Continuing the discussion from Effect of Supreme Court decision about Northern Irish law (Re RM):
What struck me was the seemingly blanket insistence that “appropriate” and “necessary” mean the same thing, does that mean that every time the Act uses “appropriate” it effectively means “necessary”? Section 12ZC uses “necessary OR appropriate”…
Para. 62 of the judgment on Bailii
When I eat at a restaurant, and in a restaurant, it is appropriate but not necessary to wine-match.
Well I suppose to comply with Article 5(1)(e) ECHR, it would make sense for “appropriate” to be read as “necessary”
Para 46 of Varbanov v Bulgaria [2000] ECHR 31365/96:
The Court further reiterates that a necessary element of the “lawfulness” of the detention within the meaning of Article 5 § 1 (e) is the absence of arbitrariness. The detention of an individual is such a serious measure that it is only justified where other, less severe measures, have been considered and found to be insufficient to safeguard the individual or public interest which might require that the person concerned be detained. The deprivation of liberty must be shown to have been necessary in the circumstances (see Witold Litwa v. Poland, no. 26629/95, § 78, ECHR 2000-III).
You post risks me starting up on Section 62 of the MHA 1983 (E&W), where we have the words: immediately, necessary, urgent, alleviate and so on.
NOBODY - least of all the CQC cares what these words mean. How dare I accost the almighty CQC? I dare and I do because I published links to two tranches of data that came from my FOIA requests in these forums sometime ago, showing how actions speak louder than words.
As for psychiatrists - nationally I think they are limp and engaged in intellectual sleight of hand when it comes to interpretation of words in the MHA. Their defence? “We are not lawyers.”
So if they Law Lords can play with words, surely that’s a licence for everybody else to play equally.
But to understand the cultural underlay of the play on words in modern Britain, one would benefit from studying the The Treaty of Union (1706-1707) - and how Scotland was ‘shrewd’ over back then and at intervals ever since. I better stop there else I might move on to Northern Ireland, and then be told that I’m irrelevant when the issue is squarely about cultural patterns of the use of words.
Yeah.. nobody has time for that. Even if you understand - nothing changes.
I think all that’s necessary is for something to mean necessary.