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Mayor pledges review of taxi driver bans over concerns they were 'unjust'


Anderson responds to campaign from Hackney drivers pleas over way committee revokes licences

Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson pledges review of taxi driver bans over concerns they were 'unjust'

Mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson has pledged a review of cases of taxi drivers being banned from work amid concerns about the way the council’s licensing committee has been revoking licences.

He said he would have all decisions where there is a dispute looked at again in order to make sure the judgements were valid.

The move comes after a long-running campaign by Liverpool Taxi Alliance reached a head with its leader Jimmy Bradley accusing the council of using a “kangaroo court” system that was robbing people of their livelihoods.

But while the Alliance welcomed the Mayor’s promise, senior council sources said they were confident the move would play out in their favour because the decisions would be found to be justified.

The council’s taxi licensing committee meets on a regular basis to decide on various issues, including the fitness of drivers to hold permits to trade. Much of its time is spent dealing with applications from people with criminal convictions, and deciding whether or not they should be allowed on the roads.

It also deals with cherry picking and other enforcement cases, and its sanctions can range from a full licence ban to “a strongly worded letter”.

But Mr Bradley said it was his belief that the way the cases were being handled was unfair, and that often the accused driver is not able to fully challenge “hearsay” evidence put against him.

He also alleged evidence is put to the committee in a “clandestine” pre-hearing, and that the complainant leaves the meeting before the driver is able to come and cross examine the allegations.

Mr Bradley told a council meeting: “The nature of these hearings are akin to the Hearings that take place within the Special Immigration Appeals Commission that are reserved for Control Order applications on terrorists by Central Government.

“We are told by the Trade that it appears to the many drivers affected, that this is a “Kangaroo Court” that is operating above the law.”

Mayor Anderson said: “It is absolutely not in the interest of me or this council to try to stop any person in Liverpool in the taxi trade from trying to do a job and earn a decent living.

“I will get the city solicitor to bring in someone independent to review any cases to see if they have been dealt with in an unjust way.

“All my working life I’ve believed in natural justice and everyone should get the opportunity to defend their case and if someone accused does not get the opportunity to defend their case.”

source: http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/may ... er-7823629

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Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin

Must be an election due.

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IDFIMH

The human rights argument is quite interesting - I know of no council that allows the accused to confront the accuser -



Time for the UK supreme court to think again on hearsay

Once again, the European court of human rights has protected a right apparently better understood abroad than at home

theguardian.com, Thursday 15 December 2011

The UK supreme court in Horncastle lost sight of a fundamental common law principle. The ruling of the European court of human rights' grand chamber in the case of Imad al-Khawaja will help to remind them of its importance.

"Let my accuser come face to face and be deposed!'' cried Sir Walter Raleigh at his trial for high treason in 1603. His complaint was that he had been deprived of a centuries-old common law right: that of an accused person to confront and cross-examine the witnesses against him or her.

This idea of "face-to-face'' confrontation has long been one of the most basic safeguards of the common law right to a fair trial. When asked to decide between competing accusations of treason, for instance, Shakespeare's Richard II declares that "face to face/ And frowning brow to brow, ourselves will hear/ The accuser and the accused freely speak". And the King James Bible tells us that it "is not in the manner of the Romans to condemn a man to die unless he has his accuser face to face''.

So important was this common law right to cross-examine the witnesses against you that it became the basis for the "confrontation clause'' in the sixth amendment of the US Bill of Rights, as well as the right to cross-examine witnesses under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European convention on human rights.

Would you know any of this if you read the judgment of the UK supreme court in R v Horncastle, in which the court invited the Strasbourg court to "think again'' concerning its ruling in the al-Khawaja case? Probably not. For reasons best known only to themselves, the supreme court decided that the provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 that allowed the use of hearsay were a more important feature of English law than the venerable common law right of confrontation upheld by the European court.

