First Principles: Substantive and Procedural Review on the UKSC

The decision of the UK Supreme Court in Bank Mellat v Her Majesty's Treasury (No. 2) [2013] UKSC 39 is not exactly ground-breaking as a matter of law, and is certainly the poor relation of Bank Mellat (No. 1), UKSC 38 (see e.g. here), but it is nonetheless a very interesting case on the application of the general principles of administrative law.

Procedural Fairness in Extradition

The Supreme Court of Canada decided two interesting terrorism cases last Friday. R. v. Khawaja, 2012 SCC 69 has been grabbing most of the headlines because the Court upheld (though narrowly defined) anti-terrorism offences enacted shortly after 9/11. There were constitutional issues in the companion case of Sriskandarajah v. United States of America, 2012 SCC 70 as well, because the Court was asked to overrule one of its extradition precedents, Cotroni.

I want to focus, though, on the administrative law challenges addressed in Sriskandarajah. In particular, I want to question the Court's conclusion that there had been no breach of the appellants' rights to procedural fairness.