence or at the hands of the criminal justice system. The inquiry has now given them a voice."

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, another ardent supporter of the need to create a specific offence of stalking in England and Wales, said it was vital that any change in the law was not delayed. She warned that it could take two years for a new law to be introduced and urged peers to back an amendment tabled tomorrow that could lead to a quicker change being implemented. Cooper said: "Nearly one in five women over 16 have been a victim of stalking. The persistent and terrifying intimidation, threats and abuse can destroy people's lives and escalate into serious violence. Although progress has been made, the criminal justice system still isn't sensitive enough to the problem and too many victims still aren't getting the protection they need. That's why a change in the law is needed."

The UK supreme court: an interactive history

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:06:00 GMT

The UK's highest court of appeal has ruled on cases ranging from prenups to Star Wars helmets and the definition of a miscarriage of justice

Ken Clarke reveals plans to give divorced fathers more rights

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:34:56 GMT

Justice secretary says overhaul of family justice system will put emphasis on children's need for relationship with both parents

Ken Clarke, the justice secretary, is to publish proposals to give divorced and separated fathers stronger rights to see their children as part of an overhaul of the family justice system.

Grandparents are also expected to see their influence increased amid plans to consider how "parenting agreements" could be used to emphasise the need for parents to consider how the child can maintain a relationship with other close family members.

Other reforms include a six-month time limit for care and adoption cases in the courts, though Clarke insisted that flexibility would remain to ensure a time extension for complex cases where this was in the children's interest.

The key change in the process is the introduction of rules making clearer that it is vital youngsters enjoy "an ongoing relationship with both parents". Ministers have signalled that they will not offer the guarantee of equal access demanded by some fathers' rights groups but want to ensure no loving parent is "pushed out".

In a bid to prevent custody cases reaching the courts in the first place, the government will promise an extra £10m for mediation services.

Where parents do end up resorting to the law, it will examine ways to amend legislation to ensure no parents are excluded unless they pose a safety or welfare risk.

Clarke told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Monday: "We want to put back confidence that the courts will have proper regard to the position of fathers and the right of the child to have contact with the father, but of course in the end the interests of the child must be uppermost and it isn't always possible."

The change forms part of the government's response to a review led by former Whitehall mandarin David Norgrove – but is directly at odds with one of his main findings.

Norgrove voiced his "regret" last week that a legal right would be included despite his report warning it could cause "confusion, misinterpretation and false expectations". Similar changes in Australia led to delays in resolving custody disputes, he cautioned.

Clarke said Norgrove had initially recommended the move in his interim report but withdrew it following a visit to Australia. The justice secretary said the working group would have the "difficult task" of drafting a statement in the law of the "undoubted joint responsibilities of children, and the joint entitlements of children, without getting into the Australian problem, which was a disaster, because it led to a great increase in litigation with everybody arguing about shared time, and they didn't draft it very well. We have to draft it with care."

Clarke said: "We are stating what I think is the view of most people, that both parents have responsibilities and rights towards their children and the children are entitled to try to maintain contact with both parents if it's at all possible. But what we are doing is going to state that principle in the law, because there are far too many people who still think it's not being applied – though I do think the courts do apply it and try to apply it in most cases. But we are also going to have to draft what we do to avoid all the undoubted dangers in Australia which caused David Norgrove and his colleagues to be hesitant."

Clarke said one thing that needed to be addressed was what could be done where one parent, usually the mother, refused to comply with the order of the court allowing the father contact.

Asked whether, in the case of a non-complying parent, he would rather the child were removed so that the father had more rights, Clarke said such cases represented a small minority. "The hardcore ones require the judge to exercise the judgment of Solomon. What we are suggesting is that at an early stage the judge makes it clear he or she does have powers to transfer custody."

He added: "Of course it's right that the interests of the child will finally determine it, but I think at an earlier stage in the case it should be made perfectly clear that the court like any other court will expect to enforce its judgments. These are all very difficult areas. They are not capable of simple solutions."

