Jonathan Rayner's blogs

Here’s a worthwhile research project: what would you do with £12m? A vineyard in France, with an Aston Martin in the garage? Or would you spend it on a piece of research that concludes, surely to nobody’s surprise, that the law is not the best instrument to settle disputes about religious freedom and equality?

That’s a no-brainer, Mr Rayner, my imaginary audience choruses.

But is it really a no-brainer? Apologists for apparently pointless research claim that even the most speculative projects sometimes produce gold dust. They point to penicillin, the medicinal properties of which were discovered quite by chance. The same serendipity applies to such established scientific theories as relativity and evolution, apparently.

Now don’t hold your breath, but linguists everywhere are hoping that research published in 2007 revealing that rats can’t always tell the difference between Japanese spoken backwards and Dutch spoken backwards might also take its place in the roll call of findings that changed the world.

Scientists are similarly optimistic about 2003 research into pressures generated when penguins have bowel movements, not to mention the 2006 finding that malaria mosquitoes are as attracted to human foot odour as they are to Germany’s famously smelly Limburger cheese.

There are even annual prizes for improbable research projects. These are called the Ig Nobel (‘ignoble’ - geddit?) Prizes and the next awards ceremony is on 20 September this year.

On past Ig Nobel performances, these projects add immeasurably to human knowledge. In 2011, for instance, an international team of European researchers was honoured for a study showing that there was no evidence for contagious yawning in red-footed tortoises.

Two years earlier, a Dr Elena Bodnar won a prize for inventing a brassiere that quickly converts into two protective facemasks. And then there was the 1996 prize-winning structured theory of procrastination and the 1983 discovery that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle.

Or maybe you would prefer the Ig Nobel Peace Prize-winning Lithuanian mayor, who demonstrated on video that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars could be easily solved by running them over with an armoured combat vehicle.

But as I’m sure some research somewhere revealed to a startled world, bloggers frequently digress - and I am no exception. Let’s get back to that research about the law and religion.

The press release, headlined Law can't resolve religious disputes, say legal experts, reports that two ‘leading scholars of law and religion’ claim that, according to their research findings, most disputes about religious freedom and equality are best solved out of court. They call for ‘common sense, respect and restraint’ when dealing with such disputes.

One of the leading scholars, Kings College London law professor Maleiha Malik, says freedom of religion does not exempt people from behaving with respect towards those with whom they disagree, ‘including gay people’.

Freedom of expression should not be used as an excuse to insult religious people, the other leading scholar, Newcastle University emeritus professor of political philosophy says.

This research, which many would say states the bleedin’ obvious, was supported by the £12m ‘Religion and Society Programme’, which is funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.

Perhaps the press release was written in a hurry, which is why the research findings sound so facile: don’t behave disrespectfully to gay people, don’t use religion to justify insulting others. But at least programme director Linda Woodhead speaks sense. Equality law and appeals to freedom are being hijacked by the aggressive fringes of religion and secularism to fight their ideological battles, she says.

‘These groups don't represent the majority of religious and non-religious people. Yet a string of recent cases, often pushed by campaign groups, has created a needless sense of polarisation in society. We're descending into a politics of mutual loathing and self-righteous indignation, and issues which could be solved with a bit of common sense and mutual respect are becoming unnecessarily divisive,’ she says.

That quote alone should be enough to disqualify this particular piece of research from the Ig Nobel Prize 2012.

So my money for a prize, particularly in the light of the forthcoming local government elections, is on this month’s research showing that democracies would be better off if citizens chose some of their politicians at random. Apparently, the scientists made a simple calculation model that mimics the way modern parliaments work, including the effects of particular political parties or coalitions…

They are called didicoys or pikeys in Kent and they are the subject of an admonishing letter sent to the UK government by the Strasbourg court, which is again venturing into a part of the British psyche where even angels fear to tread.

First the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg told us to allow prisoners to vote in elections, which caused outrage and made our prime minister feel quite nauseous. And now it is telling us to provide didicoys and pikeys with ‘adequate housing’.

Didicoy and pikey, for those of you not familiar with the gamut of race hate words, are pejorative terms that refer to Gypsies and Travellers. These people have been persecuted for centuries and still meet considerable prejudice in Central Europe, to the extent that the improbably named French actress Fanny Ardent produced and starred in a film to raise awareness of their plight.

Gypsies and Travellers were among the victims of the Nazi final solution in World War II, when hundreds of thousands of them were gassed or slave-laboured to death along with millions of Jews, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, resistance fighters and others. (I can recommend a novel on the persecution of Gypsies and Travellers in World War II: Fires in the Dark by Louise Doughty.)

