When human rights hit the private law of damages for death – UK Human Rights Blog
“Swift v. Secretary of State for Justice [2012] EWHC 2000 (QB) Eady J, read judgment. This decision involves the intersection of Articles 8 (family) and 14 (discrimination) of the ECHR with the law governing who can recover damages for the death of a relative. This law is the Fatal Accidents Act 1976 (for the text see [10] of the judgment – embarrassingly, the one freely available on the internet is out of date). One does not to think for very long before realising that the FAA is underpinned by an idea that one ought to respect the rights of the family, and to pay the family when one has negligently caused the death of a family member. But like all such laws, there is the problem of where to stop – where does the family stop for these purposes?”
UK Human Rights Blog, 24th July 2012
Source: www.ukhumanrightsblog.com