Clarke denied there was an inconsistency between plans to increase the rights of parents in private law while, where care proceedings were concerned, the government was taking less account of parents' rights by imposing a six-month limit on care proceedings that could mean a child being taken into care sooner.

Clarke cited the "intolerable" delays in care proceedings that can lead to a child being taken into care and eventually sometimes to adoption. He said the six-month limit was recommended by Norgrove and was designed to speed up the process, but he said there would be cases where the judge would be under a duty to explain why it would have to take longer.

"If they can't sort it out within six months then the judge has to give reasons for the delay and the continued delay has to be tackled. Of course there will be some cases where it can't be done but at the moment there is far too much delay in the court … in the interest of the child you cannot leave the child either exposed to risk or in an uncertain situation, delay adoption as much as we do."

Ministers will also signal a desire to address complaints from grandparents' groups that their needs are often ignored when children's futures are being discussed.

Guidance will make clear that they should be formally considered when voluntary parenting agreements are being negotiated in an effort to avoid court action.

A working group involving five ministers to review the 1989 Children's Act will be unveiled on Monday.

Joblessness and 'toxic relations' with police are blamed for Tottenham riot

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:53:42 GMT

Citizens inquiry reports that London borough suffers from lack of employment and 'low self-esteem' after interviewing 700 locals

A "citizens inquiry" into the riots in Tottenham will conclude they were partly caused by high youth unemployment and toxic relations with local police, arguing the disorder reveals the need for a major regeneration project in the area.

The north London borough was the first place to suffer riots last summer, when a protest about the police shooting of local man Mark Duggan turned violent. The trouble which started in Tottenham exactly six months ago quickly spread across London and to other English cities.

The report produced by the Citizens Inquiry into the Tottenham Riots, a grassroots coalition of locals, reveals that many in the community believe their area was "left to burn".

The study, which involved interviews with 700 people, will be launched on Tuesday at an event hosted by Reading the Riots, the Guardian and London School of Economics study into the August disturbances.

More than 270 rioters were interviewed in the Reading the Riots study, which found the government had mistaken the role of gangs and social media in the riots. It also found that hostility toward police, particularly over the use of stop and search, was a big factor.

The home secretary, Theresa May, later announced a police review of the use of stop and search and the Metropolitan police commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, indicated the tactic is to be reformed in the capital.

The Tottenham report was written by a panel of nine commissioners, including four members of the clergy and a headteacher. It paints a picture of a community suffering from a poor reputation and low self-esteem.

It identified poor relations with police and a lack of jobs in the area as important "causes" of the riots. Criminal "opportunism" was also considered significant.

"From the stories we heard, there has been a long-term deterioration of the relationship between people in our community and the police, in particular young people from ethnic minorities," it will say. "Stop and search was frequently described as being excessive and disrespectful."

It adds: "A concerted effort is needed by all parties to rebuild a more positive relationship between community in Tottenham and the police" and says large numbers "feel Tottenham was left to burn".

The report proposes involving the community in the training of new police recruits in the Haringey borough and calls on the Met to "increase diversity" among its officers.

The Tottenham inquiry is one of scores of small-scale research inquiries taking place across England, as communities affected by the riots examine the violence and looting that blighted parts of Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester.

In Southwark, research by Harriet Harman MP found provision of youth services was crucial for preventing a return of the riots. Her inquiry called for more jobs and apprenticeships, sufficient police numbers and a new drive to improve relations with police.

A Hackney council-sponsored inquiry involving a poll of 2,000 residents unearthed complaints of a growing divide between rich and poor in the borough, concern over affordable housing and – as elsewhere – found desire for improved relations with police. Other post-riot initiatives are still underway in Ealing, Enfield, Croydon and Birmingham.

The independent communities and victims panel, which was set up by the three main political parties and has also taken evidence from riot-affected areas, will report back in March.

In Tottenham, much of the physical damage done by the fires is in the process of repair. A post office and job centre have been relocated, while moves are afoot to rebuild fire-hit Aldi and Carpetright stores. Haringey council has given £1.5m in grants and support to local businesses and is promising to invest £41m in a regeneration plan.

