Democracy, free speech and TV: the case of the BBC and the ProLife Alliance

Freedom of political expression generally receives a very high degree of protection from the courts. Political expression in the UK’s broadcast media, by comparison, receives far lower levels of protection. This has been graphically demonstrated recently by the decision of the House of Lords in R (on the application of the ProLife Alliance) v BBC in which a majority of their Lordships upheld a refusal by the BBC and independent broadcasters to transmit a Party Election Broadcast by the ProLife Alliance, depicting an abortion, prior to the 2001 general election. It will be argued that this decision is inconsistent with the jurisprudence underlying the free speech right and with the Article 10 case law of the European Court of Human Rights. In particular it will be argued that the court failed to have due regard to the type of expression at issue in the case resulting in an inadequate assessment of the proportionality of the restriction

What not to wear: religious rights, the European Court and the margin of appreciation

The issue of religious dress, specifically female Muslim religious dress, has been the subject of intense controversy within Europe over recent years. In the United Kingdom comments by Jack Straw MP, Leader of the House of Commons and a former Home and Foreign Secretary, that he felt uncomfortable talking to women at his constituency surgery who wore the Muslim veil sparked a storm of intense and, at times, acrimonious debate. In France the banning of headscarves in State schools has provoked major controversy. In the Netherlands the Dutch Parliament voted to ban the burka in public places and in five Belgian towns its wearing has been banned on pain of a fine

Rights lost in translation? Fact-insensitive laws, the Human Rights Act and the United Kingdom's ban on political advertising

This article explores the issue of blanket legal prohibitions and how these sit with proportionality under the ECHR and the HRA as interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights and English courts. The author first looks at Strasbourg case law and factors examined by the European Court in deciding whether a fact-insensitive law is proportionate. He then considers the domestic decision of R. (on the application of Animal Defenders International) v Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and finally analyses the difficulties this approach raises in giving effect to Convention rights under the mechanisms of the HRA

The influence of laser hardening on wear in the valve and valve seat contact

In internal combustion engines it is important to manage the wear in the valve and valve seat contact in order to minimise emissions and maximise economy. Traditionally wear in this contact has been controlled by the use of a valve seat insert and the careful selection of materials for both the valve and the insert. More recently, due to the increasing demands for both performance and cost, alternative methods of controlling the wear, and the resulting valve recession, have been sought. Using the heating effect of a laser to induce localised phase transformations, to increase hardness and wear resistance, in materials has been used since the 1970s, however it is only in recent years that it has been able to compete with more established surface treatment techniques, particularly in terms of cost, as new laser hardware has been developed. In this work, a laser has been used to treat the valve seat area of a cast iron cylinder head. In order to optimise the laser parameters for use on the head, preliminary tests were carried out to investigate the fundamental wear characteristics of untreated cast iron and also cast iron with a range of laser treatments. Previous work has identified the predominant wear mechanism in the valve and valve seat contact as impact on valve closure. Two bespoke test machines, one for testing basic specimens and one for testing components, were used to identify the laser parameters most likely to yield acceptable results when applied to a cylinder head to be used in a fired dynamometer test. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Isospin violation in the vector form factors of the nucleon

A quantitative understanding of isospin violation is an increasingly important ingredient for the extraction of the nucleon's strange vector form factors from experimental data. We calculate the isospin violating electric and magnetic form factors in chiral perturbation theory to leading and next-to-leading order respectively, and we extract the low-energy constants from resonance saturation. Uncertainties are dominated largely by limitations in the current knowledge of some vector meson couplings. The resulting bounds on isospin violation are sufficiently precise to be of value to on-going experimental studies of the strange form factors.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, uses RevTe

Food, Brexit and Northern Ireland: Critical Issues

This report is the third in our Food Brexit Briefing series. It argues that the absence of serious consideration of food flows into, out of and through Northern Ireland is a significant policy omission in the ongoing Brexit negotiations. There has been much talk of the importance of Northern Ireland, but next to no detailed attention to the food implications of Brexit for Northern Ireland. The report makes the case that there is an urgent need to get down to detail over border arrangements, contingency planning and resource allocation. This is too important to leave to last-minute makeshift or muddle. Food is central to the economy of Northern Ireland, and the continuing supply of safe, high quality, healthy food is currently dependent on the absence of border controls between Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Great Britain and the rest of the European Union. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food criss-cross these borders every year. They are currently free from inspection because of shared, underpinning EU Single Market regulation. An unplanned or mishandled food border imposition is likely to have powerful, destabilising consequences for the integrated nature of food supply, trade and access within Northern Ireland for many years to come. It would raise important challenges for food safety, put jobs at risk, potentially constrain Northern Ireland’s access to health-supporting foods such as fruit and vegetables, and create opportunities for food fraud and crime. The report, by Gary McFarlane and Tony Lewis, both senior environmental health professionals and officers of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, and Professor Tim Lang, of the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London, is based on a thorough review of food flows into, from and through Northern Ireland, and the practical experience of its authors. The report dismisses talk of ‘technological fixes’ to help maintain the smooth flow of goods as vague, unavailable now and unrealistic. It calls for all the governments and bodies involved in food and Brexit – the European Union, United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland itself – to set political differences aside in order to resolve the considerable practical challenges of cross-border food traffic. The authors make more than 30 recommendations to help that process