Gypsies and Travellers are still getting a raw deal in the UK, according to a letter that Council of Europe commissioner for human rights Thomas Hammarberg sent to this country’s secretary of state for communities and local government Eric Pickles on 1 March.

Hammarberg wrote that the UK must uphold the rights of Gypsies and Travellers to adequate housing, which is a ‘pre-condition for the enjoyment of other human rights, including the rights to education and health’.

He noted that more than 100 Gypsy and Traveller children were evicted from Dale Farm in Basildon, Essex in contravention of the United Nations convention on the rights of the child. He also writes that around a quarter of the 60-70,000 Gypsies and Travellers living in caravans in the UK are occupying unauthorised encampments because the relevant local authority has not met its duty to find them somewhere appropriate to settle.

He 'calls on the secretary of state to ensure that local authorities are made aware of the UK’s obligation to respect the right to adequate housing for all, including Gypsies and Travellers, and to deploy all efforts to identify sustainable solutions, respectful of cultural diversity.'

How dare an unelected bureaucrat say all this to us, a mature democracy and the home of the magna carta? Well, he is actually reading us the riot act in the form of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which we are a signatory and which maintains that certain rights are due to humans simply because they are humans.

The Convention draws no distinction between humans who happen to be Jews or gentiles, homosexuals or heterosexuals, Communists or Tories, adherents of the Jehovah’s Witnesses or members of the Church of England. All humans are entitled to these basic human rights, the Convention holds, even those who - for example - don’t pay council tax or refuse to live in settled communities.

Treating Gypsies and Travellers right is going to upset a lot of people, not least the good folk of Essex who lived for years in the shadow of Dale Farm. But maybe salvation is at hand in the form of the coalition’s plans to reform the European Court of Human Rights during the UK’s six months’ presidency.

These plans, in draft form, have been leaked before the Brighton Ministerial Conference on 18-20 April. ‘Ministerial’ in this context means ministers from all 47 member states of the Council of Europe, who are supposed to come to Brighton and agree to our prime minister’s plans to streamline how the court works.

More importantly still, the prime minister is to push the idea of greater ‘subsidiarity’, by which he means national courts assuming responsibility for judgments in most cases, leaving the Strasbourg court free to focus on the worst, most flagrant human rights violations. This should mean that the Strasbourg court interferes less in our sovereign affairs, believes Cameron and other Tories, and will mean an end to diktats about giving prisoners the vote and ensuring accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers.

Cameron hasn’t a great track record for getting Europe to follow his lead, but he just might pull it off this time. And we just might see 47 pigs flying over Brighton pier, too.

Jonathan Rayner is a reporter on the Gazette

It’s been a fraught and, in one instance, poignantly tragic month for three detained individuals who gained their liberty. We have had ‘fanatical hate preacher’ Abu Qatada’s release from jail after almost a decade’s detention without charge.

We have had a prisoner dressed in blue and yellow pyjamas, not dissimilar to the ones my children wore when toddlers, who escaped from a van while being taken from prison to court. And we have had a Supreme Court ruling on the tragic case of a patient who had voluntarily admitted herself to mental hospital and who, upon being granted permission to go home for a couple of days, hanged herself.

Let’s start with the patient. Melanie Rabone had a history of depression. She tried to commit suicide on 4 March 2005 and was admitted to Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, Manchester. She was discharged on 18 March 2005, but on 31 March 2005 slashed both her wrists with broken glass. No hospital beds were available, so on 6 April 2005 she was seen as an outpatient.

On 11 April 2005, she again attempted suicide and this time agreed to an informal admission to the hospital.

Patients opt for informal admission because then they won’t have the perceived stigma of a Mental Health Act (MHA) section on their record. In practice, however, most patients admitted in this way are promptly sectioned if they decide to discharge themselves before the doctors think they are ready to leave. This is what should have happened with Melanie - but didn’t.

When she was admitted, a senior house officer noted that if she attempted or demanded to leave, she should be assessed for detention (for sectioning) under the MHA. She was prescribed a course of drugs and, judged a moderate to high suicide risk, was kept under observation every 15 minutes.

Tragically, a doctor who had just returned from leave was told on 19 April 2005 that Melanie wanted to go home for a couple of days. He gave his permission, she went home and, on 20 April 2005, 24-year-old Melanie hanged herself.

Melanie’s parents brought a claim to establish, among other things, whether the hospital trust had a duty under article two (right to life) of the Human Rights Act (HRA) to protect their daughter’s life as a non-detained patient.

