“Defence of the weak and vulnerable can easily flip to defence of a leadership cadre…”
School worship in Scotland
S.9 Education (Scotland) Act 1980 gives parents the right to withdraw their children from religious observance, and the Scottish Government is proposing to amend the law to oblige schools to take the children’s views into account. The Government says that this will align the law with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was incorporated into Scots law last year.
However, in response to a consultation which has just closed, the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland (CYPCS) has said that the Government’s proposals “may appear, superficially, to provide progressive realisation of children’s rights” but do not represent “significant progress towards UNCRC compliance, given its divergence from a clear recommendation made by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in the 2023 concluding observations”.
According to the Commissioner, instead of giving children the right “to make a decision on their participation in collective worship”, the proposed change “transfers the ability to make a final decision on withdrawal from parents to the State” and “The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child is clear that children’s rights are not realised merely by their views being heard when decisions are made by adults”. The Commissioner concludes that children “should be able to independently exercise a legal right to withdraw from religious observance”. [With thanks to Scottish Legal News.]
Canterbury CNC episcopal member election
Details about the process to elect the episcopal member of the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) for the See of Canterbury are now available. The nomination period for those wishing to stand will begin on 31 January 2025. An election by the House of Bishops will take place to select a member of the CNC who is a bishop or suffragan from the Province of Canterbury or any bishop who has retired and is resident in the Province of Canterbury. The episcopal member of the CNC for the See of Canterbury will be announced alongside the rest of the membership as soon as possible after the count in mid-March.
Two recent judgments
David Lamming has very kindly drawn our attention to two new judgments:
- Atwal & Anor v Charity Commission for England and Wales [2024] EWHC 3451 (Ch), an application for consent to bring charity proceedings relating to the Sikh Gurdwara in Wednesfield, Wolverhampton.
- Smith & Ors v Surridge & Ors [2025] EWHC 74 (KB), a claim by two teachers for libel, negligent misstatement and misuse of private information in relation to safeguarding and employment references: the first three defendants are named as pastors associated with the British Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.
We hope to post a fuller note on Atwal later in the week.
Cathedrals Fabric Commission meetings
Meetings of the Church of England Cathedral Fabric Commission are reported in our Ecclesiastical Court Judgments each month, the most recent being posted on 31 January. An ongoing issue over the past couple of years has been the substantial delays in the reports on the applications that the Commission examined (Form 8s) and the decisions made by the Commission (Form 10s). Recently, there has been significant progress with all Form 8s and all Form 10s, apart from 1 February 2024 and 11 April 2024, up to date.
Forthcoming international webinar on Anglican canon law
The Ecclesiastical Law Society is hosting an international webinar on Anglican canon law for the International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies (ICLARS) at 2 pm GMT on Wednesday, 12 March. The panel will include Revd Russell Dewhurst, Rt Revd Dr Vicentia Refiloe Kgabe, Bishop of Lesotho in the Anglican Church of South Africa and Ven Alan Perry, General Secretary of the Anglican Church of Canada. It will be chaired by Professor Mark Hill KC.
The webinar via Zoom is open to all and free of charge, but please register at least 24 hours beforehand at https://ecclawsoc.org.uk/events/anglican-canon-law/. You can also find more information about the webinar at the same link.
“A Grand Inquisitor is always up to date…”
… but is a web page? A discussion on Twi/X this week was initiated on the basis of a statement on the Church of England website which reflected the position some months ago. Although this was subsequently changed, it does raise the question of the currency of information on the internet. The dating of source documents was an early issue raised on this blog, and since the end of 2018, we have held all judgments circulated by the Ecclesiastical Law Association in their revised versions where necessary. On our own posts on L&RUK, where necessary we indicate at the end of the document the date on which it was last updated.
Quick links
- ECtHR: Annual Report 2024: in 2024, there were three cases against the UK in total, of which one was struck out, one was settled, and in the third, the UK was found to be in breach of Article 10 (freedom of expression). (For comparison, Turkey was found guilty of violations in 67 cases.)
- Neil Foster, Law and Religion Australia: Religious faith, medical procedures and minors – H v AC: on a case in which a young person from a “mainstream” Protestant church believed that she had been healed miraculously and that no further treatment was needed.