R (Raissi) v Secretary of State for the Home Department
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 22 February 2007 |
| Neutral Citation | [2007] EWHC 243 (Admin) |
| Date | 22 February 2007 |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division (Administrative Court) |
Queen's Bench Division
Before Lord Justice Auld and Mr Justice Wilkie
A court seeking to interpret a ministerial statement of policy was entitled to use his guidance to staff, which had also been issued to the public, as an aid in deciding, within a reasonable range of meaning, to whom it applied and what it meant.
The Queen's Bench Divisional Court so held refusing the claim of Lofti Raissi for judicial review of the decision of the Home Secretary to reject his claim under an ex gratia scheme for payment of compensation to persons whose convictions were quashed on appeal or who following charge, had not been proceeded against or had been acquitted at trial.
The ex gratia scheme had been set out in a statement of ministerial policy, introduced and explained by Mr Douglas Hurd as Home Secretary in a statement to Parliament (Hansard (HC) November 29, 1985 Cols 689-690).
Mr Raissi's claim arose from unsuccessful extradition proceedings instituted in England by the Government of the United States of America, leading to his detention for some four and half months before their dismissal.
Mr Edward Fitzgerald, QC and Mr Stephen Cragg for Mr Raissi; Mr Khawar Qureshi, QC, for the Home Secretary.
LORD JUSTICE AULD, giving the judgment of the court, said that when interpreting and applying an ex gratia scheme set out in the form of a statement of ministerial policy, the first consideration was that it was a statement by the Home Secretary of the day, in this case adhered to by his successors, of what he intended to do.
It was not a statute.
The second consideration was that it was an ex gratia scheme directed to circumstances that the Home Secretary, on a case-by-case basis, might consider exceptional and, which, on that account and in his discretion, merited payment of compensation from public funds.
Given those considerations, while decisions of a Home Secretary under the scheme were susceptible of judicial review, both as to matters of general interpretation and individual application, intervention by the courts in either respect should be highly guarded.
For the same reasons, it was not an apt field for judicial control by reference to the range of meaning that some notional reasonable reader of the policy might give it, or one that a wrongfully detained person might reasonably expect when first having occasion to read it.
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...in August 2010. He noted that the meaning of a policy such as this is an objective matter (see R (on the application of Raissi) v The Secretary of State for the Home Department [2008] EWCA Civ 72). And he went on (in paras. 51 to 55 of his judgment) to say: "51. Paragraph 55.10 provides tha......
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R (Anam) v Secretary of State for the Home Department
...case, when proceedings were brought by the claimant in person, in reliance on his understanding of the meaning of the policy). The upshot in Raissi was that the Court of Appeal decided that the meaning of a policy was a “hard edged question” which fell to be determined objectively by the co......
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Tesco Stores Ltd v Dundee City Council
...suggest that in principle, in this area of public administration as in others (as discussed, for example, in R (Raissi) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2008] QB 836), policy statements should be interpreted objectively in accordance with the language used, read as always in i......
- R (Raissi) v Secretary of State for the Home Department