Court : House of Lords
LORD HOFFMANN My Lords, 1. Angiotech Pharmaceuticals Inc, a Canadian company, and the University of British Columbia are joint proprietors of European patent 0 706 376 which claims, among other things, a stent coated with taxol for “treating or preventing recurrent stenosis". For convenience I shall call the patentees Angiotech. Conor Medsystems Inc (Conor), an American competitor, applied in both the United Kingdom and the Netherlands for revocation of the patent on the ground that the claimed invention was obvious. In the United Kingdom, before Pumfrey J and the Court of Appeal (Mummery, Tuckey and Jacob LJJ), it succeeded. In the Netherlands, before the District Court of The Hague (Robert van Peursem, Edgar Brinkman and Walter van Straalen) it failed. Angiotech appeals to your Lordships’ House and says that the Dutch court was right and that the patent should be declared valid. 2. Since the decision of the Court of Appeal, Angiotech and Conor have reached a settlement. C...
Tag this Judgment!Court : House of Lords
LORD HOFFMANN My Lords, 1. I have had the advantage of reading in draft the speech of my noble and learned friend Lord Hope of Craighead. For the reasons he gives, with which I agree, I too would allow this appeal. LORD HOPE OF CRAIGHEAD My Lords, 2. This case raises important questions about the interaction between provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 (“DPA 1998”) on the one hand and provisions of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (“FOISA 2002”) on the other. The corresponding provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (“FOIA 2000”), which extends to the whole of the United Kingdom and applies to UK public authorities located in Scotland, are not engaged directly. The appellant, the Common Services Agency (“the Agency”), is a special Health Board the regulation of whose functions is a matter for the Scottish Parliament: see FOIA 2000, section 80. But much of the wording of section 38 of FOISA 2002, which address...
Tag this Judgment!Court : House of Lords
LORD HOFFMANN My Lords, 1. The Achilleas is a single-decker bulk carrier of some 69,000 dwt built in 1994. By a time charter dated 22 January 2003 the owners let her to the charterers for about five to seven months at a daily hire rate of US$13,500. By an addendum dated 12 September 2003 the parties fixed the vessel for a further five to seven months at a daily rate of US$16,750. The latest date for redelivery was 2 May 2004. 2. By April 2004, market rates had more than doubled compared with the previous September. On 20 April 2004 the charterers gave notice of redelivery between 30 April and 2 May 2004. On the following day, the owners fixed the vessel for a new four to six month hire to another charterer, following on from the current charter, at a daily rate of US$39,500. The latest date for delivery to the new charterers, after which they were entitled to cancel, was 8 May 2004. 3. With less than a fortnight of the charter to run, the charterers fixed the vessel under a subcharter ...
Tag this Judgment!Court : House of Lords
LORD HOFFMANN My Lords, 1. In 2003 the pursuer Mr Spencer-Franks was employed as a mechanical technician by Kellogg Brown and Root Ltd (“KBR”), then a subsidiary of Halliburton, the multi-national company based in Texas which, among other things, supplies services to the offshore oil industry. KBR contracted to supply workers to operate the Tartan Alpha platform in the Scottish sector of the North Sea, which was operated by Talisman Energy (UK) Ltd (“Talisman”), a subsidiary of a Canadian oil company. The pursuer was one of the workers which KBR supplied to work on the platform. 2. On 12 October 2003 the closer on the door of the central control room was not working properly and the appellant was asked to inspect and repair it. The closer consists of a spring mechanism attached to the door and connected by a linkage arm to the door frame. According to the pursuer’s averments, which must for the purposes of this appeal be taken as true, he decided to remove...
Tag this Judgment!Court : House of Lords
LORD BINGHAM OF CORNHILL My Lords, 1. On 4 March 2005 the four appellants were convicted in the Crown Court at Leeds before Wakerley J and a jury of murdering Tyrone Clarke on 22 April 2004. The indictment contained a second count, of violent disorder, on which no verdict was returned. It was not alleged or proved that any of the appellants had personally struck the fatal blow or blows and they were convicted as accessories or secondary parties to the joint enterprise which culminated in the death of the deceased. The Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal (Hooper LJ, Gibbs and Roderick Evans JJ) dismissed their appeals against conviction on 23 February 2007, for reasons given by Hooper LJ: [2007] EWCA Crim 342, [2007] 1 WLR 2191. Their appeals to the House raise a narrow but significant question on the direction to be given to the jury concerning the liability of an accessory on facts such as arose in the present case. The facts 2. There was, it seems, a history of confrontation bet...