Last week, after a six-year battle through the courts, the Supreme Court finally ruled in their favour, confirming that, as a non-detained patient, the hospital trust had an operational duty to protect Melanie’s life under the HRA and that there was a real and immediate risk of suicide that was known to the hospital.

The court also ruled that the trust failed to do all that could reasonably have been expected to prevent that risk, and that Melanie’s parents were entitled to compensation for their bereavement,

It was a satisfactory outcome to a tragic case, with the HRA doing its bit to see justice done.

But what of ‘fanatical’ Abu Qatada, that hate figure who has made a mockery of British law by hiding behind the ample skirts of the European Convention on Human Rights - and of our domestic version of it, the aforementioned HRA?

Well, he’s not done great so far with human rights or, indeed, British law - we don’t need those awful Europeans to tell us that we don’t lock up people for a decade without charging them.

We crossed that bridge back in 1215 with clause 39 of the Magna Carta: ‘No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.’

There is also the small matter of the 1679 Habeas Corpus Act, which protects us from being arrested without charge. We supposedly gave up on torture some time ago, too, but the ‘war on terror’ has done for that particular good intention.

Returning to Abu Qatada, he has now been released. Or nominally released (he is under curfew 22 hours a day and is restricted in his movements and with whom he associates. It’s not what most of us would call freedom).

If he’s really this guilty, why on earth don’t we charge him? If we can’t make terrorism charges stick, we could always do an Al Capone and put him away for a lesser charge (tax evasion was Capone’s downfall) - if, I repeat, he’s really this guilty.

And finally, we return to the garishly dressed suspected murderer John Anslow, 31, who was sprung from a police van on the way to court by a masked gang armed with knives and sledgehammers. Three weeks later he is still on the run, presumably having shed his blue and yellow PJs.

It’s like something from a film - and nothing like the gritty reality of bereaved parents grinding through the courts for six years until they can finally say: ‘Unfortunately this won’t help Melanie, but we have to find something positive from this and it gives us some comfort to see that justice has at last been done and that other patients like Melanie will be afforded more protection. I wish we could go and tell her.’

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It had taken three months and 11 days to get there - a room in a police station looking at individual mugshots of nine villainous-looking young men on a flat screen computer.

It was Friday 13 January 2012 and the moment of truth was upon us. Could we identify the guy who on 2 October 2011 we had spotted stealing lead from some garage roofs?

The bloke I had seen, and helped the police arrest and charge, had fought with the police officer, spat in his face, swore terrible revenge upon me for getting him nicked and generally behaved like a living-and-breathing lowlife.

My partner, on the other hand, had seen him only for a couple of minutes.

But both of us agreed, when we were allowed to confer after the ID process was completed, that these static mugshots were not what we had been expecting.

They each showed a young man looking straight up at the camera, with the same shaved haircut and no facial whiskers. There were no faces in profile, no voices to recognise, no mannerisms, no sense of height.

It was going to be a tough call. What had happened to the identity parade beloved of television and films, such as The Usual Suspects? The support officer running the ID process had been in the job for more than 20 years and he told me how it used to be done.

They would send a police bus into town to pick up volunteers who were keen to earn a few quid standing in an identity parade. The volunteers would even get fed, the support officer told me, and it sure beat working for a living.

That’s all changed. Police forces now use Video Identification Parade Electronic Recording (VIPER) to run the show. This is a system with a huge database of volunteers willing to be videoed and displayed beside suspects of the same age, weight, ethnicity and gender as them.

Technicians can manipulate the images, where necessary, to add the appropriate hairstyle and hair colouring. They can also pixelate distinguishing features, like scars and tattoos, while ensuring that all the other mugshots have the same pixelation in the same places.

This saves the public purse money in several ways. Identification parades can be conducted anywhere - you can even take the photos on a laptop computer to the victim’s home. Expensive-to-organise parades aren’t cancelled because, as commonly happens, the suspect fails to turn up at the police station. And you don’t have to keep on paying work-shy volunteers to attend the police station, week in and week out.

Great idea all round, you might say, except isn’t the new system, with its characterless static mugshots, making it just a tad too easy for the bad guys to get off?

So how did we get on? My partner was first into the identification suite and, at first, couldn’t decide between photographs number six and seven. She decided on number six.

With no contact between us, I was next into the identification suite. I chose photograph number seven.

We were not told if either of us or neither of us had got the right guy because that could compromise the prosecution. It was an interesting experience and we had done our civic duty, but it had cost us 70 miles in petrol and taken all the morning and half the afternoon of a working day.

One of the benefits of VIPER, we are told, is the id parade can take place anywhere - even the home of the victim. So why did we have to schlep half way across the county? Ho-hum. Let’s just hope one of us identified the right guy.