To be fair, the old hearsay rule – probably the most convoluted rule in the English law of evidence – was sorely in need of reform. But it was ultimately designed to prevent a very basic kind of injustice: ie people being convicted on the basis of testimony that had not been subject to cross-examination. To read the supreme court's judgment in Horncastle, by contrast, you might think that this amounted to nothing more than a right to be convicted on the basis of uncross-examined testimony that a high court judge sitting alone found sufficiently plausible.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with the core principle highlighted by the supreme court in Horncastle. It is surely right that the court ask Strasbourg to think again if it believes Strasbourg got the law wrong. Indeed, this has already happened several times since the Human Rights Act came into force, although without any the fuss that seems to have accompanied al-Khawaja. If, for example, the European court were ever to make a ruling that restricted abortion rights, you would certainly hope that our supreme court would challenge Strasbourg's analysis.

What is genuinely bizarre was the supreme court's choice of subject matter. It did not go to bat on behalf of a fundamental common law principle. Instead, it went to bat against it, on behalf of the same dodgy piece of legislation that eroded the right of trial by jury and raised the maximum period of pre-charge detention from seven to 14 days.

What does this all this show? First of all, it shows that just because Britain's judges are unanimous about something, that does not mean they are right. Indeed, when it comes to human rights, it would hardly be the first time in recent years that they have been wrong. If it had been left to the UK courts, for instance, we would still have stop and search without reasonable suspicion under the Terrorism Act 2000, and the indefinite retention of the DNA of people neither charged nor convicted of a criminal offence. In both cases, no less than 13 UK judges apiece declared that there was no human rights violation. The European court of human rights was the only court to recognise that indefinite retention of innocent people's DNA and stop and search without reasonable suspicion were genuine breaches of fundamental rights.

The Strasbourg court is not perfect. No court is. But the problems of the court are grossly exaggerated, at least as far as the UK is concerned. Unelected judges? Actually, theirs are elected, ours aren't. Judges from tiny jurisdictions ruling over larger countries? True, but then the supreme court always has two judges from Scotland (population 5 million) and one from Northern Ireland (1.75 million) and nobody doubts their quality.

A huge backlog of cases? Again true, but most of those end up being ruled inadmissible in any event. The number of cases against the UK has never been large by comparison with those from Russia and Turkey, for instance. Most striking is how much value for money the court delivers on what is, on a per capita or per case basis, a shoestring budget compared with your average county court in England and Wales.

The irony here is that the common law right of confrontation is exactly the kind of right that UK courts should be expected to defend, the kind of traditional liberty that you might expect to be at the heart of any British bill of rights worth the name. Although the grand chamber somewhat fudged its application of the "sole or decisive'' rule in one of the complaints in al–Khawaja, it nonetheless rejected the UK government's wholesale attack on its jurisprudence.

Once again, it has fallen to the European court of human rights to protect a right that is apparently better understood abroad than at home. The court's role should be celebrated by anyone who values the common law. The fact that it probably won't be shows just how febrile the UK debate on rights has become.


Eric Metcalfe is a barrister at Monckton Chambers. He was previously director of human rights policy at JUSTICE, which intervened in Al Khawaja before the European court of human rights

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Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin

Kangaroo courts possibly ........the lesson here never represent yourself ALWAYS be represented by a TU official/ Taxi association/ solicitor/ never yourself!

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All posts by this contributor are made in a strictly personal capacity

I AM PROUD TO BE A CITIZEN NOBODY'S SUBJECT http://www.republic.org.u

F88K EM ALL WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND

BOOZE BOOZE BOOZE

I was told yesterday that the unite union in Liverpool refused to represent a number of drivers, let alone appeal. But TT is right.

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Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin

That union is only interested in plate values and wetting their beaks on training.

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IDFIMH

I know nothing of Unites reasoning behind that decision which will not have been taken lightly ...................but be aware you wont get any Union representing you on any issue that PREDATES your membership.

So many in this industry got a problem utilised a Unions resources and then shamefully resigned from the Union once their problem had been dealt with,,,,,,,,,,,typical i am afraid ......................so that doors been shut

DO NOT REPRESENT YOURSELF EVER!

_________________
All posts by this contributor are made in a strictly personal capacity

I AM PROUD TO BE A CITIZEN NOBODY'S SUBJECT http://www.republic.org.u

F88K EM ALL WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND

BOOZE BOOZE BOOZE

Not til 2016, Joe Anderson has always been a supporter of the taxi drivers in Liverpool

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Note to self: Just because it pops into my head does NOT mean it should come out of my mouth!!