The Tottenham commissioners plan to call for money to be targeted at the creation of 1,000 new jobs for those aged 16-24 before 2014. "When we listened to young people who chose not to riot, their most important reason was that they had a stake in the community: family and community ties, education and job opportunities," the report states.

At the time of the riots there were 10,000 unemployed in the borough but just 367 job vacancies.

The commission also wants money to train 100 local "leaders" to oversee a transformation of the area.

The proposals are supported by Tottenham's MP, David Lammy. He said unemployment had risen in the area since August – one ward that suffered rioting now has the highest unemployment rate in the capital.

"We need a passport office or a students loan company here in Tottenham – a major public sector employer that will do something about the acutely worrying levels of unemployment," he said. Lammy also said he believed that there had been an increase since the riots in the police's use of the Section 60 power to stop and search.

Additional research by Yemisi Adegoke

Reading the riots – community conversations

Tottenham Tuesday 7 February. In partnership with North London Citizens. Bruce Grove Youth Centre, 10am-11.30am

Peckham Tuesday 21 February. In partnership with the Damilola Taylor Trust. Damilola Taylor Centre, 6pm-8pm

Croydon Thursday 23 February. In partnership with Croydon Voluntary Action. CVA Resource Centre, 6pm-8pm

Birmingham Tuesday 28 February. In partnership with the Haven Community Project. The Drum, 6pm-8pm

Liverpool Thursday 1 March. In partnership with the Unity Community Project. The Unity, Toxteth, 6pm-8pm

Manchester Tuesday 6 March. In partnership with Manchester's Social Action and Research Foundation. Friends Meeting House, 6pm-8pm

Salford Thursday 8 March. In partnership with the Social Action and Research Foundation. 2 Pendleton Gateway, 6pm-8pm

For information contact symeon.brown.casual@guardian.co.uk Sponsored by the Open Society Foundations

Rotherham's two-finger monument to American liberty reopens soon

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:00:00 GMT

That should read 'one-finger' for American readers. But here's welcoming the return of England's only tourist attraction with a cafe where you couldn't drink tea

There's a very welcome ceremony in Rotherham today which sheds light on one of the most interesting episodes of the north's long-standing and entirely justified truculence against centralised power.

The Mayor of Rotherham, Coun Shaun Wright, will preside over a topping-out ceremony at Boston Castle, a little fortified folly with overlooks the Don Valley and can just be glimpsed from the M1.

Its name derives from the USA's Boston and it was built to commemorate the famous Boston Tea Party, not in any spirit of revenge but entirely in support of the American rebels. The man who commissioned it in 1773, the third Earl of Effingham, was one of many northerners who backed George Washington & Co in what was in effect the UK's second civil war. The Northerner's colleague Jonathan Freedland has written a very good book about this: Bring Home the Revolution.

Effingham had a sense of humour and forbade tea-drinking in the folly, which is one of a series which make an excellent northern tour if you have a few days spare this summer. Three similar sites are the Greystoke folly-farms in Cumbria – Fort Putnam and Bunker Hill, named after a rebel general and an embarrassing (for us English) battle; the remains of the American Garden at Meanwoodside in Leeds; and the triumphal arch erected by the Gascoigne family at Parlington Park, also near Leeds, which has the splendidly treasonable inscription: Liberty in N. America Triumphant MDCCLXXXIII (1783).

Last time I visited Boston Castle it was in a terrible state, but that was ten years ago and the local council and Heritage Lottery Fund have since intervened. The unsightly Victorian extension has gone, fabric has been carefully repaired and all sorts of useful amenities are being installed for a new visitor centre and cafe including a lift to the turrets to let everyone admire the view.

The work is part of Rotherham and HLF's wider restoration of Clifton Park which was opened in 1876 to mark the centenary of the American declaration of independence. More on that happy occasion here.

The next happy occasion, the castle's reopening, should come later this year - and here's one thing: the ban on tea must surely remain. What a fantastic tourist attraction for Welcome to Yorkshire, especially for Americans and others from overseas: a place in England where you aren't allowed the national drink. Or at least have to pay a healthy fine.

