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Showing posts with label United Kingdom Supreme Court. Show all posts
Showing posts with label United Kingdom Supreme Court. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 21, 2012

United Kingdom Supreme Court=This case is about the employment status of individuals who are resident in Great Britain and are employed by a British company but who travel to and from home to work overseas. Halliburton Manufacturing & Services Ltd ("the appellant") is a UK company which is based at Dyce, near Aberdeen. It is one of about 70 subsidiary or associated companies of Halliburton Inc, which is a US corporation. It supplies tools, services and personnel to the oil industry. The employee, Ismail Ravat ("the respondent"), lives in Preston, Lancashire and is a British citizen. He was employed by the appellant from 2 April 1990 as an accounts manager until he was dismissed with effect from 17 May 2006. The reason for his dismissal was redundancy. The respondent complains that he was unfairly dismissed. The complication in his case is that at the time of his dismissal he was working in Libya. The question is whether the employment tribunal has jurisdiction to consider his complaint. An employment tribunal sitting in Aberdeen (Mr RG Christie, sitting alone) held on 23 November 2007 that it had jurisdiction. That decision was set aside by the Employment Appeal Tribunal (Lady Smith, sitting alone) in a judgment which was given on 14 November 2008. The respondent appealed under section 37(1) of the Employment Tribunals Act 1996 to the Inner House of the Court of Session. On 22 June 2010 an Extra Division (Lord Osborne and Lord Carloway, Lord Brodie dissenting) allowed his appeal: 2011 SLT 44. The appellant now appeals to this court. The question whether the respondent's complaint of unfair dismissal can be heard in Scotland is, as the decisions below show, not an easy one to answer. Section 94(1) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 provides: "An employee has the right not to be unfairly dismissed." Section 230(1) of that Act provides that "employee" means an individual who has entered into or works under (or, where the employment has ceased, worked under) a contract of employment. Neither of these provisions contains any geographical limitation. Nor is any such limitation to be found anywhere else in the Act. As Lord Hoffmann observed in Lawson v Serco Ltd [2006] UKHL 3, [2006] ICR 250, para 1, the statement in section 244(1) that the Act extends to England and Wales and Scotland means only that it forms part of the law of Great Britain and does not form part of the law of any other territory, such as Northern Ireland (to which the subsection states the Act does not apply), for which Parliament could have legislated. Yet it is plain that some limitation must be implied. As Lady Hale noted in Duncombe v Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families (No 2) [2011] UKSC 36, [2011] ICR 1312, para 5, it was agreed in that case that section 94(1) could not apply to all employment anywhere in the world. That must indeed be so: see also Lawson, para 6, where Lord Hoffmann said that all the parties in that case were agreed that the scope of section 94(1) must have some territorial limits. But this does not solve the problem as to where the line is to be drawn between those cases to which section 94(1) applies and those to which it does not. It is not straightforward. As Louise Merrett, The Extra-Territorial Reach of Employment Legislation (2010) 39 Industrial Law Journal 355, has pointed out, increasing labour mobility together with the proliferation of multinational companies and groups of companies has made the international aspects of employment law important in an ever-growing number of cases. The present case is an illustration of the problems that this gives rise to.

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Hilary Term [2012] UKSC 1 On appeal from: [2010] CSIH 52 JUDGMENT Ravat (Respondent) v Halliburton Manufacturing and Services Ltd (Appellant...

United Kingdom Supreme Court=Some time after 17.00 hrs on 20 April 2005, Melanie Rabone hanged herself from a tree in Lyme Park, Cheshire. She was 24 years of age and was the loved daughter of Mr and Mrs Rabone. At the time, she was on two days' home leave from Stepping Hill Hospital, Stockport where she was undergoing treatment for a depressive disorder as an informal patient (ie one who was not detained under the Mental Health Act 1983 ("the MHA")). She had been admitted to the hospital as an emergency following a suicide attempt. She was assessed by the hospital as a high risk of a further suicide attempt. Mr and Mrs Rabone have always maintained that the hospital authorities should not have allowed her home leave and that they were responsible for their daughter's tragic death. They started proceedings against the Pennine Care NHS Trust ("the trust") alleging negligence and breach of the right to life protected by article 2 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms ("the Convention"). The trust eventually admitted negligence, but they have never admitted liability for breach of article 2. A number of issues were raised in the proceedings all of which are live in this appeal. The claim failed because the judge (Simon J) held that the operational duty implicit in article 2 did not apply in this case: there was no duty on the hospital authorities under article 2 to take reasonable steps to guard Melanie against the risk of suicide: [2010] EWHC 1827. He also held that, if there was such a duty, there had been no breach of it by the trust on the facts of this case. The Court of Appeal (Rix, Stanley Burnton and Jackson LJJ) dismissed Mr and Mrs Rabone's appeal. The only substantive judgment was given by Jackson LJ (now reported at [2011] QB 1019). They agreed that there was no operational duty, but held that if there had been such a duty, the trust would have been in breach of it. This appeal raises a number of issues, but before I come to them, I need to set out the relevant facts.

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HilaryTerm [2012] UKSC 2 On appeal from: [2010] EWCA Civ 698 JUDGMENT Rabone and another (Appellants) v Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust (R...