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Hundreds of Muslim asylum seekers have had their claims accepted by the Home Office after converting to Christianity. The converts, who are mainly from Iran, argue that their new faith would expose them to persecution — up to and including the death penalty — if they were returned to their home country.
Senior Church of England clerics admitted last week that some asylum seekers might be getting baptised in part to exploit a loophole in the system.
Transgender criminals will be able to serve their sentences in either male or female prisons under official guidance drawn up by ministers.
The new policy follows the apparent suicides last year of two transgender inmates who were sent to male prisons.
Prison staff will be told to ensure that transgender inmates can obtain beauty products and other items that they require to live as their chosen gender. The move follows complaints that hair dye and make-up were not available in a male jail.
British fathers lag behind the rest of the developed world for sharing childcare responsibilities.
Men provide only 24 minutes of care for every hour performed by women — placing the UK last out of 15 countries that compile the data, according to research by the London School of Economics.
Adrienne Burgess, joint chief executive of the Fatherhood Institute, which commissioned the research, said fathers were not to blame.
The threat of circulating “revenge porn” would be criminalised and the evidence threshold lowered to bring England and Wales in line with Scottish law, under changes to be proposed by a former Lib Dem cabinet minister.
The law south of the border has failed to keep pace with the rapid increase of the malicious exploitation of explicit or sexual images without their subject’s consent, according to former Scottish secretary Alistair Carmichael. He is to argue in the Commons in favour of amendments to criminalise not only the circulation of private sexual photographs and films without consent, but the threat of circulating them.
Since 2005 about 40 people in Belgium and the Netherlands have successfully combined euthanasia with organ donation, according to an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics by ethicists and transplant specialists. The doctors are so enthusiastic about the procedure that they have proposed legal changes which will speed up the procedure and maximize the number of donations. Although the numbers are still low, the idea is becoming more popular in both countries, according to the authors.
“I don’t think I’m saying anything that shocking or particularly that new,” says Trevor Phillips, the self-described ‘Prophet Of Doom’ on race and integration in Britain. Middle class people like him are not affected by the dangers he is warning about, he says. The only way an unprecedented level of immigration impacts them is “it’s probably easier to find a Brazilian cleaner than it used to be.”
A Muslim whose father plotted to marry her to a stranger online has become the subject of a groundbreaking legal order to protect her from her parents.
The 21-year-old feared ending up a slave and was told by her devout father she had to undergo female genital mutilation.
SNP ministers have attempted to save their controversial football sectarian laws from being torn up by Holyrood’s opposition parties by pointing to a large increase in the number of fans being charged.
A total of 287 charges were brought in 2015/16 under controversial legislation that aims to crack down on fans singing sectarian songs or chanting sectarian slogans at or around matches - a rise of 49 per cent from the previous year.
Michael Matheson, Scotland’s Justice Minister, argued the figures showed the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act "continues to be an important tool" for the authorities dealing with sectarianism.
Scotland’s teachers have warned there is a “big black hole” in the SNP’s plan to allocate every child a state guardian two months before they will be expected to take on the controversial role.
Delegates at the annual general meeting of the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS), the country’s largest teaching union, backed a motion calling on its council to investigate and report on the "workload, contractual and legal implications arising from the role of the named person".
All Presbyterian marriage ceremonies in Ireland must now include a statement that such a union can only be between a man and a woman.
This decision was taken at the Presbyterian church’s general assembly in Belfast on Wednesday afternoon and has immediate effect.
General assembly clerk Rev Trevor Gribben told delegates that the statement had to be read at all such ceremonies “from here on”, and, if this was not done in the Republic, “there could be legal implications”.