Tag this Judgment!Court : House of Lords
LORD BINGHAM OF CORNHILL My Lords, 1. I have had the advantage of reading in draft the opinion of my noble and learned friend Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood. I am in full agreement with it and would, for the reasons he gives, make the order he proposes. LORD HOPE OF CRAIGHEAD My Lords, 2. I have had the advantage of reading in draft the opinion of my noble and learned friend Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood. I agree with it, and for the reason he gives I would allow the appeal and make the order he proposes. LORD SCOTT OF FOSCOTE My Lords, 3. I, too, have had the advantage of reading in draft the opinion prepared by my noble and learned friend Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood. The reasons given by my noble and learned friend for allowing the appeal are, in my opinion, wholly persuasive and I am in full agreement with them. I would make the order that he proposes. BARONESS HALE OF RICHMOND My Lords, 4. I am in full agreement with the opinion of my noble and learned friend Lord Brow...
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LORD BINGHAM OF CORNHILL My Lords, 1. I have had the advantage of reading in draft the opinions of my noble and learned friends Lord Scott of Foscote and Baroness Hale of Richmond. I gratefully adopt their summaries of the background and issues in this appeal. I can state my own conclusions relatively briefly. 2. The conduct of Mr Malcolm in subletting and ceasing to live in the flat let to him by the London Borough of Lewisham (“Lewisham”) had the effect of destroying the security of tenure he had previously enjoyed and breaching the terms of his tenancy so as to give Lewisham what was, in terms of housing law, an unanswerable claim to possession. To defeat that claim Mr Malcolm relied, unsuccessfully before Her Honour Judge Hallon but successfully before the Court of Appeal (Arden, Longmore and Toulson LJJ: [2007] EWCA Civ 763, [2008] Ch 129), on the terms of sections 22 and 24 in Part III of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. The question is whether, on the facts an...
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LORD HOFFMANN My Lords, 1. I have had the advantage of reading in draft the speech of my noble and learned friend Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury. For the reasons he gives, with which I agree, I too would allow these appeals. LORD SCOTT OF FOSCOTE My Lords, 2. I have had the advantage of reading in draft the opinion of my noble and learned friend Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury and for the reasons he gives, with which I am in full agreement, I, too, would allow these appeals. LORD WALKER OF GESTINGTHORPE My Lords, 3. I am in full agreement with the opinion of my noble and learned friend Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, which I have had the advantage of reading in draft. I too would allow these appeals. BARONESS HALE OF RICHMOND My Lords, 4. For the reasons given in the opinion of my noble and learned friend, Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, with which I entirely agree, I too would allow these appeals and restore the decisions of the first instance judge in each case. LORD NEUBERGER OF ABBOTSBURY ...
Tag this Judgment!Court : House of Lords
LORD BINGHAM OF CORNHILL My Lords, 1. I have had the advantage of reading in draft the opinions of all my noble and learned friends. In the result, I reach the same conclusion as my noble and learned friend Baroness Hale of Richmond, for whose exposition of the issues I also am grateful. But, for reasons given by my noble and learned friends Lord Hope of Craighead and Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, I reach this conclusion with fewer misgivings than she expresses. 2. Viewed through the eyes of the appellants, the Home Secretary’s family policy seems harsh: they have suffered the misfortune of losing their parents and now suffer the additional misfortune of losing a benefit which they would have enjoyed had they arrived here with their parents. But viewed through the eyes of the Home Secretary, the policy looks very different: he faced a formidable administrative problem caused by the difficulty, delay and expense of removing families, and the solution was to grant an indulgenc...
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LORD BINGHAM OF CORNHILL My Lords, 1. The appellant, a Kosovar, arrived in this country from Kosovo, via Macedonia, on 2 September 1999. He was then aged 13. He claimed asylum four days later. It was refused on 27 April 2004, a delay of over four and a half years. Conditions in Kosovo having changed, the appellant now has no ground for claiming asylum. But had his application been decided before 10 December 2003, when he became eighteen and so ceased to be an unaccompanied minor, he would, depending on the date of the decision, under the policies in force, from time to time, have been granted exceptional leave to remain in this country for four years or until his eighteenth birthday, with at least the chance of obtaining indefinite leave to remain thereafter. The respondent Secretary of State now seeks to remove him to Kosovo. The appellant resists removal, relying on his rights under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to respect for private and family life...
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