Threat to Kill in UK Law

It is moreover clear that the Strasbourg court in Osman, para 116, roundly rejected the submission of Her Majesty's Government that the failure to perceive the risk to life in the circumstances known at the time or to take preventative measures to avoid that risk must be tantamount to gross negligence or wilful disregard of the duty to protect life.

I would hold that if a member of the public (A) furnishes a police officer (B) with apparently credible evidence that a third party whose identity and whereabouts are known presents a specific and imminent threat to his life or physical safety, B owes A a duty to take reasonable steps to assess such threat and, if appropriate, take reasonable steps to prevent it being executed. I shall for convenience of reference call this "the liability principle".

As Lord Bingham pointed out in R (Greenfield) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2005] 1 WLR 673, Convention claims have very different objectives from civil actions. Where civil actions are designed essentially to compensate claimants for their losses, Convention claims are intended rather to uphold minimum human rights standards and to vindicate those rights.

In my judgment, the authorities demonstrate that it is the quality of the publishees not their quantity that is likely to determine the issue of serious harm in cases involving relatively small-scale publication. What matters is not the extent of publication, but to whom the words are published. A significant factor is likely to be whether the claimant is identified in the minds of the publishee(s) so that the allegation "sticks".

The same argument, that the common law should be developed in harmony with the obligations of public bodies including the police under the Human Rights Act 1998 and articles 2 and 3 of the Convention, was advanced in Smith as a ground for holding that the police owed a duty of care to the deceased after he reported receiving threats.

Tofaris and Steel in their article, Police Liability in negligence for failure to prevent crime: Time to Re-think, (Legal Studies Research Paper Series 39/2014, July 2014) define what they describe as the "omissions principle" in the following way: A is not under a duty to take care to prevent harm occurring to B through a source of danger not created by A unless either (i) A has assumed a responsibility to protect B from that danger, (ii) A has a special level of control over that source of the danger, or (iii) A's status creates an obligation to protect B from that danger.

In our judgment, however, the words of the statute “has to deal with” are words of prima facie broad application, albeit constituting a phrase that has to be construed in the overall context of the bad character provisions of the 2003 Act.