Why a lasting power of attorney is not just for the elderly

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:01:06 GMT

Mental and physical incapacity can hit at any time, which is why charities recommend planning ahead to ease the potential burden on loved ones

We all know that we should write a will, but too few of us know we should also consider something called lasting power of attorney.

By 2025, more than 1 million people in the UK will have dementia, according to the Alzheimer's Society. One in five people over 85 already suffers from it, with rates significantly higher among women than men. Handling your financial affairs becomes virtually impossible – which is why charities who care for the elderly recommend everyone plans ahead to ease the potential burden on our relatives.

A lasting power of attorney (LPA) gives another individual the legal authority to look after specific aspects of your financial affairs or health and welfare should you lose the capacity to do so. It's not just for the elderly; younger people may become incapacitated through accident or illness.

If you do not have an LPA in place and later become mentally incapacitated, relatives may face long delays and expense in applying to the court of protection to get access and take control of your assets and finances.

LPAs are designed to be recognised by financial institutions, care homes and local authorities, as well as tax, benefits and pension authorities. They are legal documents that can be set up relatively cheaply, with or without the help of a solicitor. You may consider having one alongside your will.

LPAs were introduced in October 2007, replacing the previous system of enduring powers of attorney (EPA) – although an EPA created before October 2007 remains valid.

There are two types of LPA: one that can cover decisions about money matters, known as a property and financial affairs LPA, and one that can cover decisions about healthcare, known as a personal welfare LPA. A key difference is that a property and financial affairs LPA can be used while someone still has capacity, whereas a personal welfare LPA can only be used once they have lost it.

A person administering a property and financial affairs LPA can make decision on things such as buying and selling your property, dealing with your bills, running your bank accounts and investing your money. If they have a personal welfare LPA, they can generally make decisions about where you should live, how you should be treated medically, what you should eat and who you should have contact with.

You may choose anyone you trust as your attorney, provided they are over 18, not bankrupt and they are willing to take on the role, which is a serious responsibility. It is their duty to make all decisions in your best interests and they must follow certain principles set out in the Mental Capacity Act aimed at making sure you are encouraged to make your own decisions where possible. As a donor, you can restrict or specify the types of decisions the attorney can make, or you can allow them to make all decisions on your behalf.

To protect your interests, an LPA must be signed by a certificate provider – a solicitor or someone else of your choosing – who certifies that you understand the LPA and have not been pressurised into signing it. You could choose close friends or relatives (other than your chosen attorneys) who must be formally told that you are setting up an LPA and given the opportunity to raise any concerns.

Forms and guidance are free from the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) or call 0300 456 0300.

Registering the document can take up to three months and costs £130 per LPA, so £260 if you want to set up both a property and financial affairs LPA and a personal welfare LPA. Anyone on benefits, or who has an income of less than £12,000, can get an exemption or reduction.

So should you do it yourself or use a solicitor? Lucy Malenczuk, policy adviser on financial services for Age UK, says: "We would encourage people to read through the forms and guidance first and, if they want to set up something fairly simple and feel confident about their decisions and filling out the forms, then they don't have to have legal advice. But it's important to remember that an LPA is a serious, powerful document so, if in doubt, they may want to take legal advice."

Julia Abrey, head of elder law at law firm Withers, agrees that people who want to set up a straightforward LPA can do it themselves, although for something more complex, she recommends using a solicitor.

"Suppose you want to put in particular restrictions on what the attorney can do," she says. "This can be quite complicated to draft correctly and the risk is (if it is drafted incorrectly) the Office of the Public Guardian may sever a restriction or, in extreme cases, render the power of attorney invalid."

Natalie Walker, head of wills at Co-operative Legal Services, says that, without legal advice, there is the danger of making errors of judgment in drafting the form that can make life unintentionally difficult for your attorneys in the future, or which can cause the OPG to reject it.

If you decide to use a solicitor charges vary enormously, from around £400 to £1,000 including VAT, so do shop around. A good place to start is Solicitors for the Elderly, a national organisation of lawyers who provide specialist legal advice for older and vulnerable people, their families and carers, many of whom specialise in LPAs.

