Tom Hickman

Keir Starmer​ has made several eye-catching appointments to his new government from outside Parliament, continuing the practice of his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, who appointed David Cameron as foreign secretary last November, making him a peer in order to do so. Many find the practice of making outside appointments constitutionally suspect. However, the constitutional issue that requires...

In the end,​ the government lost its appeal to the Supreme Court in the Rwanda case hands down. In a unanimous ruling on 15 November, the court held that asylum seekers transferred to Rwanda faced a real risk of being wrongly returned to their countries of origin. The court could have said simply that there was no legal error in the Court of Appeal’s assessment of the evidence. But it...

On​ 29 June, two days after the government announced it was shelving its Bill of Rights Bill, the Court of Appeal ruled that the government’s policy of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda breached the European Convention on Human Rights, reigniting calls on the right for the UK to withdraw from the convention. When it introduced the Bill of Rights in 2022, the government promised that the...

The United Kingdom​ might soon have its first bill of rights since the English Bill of Rights of 1688. On 14 December last year, the government published the much anticipated Independent Human Rights Act Review (IHRAR), which sets out the conclusions of a ten-month inquiry by an independent panel of experts into the operation of the Human Rights Act 1998. At the same time, the Ministry of...