Generate a structured brief — facts, issues, held, reasoning, and significance — for this case in seconds. Or browse the verbatim judgment via the source links below.
Judge Pilling, who had chaired the Tribunal in question, refused Mr Cole permission to appeal to the Upper Tribunal in her ruling dated 6 December 2013. Mr Cole then renewed his application direct to the Upper Tribunal. He answered �No� to the question on the UT11 Form asking whether he wished to have an oral hearing of the application. However, this was qualified by the remark that if the Upper Tribunal would be assisted by oral argument, or was minded not to grant permission, then an oral hearing was sought.
At the oral permission hearing Mr Wise QC, for Mr Coles, advanced three principal grounds of appeal. Ground 1 was that the Tribunal had erred in law by finding that the section 26 exemption applied in respect of both Request 1 and Request 2. Grounds 2 and 3 were both reasons challenges; namely that the Tribunal had failed to give adequate reasons for its conclusion that section 26 was engaged and as to how the public interest test fell in favour of maintaining the exemption.
The Tribunal, according to Mr Wise QC, was therefore simply wrong to conclude that these RAF releases �have been drafted carefully to reveal very little by way of detail that could identify where a particular weapon launch took place� (Tribunal�s decision at [37]). That, Mr Wise QC argued, was an unsustainable finding of fact which amounted to an arguable error of law. It also followed, he argued, that there was no prejudice in the disclosure of a complete list of drone strikes but organised by province only.
16.� I also bear in mind the observations of the Upper Tribunal three-judge panel (of which I was a member) in All Party Group on Extraordinary Rendition (APPGER) v Information Commissioner and Foreign and Commonwealth Office [2013] UKUT 560 (AAC) at paragraph [44]:
�... it seems to us that in many cases permission to appeal on the basis of a �reasons challenge� should not be given simply on the basis that the excluded party has not seen the documents or the closed reasoning (if any) and wants the appeal court or tribunal to check the conclusions reached on the application of an exemption to the requested information.� In any event, when dealing with an application for permission the court or tribunal can consider the impact of the closed reasoning.�
Auto-extracted from BAILII. Full structured brief in progress — the source links below give you the verbatim judgment in the meantime.
Multiple official and mirror sources — pick whichever loads cleanly on your network.
Common Room
0 comments · About the Common Room →
No comments yet — start the discussion.
Voted-best comments help future students and feed Caselaw's AI study tools.