December 1st
This week, The Justice Beat focuses on Brexit, the gig economy, suicides in the courtroom, and invites you to a CrowdJustice breakfast roundtable.
A big question on Brexit
1. Four Scottish politicians are taking a case in the Court of Sessions in Edinburgh to request a referral to the ECJ in relation to whether the UK alone can decide to leave the EU, or whether every European member state must decide to “cancel” Article 50. The Guardian says the case “will strengthen efforts by campaigners to block Brexit after the deal is finalised.” The politicians are being advised pro bono by Jolyon Maugham QC of the Good Law Project, and are crowdfunding for legal costs associated with permission and adverse costs.
2. And as to the question of what lies ahead for Brexit, the CrowdJustice-funded group that intervened in the Miller case to champion individual rights issues, The People’s Challenge, has today published an updated version of its Legal Milestones Guide to give readers a sense of the direction of travel, the points at which the politics of Brexit must give way to the demands of the law and how some of the fundamental rights individuals currently enjoy, thanks to the UK’s membership of the EU, might be protected for the future, writes John Halford of Bindmans LLP in a blog.
Gig economy
3. The ECJ has ruled that workers are entitled to paid leave and can claim compensation if they are not allowed to take their holidays, even if they are ostensibly “self-employed” and their contract does not specify an entitlement to paid leave, reports the Guardian. In this case, the claimant, a window salesman, had been paid entirely on commission and his contract described him as self-employed.
4. The gig economy is generally under fire, as courts try to balance innovation and workers’ rights. After two Uber drivers in London successfully persuaded an employment tribunal that Uber should not be able to classify them as “independent contractors”, Uber has applied to the Supreme Court to appeal, reports the FT.
A suicide in plain site at the UN
5. The ICTY, the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, witnessed a moment of terrible courtroom theatre. Immediately after a conviction was handed down for Bosnian Croat general Slobodan Praljak, he dramatically held up, and drank a bottle of poison in the courtroom. He died a few hours later. Many have wondered how he procured the bottle of poison and snuck it into the courtroom. (Our Justice Beat reporter once saw firsthand Vojislav Šešelj, one of the accused at the ICTY who was later acquitted, sneak prison food into the courtroom and try to coax the judge into eating it, to illustrate how bad cafeteria food was in prison.) In any event, the spectacle is likely to have longer term implications for how the war crimes tribunal is perceived.
A breakfast event worth joining
6. As the Justice Beat reported recently, Quaker Sam Walton and Methodist Reverend Daniel Woodhouse, who managed to get past several security barriers at BAE Systems to try to disarm a warplane being sold to Saudi Arabia, were nonetheless acquitted of criminal damage. Sam Walton, one of the two activists, and his legal team at Bindmans and Matrix, are speaking about the legal case at a breakfast roundtable at CrowdJustice on 13 December. You can RSVP here – space is limited.
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This week on CrowdJustice, an LSE cleaner fights back against homophobia in the workplace, the Centre for Criminal Appeals launch their Innocence Initiative Christmas Appeal and a Nepalese family seek British citizenship for their autistic son.