R v Larsonneur

Facts

Larsonneur was a French national who was in the United Kingdom as an alien subject to conditions on her landing. After those conditions were breached she went to the Irish Free State. The Irish authorities deported her and delivered her in police custody to the British authorities at the port of Holyhead, where she was taken into custody. She was charged under the Aliens Order 1920 with being an alien found in the United Kingdom in breach of the landing conditions imposed on her.

History

She was convicted at first instance and appealed to the Court of Criminal Appeal.

Issue

Whether an alien who is brought into the United Kingdom against her will by the authorities of another state can be convicted of the offence of being found in the country in breach of the Aliens Order 1920, given that she did not voluntarily enter or remain.

Held

Appeal dismissed and conviction upheld. Her presence in the United Kingdom, although involuntary, satisfied the definition of the offence.

Ratio

• Where the Aliens Order 1920 defined the offence by reference to an alien being found in the United Kingdom in breach of the landing conditions, the offence was made out by that state of affairs, and the involuntary way in which the defendant came to be in the country was no answer.

Key reasoning

• The Order defined the offence by the existence of a state of affairs, namely being found in the country in breach of the conditions, and not by a voluntary act of entry or remaining.
• The fact that the defendant had been returned to the country by the Irish police rather than coming of her own choice did not take her outside the words of the Order.

Where it fits in the module

In the Basic Principles topic the case is the classic test of the claim that criminal liability requires a voluntary act or omission by the defendant. It sits beside the cases on strict liability and the distinction between conduct crimes and state of affairs crimes. Students are expected to ask whether the decision shows that Parliament can define an offence so that voluntariness is irrelevant, and whether a court should read such an intention into a statute when the defendant was moved by state action. Later authority such as Winzar v Chief Constable of Kent (1983), where a drunk person taken by police to a highway was convicted of being found drunk there, shows the approach surviving but being met with scepticism.

Criticisms

• It punishes a person for a situation created entirely by the state, so the conviction does not reflect any choice by the defendant and sits badly with the principle that liability should rest on conduct for which the defendant is responsible.
• The court read the Order as creating a pure state of affairs offence without asking whether Parliament really intended to catch a person who was returned to the country by force, and it is better understood as a case about strict statutory wording than as a statement of general principle.
• Later courts have treated it as an anomaly or confined it to its statutory context, and the reasoning is thin; it has been argued that a general voluntariness requirement, or a defence of involuntariness, should apply to state of affairs offences too.