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Z v. United Kingdom Introduction The applicants

The applicants in this case were four siblings û Z, A, B and C û who were all between the ages of four and ten when they attempted to bring a cause of action in negligence against local social service authorities for failing to safeguard their welfare. Their case, which seemed to have some likelihood of success after the European Court of Human Right's (ECHR) 1998 decision in Osman v. United Kingdom, was denied by the Court of Appeal and then struck by the House of Lords for failing to state a reasonable cause of action. The applicants brought the case to the ECHR, which declined to recognize that the English domestic courts' actions had violated the applicants' protections under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights ("the Convention").

The ECHR's decision was effectively an abandonment of its rationale in the Osman decision, which had given rise to substantive changes in English domestic law. This paper examines the apparent inconsistency in the ECHR's decisions in Osman and Z. It concludes that the ECHR chose to step back from Osman due to that case's far-reaching implications for the domestic laws of all countries that are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights ("the Convention"). In contrast, the decision in Z seems to narrow the ECHR's ability to affect these countries' substantive laws while still allowing the ECHR to recognize the protections guaranteed by the Convention. As several ECHR judges noted in the Z decision, however, the ECHR ruling can be considered logically inconsistent. Moreover, the net result of the ECHR's decisions has nonetheless been to impact countries' domestic laws to provide for greater protection of Convention rights.

In October 1987 a health visitor referred the children's family to the local social services authority based on a concern for the children's welfare. As the statement of the case details, the incidents that raised concern about the children w...

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Z v. United Kingdom Introduction The applicants. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:00, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702805.html