Age UK also publishes a useful guide, Arranging for Someone to Make Decisions about Your Finance or Welfare.

But it would be a mistake to give the impression that by setting up an LPA you will solve all future problems for your loved ones should you ever become incapacitated. Some banks and building societies are particularly bad when dealing with people trying to exercise existing powers of attorney on behalf of vulnerable relatives. Last autumn, Guardian journalist Brian Williams wrote of his frustration at trying to exercise the power of attorney he holds for his elderly mother. The response from readers revealed he was far from alone.

For information about making an LPA in Scotland click here, and here for information about the Office of Care and Protection and making powers of attorney in Northern Ireland.

Pakistan factory collapse traps scores

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:57:45 GMT

At least two dead after three-storey building in Lahore collapses, trapping mostly women and children in the rubble

At least two people were killed and up to 100 trapped, thought to be mostly women and children, after a factory collapsed in Lahore.

The desperate cries of children could be heard from beneath the rubble, including two sisters pleading to be pulled out, as rescuers battled to remove the debris of the three-storey factory. It appeared that the facility's boiler or stored gas cylinders had exploded at around 8.30am local time on Monday.

Reports said up to 100 people were stuck beneath wreckage, with two bodies and 15 injured pulled out by noon with the help of mechanical diggers. Many of the trapped were children, who had provided cheap labour at the medicine plant, which was located against regulations amid narrow streets in a residential area. It was believed the survivors could be trapped in the basement.

Angry residents said the factory had been previously closed up to five times on court orders but the political connections of its owners had got it reopened. The owner of the house adjoining the plant, which was also destroyed in the blast, said he had been fighting since 2005 to get police and the courts to shut the factory.

Senior Lahore city official Ahad Cheema, speaking to reporters at the scene, said: "Illegal commercial units are a big problem. It will take time to solve this issue. I'm told this factory was sealed two or three times."

The revelations about the illegality of the factory will add to the political problems of the provincial government of Punjab, which is run by the main opposition party. The administration of Shahbaz Sharif, brother of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, has been hit by multiple crisis of governance, including a deadly outbreak of Dengue fever in 2011 and a scandal this year over medicines given to heart patients at a public hospital that turned out to be poisonous and killed 120 people.

Kenneth Clarke to 'wipe slate clean' for hundreds of thousands of ex-offenders

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:31:01 GMT

Justice secretary wants to dramatically reduce the length of time ex-offenders must declare their convictions

The justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, is to "wipe the slate clean" for hundreds of thousands of offenders by dramatically shortening the period during which they are obliged to tell potential employers about their criminal past.

The radical reform of the 1974 Rehabilitation of Offenders Act will see the time after which the convictions of medium-term prisoners are "spent" reduced from 10 years to four.

The convictions of short-term prisoners, serving sentences up to six months, will be spent after two years instead of the current seven.

The proposed reform will also cover hundreds of thousands of people who have recently been fined or ordered to serve community sentences. They will no longer have to declare their criminal record after one year instead of the current five.

The changes will raise the threshold for prison sentences that are never spent from two and half years to four, on the basis that sentence lengths are much longer now than when the period was fixed in 1974.

One factor that will limit the impact of the changes is that the period after which a conviction is spent will be counted from the day an offender completes their sentence rather than, as currently, from the date of their conviction. In the case of someone serving a prison term of two and a half years, this means it will become spent after six and a half years, rather than 10.

The sweeping reductions in the periods after which convictions no longer have to be declared are the first changes to be proposed for nearly 30 years and are intended to be applied retrospectively. They will affect hundreds of thousands of offenders who have been convicted or served time in the last five years.

The proposals are likely to provoke a fresh clash with Conservative backbenchers when Clarke asks them to vote through the changes as government amendments to his legal aid, sentencing and punishment bill.

Clarke expects "a bit of a row" over the move, according to a tweet from the BBC's home editor, Mark Easton.

