R (Evans) v Attorney General

R (Evans) v Attorney General (Campaign for Freedom of Information intervening)[1] is a 2015 decision of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. It concerned a request for disclosure of communications passing between Charles, Prince of Wales and various government departments.

R (Evans) v Attorney General
CourtSupreme Court of the United Kingdom
Full case nameRegina (Evans) v Attorney General (Campaign for Freedom of Information intervening)
Decided26 March 2015
Citation(s)[2015] UKSC 21, [2015] 1 AC 1787[1]
Case history
Appealed fromR (Evans) v Attorney General, 2014, Court of Appeal[2]
Related action(s)
Court membership
Judges sitting

Procedural history

The case began with an application under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 by journalist Rob Evans. The government departments admitted that they had relevant letters, but "refused to disclose them on the ground that they considered the letters were exempt from disclosure under sections 37, 40 and/or 41". On appeal, the Upper Tribunal determined that "many of the letters, which they referred to as 'advocacy correspondence', should be disclosed".[1]:[3]

Rather than appealing the decision of the Upper Tribunal, the Attorney General issued a certificate under section 53(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, effectively overriding the decision of the Upper Tribunal. Evans sought judicial review of the Attorney General's decision to issue the certificate in the High Court.

A divisional court (Lord Judge LCJ, Davis LJ and Globe J) dismissed Evans' claim for judicial review. Evans successfully appealed to the Court of Appeal (Lord Dyson MR, Richards and Pitchford LJJ), which set aside the section 53(2) certificate. The Attorney General then appealed to the Supreme Court, which dismissed the appeal by 5–2 majority (Lord Wilson and Lord Hughes JJSC dissenting).

gollark: Maybe I should adapt the potatOS privacy policy as a code license.
gollark: MPL?
gollark: There is also the "secondary processor exemption" thing, which caused the Librem people to waste a lot of time on having a spare processor on their SoC load a blob into the SoC memory controller from some not-user-accessible flash rather than just using the main CPU cores. This does not improve security because you still have the blob running with, you know, full control of RAM, yet RYF certification requires solutions like this.
gollark: It would be freer™, in my opinion, to have all the firmware distributed sanely via a package manager, and for the firmware to be controllable by users, than to have it entirely hidden away.
gollark: So you can have proprietary firmware for an Ethernet controller or bee apifier or whatever, but it's only okay if you deliberately stop the user from being able to read/write it.

See also

References
  1. Regina (Evans) v Attorney General (Campaign for Freedom of Information intervening) [2015] UKSC 21, [2015] 1 AC 1787 (26 March 2015), Supreme Court.
  2. R (Evans) v Attorney General [2014] EWCA Civ 254, [2014] QB 855 (12 March 2014), Court of Appeal.
  3. R (Evans) v Attorney General [2013] EWHC 1960 (Admin), [2014] QB 855 (9 July 2013), High Court of Justice (Divisional Court).
  4. Evans v Information Commissioner [2012] UKUT 313 (AAC) (18 September 2012), Upper Tribunal.
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