Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen, including David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs 3.40pm GMT PHILIP HAMMOND, the foreign secretary, is giving evidence to the Commons European scrutiny committee. I won’t be covering the hearing in full, but I will post any hightlights. SIR BILL CASH, the committee chairman, starts by asking how the EU agreement proposed by Donald Tusk, the European Union president, will be legally binding. 3.11pm GMT If Boris Johnson is looking a reason as to why he should not back David Cameron’s EU renegotiation, he need only ask his wife. MARINA WHEELER has just written a lengthy blog, also published on the Spectator website in a shortened form under the headline: “Why David Cameron’s EU deal is not enough.” Wheeler is a human rights lawyer who has just taken silk (become a QC), and so one would have to be particularly foolish to assume that she lets her husband tell her what to think. Still, the intervention is bound to make people wonder whether there is some Johnson household operation going on. Wheeler is not known for publishing articles criticising government policy. In English courts, however, another picture has been emerging. Take the case of ‘NS’, an Afghan asylum seeker who arrived in the UK seven years ago. Given that he had come via Greece, where he had been arrested, the UK sought to return him there under the Dublin Convention. But he argued that the treatment of asylum seekers in Greece amounted to ‘degrading’ treatment, contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights. He also sought to invoke the Charter of Fundamental Rights — which, according to Messrs Blair, Miliband and Clarke, should have been legally impossible. This was referred to the Court of Justice in Luxembourg which ruled (in effect, and after some domestic backsliding) that the British opt-out had no legal force and the Charter of Fundamental Rights applied in the UK in precisely the same way as in any other member state. Since then, the English courts have increasingly been urged to recognise and give effect to new Charter-based rights in areas of law as diverse as employment disputes, immigration and asylum claims. Continue reading...
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