The justice minister Lord McNally said the changes were being made because it was "no good for anyone if they go to jail and come out and then can't get an honest job and so turn back to crime again". He said they would give offenders who had served their sentence a fair chance of getting back on the straight and narrow.

The Confederation of British Industry backed the changes. Katja Hall, CBI chief policy director, said that giving offenders the chance of a job when their sentence was complete could significantly reduce re-offending rates.

"These changes could help more offenders who have served their sentences to get jobs, assisting their rehabilitation. This benefits not only the offender but also the taxpayer and wider community by reducing the costs of repeat offending," she said.

"The most serious crimes will always need to be disclosed, but these new arrangements are a more proportionate balance between the seriousness of the offence committed and a prospective employer having the right information to assess the risk."

The reform was first proposed 10 years ago by Labour in a Cabinet Office social exclusion unit report on getting more ex-offenders into work.Ministers are basing their proposal on recent evidence that reoffending rates among ex-prisoners tail off sharply after two years.

Those who apply for jobs in sensitive areas such as working with children or vulnerable adults, in law enforcement, or high-level financial positions will have to declare any criminal record to potential employers and are exempt from the provisions.

Paul McDowell, chief executive of Nacro, the crime reduction charity, welcomed the changes but said they did not go far enough. "These long-overdue reforms will significantly help those people who have offended in the past and are now living law-abiding lives. These people face barriers to employment because of old criminal records hanging around their necks," he said.

But he said the 1974 act would still present barriers to people who had put their offending behind them, particularly those who had served four or more years in prison.

Legal bid to free killer whales is 'strategic error', says conservationist

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 11:42:57 GMT

Biologist warns that Peta's attempt to apply US constitution to non-humans at SeaWorld could undermine scientific argument

A legal bid to free five orcas from captivity at SeaWorld on the grounds that their "enslavement" is in violation of the US constitution is a "strategic error", a conservationist has warned.

The case, brought by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) against SeaWorld in the US, to be heard this week, has triggered controversy over applying the 13th amendment – which abolished "slavery or involuntary servitude" in America – to non-humans such as killer whales.

In the UK, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society senior biologist Philippa Brakes said that taking a large-brained mammal, which would naturally range in groups over a huge area, against its will and putting it alone in a situation where it was harming itself because of its misery "amounts to slavery".

But she said most of the public would not necessarily see it that way, and they enjoyed seeing orcas and dolphins in marine zoos without being aware of the "hideous lives they're leading".

In the US, Peta has faced criticism over its bid to pursue the freedom of an animal under the 13th amendment.

While the case would bring publicity to the issue of the rights or interests of "non-human persons", something for which some people have been arguing for a long time, if the case fails and there is then case law history against recognising those rights, that would not be helpful for the cause, Brakes warned.

"I would love to be wrong, and that they find for the orcas in this case, but I doubt very much that's going to happen, and I think it's a strategic error," she said.

She said those concerned for the welfare of mammals, in captivity and in the wild, should use the increasing body of science that showed that they were intelligent creatures capable of suffering in order to argue for their interests to be recognised – not as equal to humans, but still "persons" with rights.

The science showed that cetaceans are big-brained marine mammals which form complex societies and even have different cultures within species in different parts of the world, she said. And it was important to take people along with the movement towards recognising the legal rights of non-humans.

"It's more than court cases, it's really about changing people's attitudes and understanding," she said.

While Peta's court case may not deliver freedom for killer whales, Brakes said: "I do think a tipping point is coming. We have to use the science to argue to that tipping point. All we're trying to do is have the genuine interests of these animals recognised."

Revolving door at Scotland Yard keeps spinning

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:10:00 GMT

Another departure of a senior Metropolitan police figure

The revolving door at Scotland Yard keeps spinning, as more senior figures depart in what might start looking like an exodus.

Commander David Zinzan, the top cop in south-east London, is understood to be the latest experienced figure to be preparing to quit.

Having served his 30 years, Zinzan is understood to have made the decision not to stay on at the Yard. The hugely popular and committed police officer is renowned for his dedication to his beat; the tough streets of south-east London where serious youth violence, gangland shootings and street gangs are a major issue.

