Exclusionary Rule in UK Law

The risks of absconding and re-offending are always of paramount importance, since if a person absconds, he will frustrate the deportation for which purpose he was detained in the first place.

The conclusion I would reach is that there is no clearly established case for departing from the exclusionary rule. The rule may well mean, as Lord Nicholls has argued, that parties are sometimes held bound by a contract in terms which, upon a full investigation of the course of negotiations, a reasonable observer would not have taken them to have intended.

If the parties have negotiated an agreement upon some common assumption, which may include an assumption that certain words will bear a certain meaning, they may be estopped from contending that the words should be given a different meaning. Both of these remedies lie outside the exclusionary rule, since they start from the premise that, as a matter of construction, the agreement does not have the meaning for which the party seeking rectification or raising an estoppel contends.

On these grounds, the Strasbourg court held that the English court had breached Article 6 by striking out the claim made by the Osmans against the police without hearing any evidence by reference to which the proportionality of the rule in that particular case could be judged.

As the Prudential principle is an exclusionary rule denying a claimant what otherwise would be his right to sue, the onus must be on the defendants to establish its applicability. Further, it would not be right to bar the claimant's action unless the defendants can establish not merely that the company has a claim to recover a loss reflected by the profit, but that such claim is available on the facts.

But even if there is no sufficient rational connection between the aim and the rule, is the Secretary of State nevertheless justified in adopting a "bright line" rule which enables those administering the scheme quickly and easily to identify those who qualify? On the other hand, it recognises that sometimes lines have to be drawn, even though there may be hard cases which sit just on the wrong side of it (see, for example, Animal Defenders International v United Kingdom (2013) 57 EHRR 607).

Hitherto the evidence and discussion in this case has tended to focus on whether there should be a bright-line rule or a wholly individualised system. There are obvious intermediate options, such as a more properly tailored bright line rule, with or without the possibility of making exceptions for particularly strong cases which fall outside it.