He prepares to leave as the commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe, with his new top team, begins a shake up of the boroughs, in which all 32 borough commanders face what some have called a "Wire" style grilling over their performance.

His departure comes on the heels of many other senior figures since the arrival of Hogan-Howe - some for promotion, some for the lure of the private sector and some for peace and quiet: assistant commissioner Ian McPherson, deputy commissioner Tim Godwin, Caroline Murdoch, acting head of the directorate of public affairs, Commander Simon Pountain, assistant commissioner Lynne Owens who has taken up the chief constable job at Surrey and Anne McMeel, director of resources.

As they leave, Hogan-Howe is looking outside for replacements - a future recruit could be Pat Gallon, ex of his old beat in Merseyside where she is assistant chief constable.

Such comings and goings at so senior a level take place with the Olympics just around the corner...

Poster child for Tesco law in Australia heads to UK | Neil Rose

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:43:10 GMT

Race for the consumer legal market begins with news that Australia's Slater & Gordon is to buy Russell Jones & Walker

Though the first alternative business structure (ABS) has yet to be announced – 92 have so far applied, with the first likely to receive its licence later this month – the ball is starting to roll, and personal injury is the first area of legal practice targeted by new entrants to the market.

Last week AIM-listed Quindell Group agreed to acquire Liverpool personal injury law firm Silverbeck Rymer for £19.3m as part of a move to create an integrated claims-handling operation for the insurance industry. This week, Australia's Slater & Gordon (S&G) – the world's first publicly listed law firm – announced it is to buy national law firm Russell Jones & Walker (RJW) for £54m as it enters the UK market with a bang.

Both deals are dependent on being granted ABS licences, although the S&G deal – while eye-opening for several reasons – is more traditional in that it is one law firm taking over another. I would expect them to make this a positive by trumpeting their independence from outside influences (not to say Silverbeck Rymer will act any less independently, of course); when it listed, S&G's prospectus made it clear to investors that its duties were first to the court, then to its clients and only then to shareholders.

S&G and RJW share a similar heritage, starting life before the second world war acting for injured trade unionists before broadening out into other areas of work. But they remain at heart personal injury practices (60% of its business in the case of RJW). They now share the ambition of becoming one of the dominant consumer legal brands, jostling for position with the likes of QualitySolicitors, Co-operative Legal Services and Irwin Mitchell.

Though RJW's name will not yet register with consumers, that of Claims Direct will, the once-damaged brand that the firm bought and resuscitated over recent years as its direct route to market.

S&G has done this before. The poster child for ABSs after groundbreaking liberalisation in Australia allowed it to go public in May 2007, access to capital has enabled it to grow very rapidly, largely through an acquisition spree that has seen S&G swallow up 20 practices across Australia: turnover has nearly tripled to A$182m (£123m), staff numbers have increased from 420 to 1,100 and office locations have gone from 26 to 61. It now estimates that it has around 25% of the personal injury market and claims strong name recognition in the streets of Sydney, Melbourne and the rest.

RJW is similar in size to the pre-floatation S&G and it would be no surprise to see it grow in a similar way. These two are not put off by the Jackson reforms contained in the legal aid bill, implementation of which the government announced this week will be put back from October 2012 to April 2013. Though these are likely to reduce solicitors' profits from personal injury work, there will clearly still be a lot of cases out there. It seems likely volume will be key to making it work and obviously larger, well-resourced firms with rigorous systems will be best equipped for this.

Also, S&G comes from a different litigation world, where after-the-event insurance in particular is unknown and so is arguably more prepared than most to operate in the post-Jackson environment. Further, S&G's access to funds has given it the wherewithal to take on big consumer and investor class actions (it currently has 29 on the go); given the difficulties law firms over here face in bringing such cases, this is a particularly interesting prospect.

There is no doubt that the gun has been fired on the race for the consumer legal market, with more new entrants in the offing. Silverbeck Rymer and RJW may be among the first to show their hand, but they will not be the last.

Neil Rose is the editor of legalfutures.co.uk