Article 10 unfair dismissal arguments must be raised by the parties, the EAT has confirmed, in a week that also brought APIL’s pushback on the SRA’s mandatory ethics discussions and a High Court ruling on closed material in the Afghanistan inquiry. Three developments for litigators, employment lawyers and compliance teams, in brief.
Cherrington: no duty to raise Article 10 unfair dismissal points for the parties
An employment tribunal deciding unfair dismissal was not obliged to consider a claimant’s Article 10 right to freedom of expression of its own motion, Cavanagh J held in Cherrington v University of Derby [2026] EAT 107. The appellant, a senior lecturer dismissed for gross misconduct over language used to students, never advanced Article 10 before the tribunal, in his claim form, evidence or submissions. The EAT’s judgment holds that the point did not “shout out” from the case as presented, and that tribunals face no duty to work through Convention rights as a matter of course in unfair dismissal complaints, or in any particular species of them. Speech and belief points must be pleaded and argued, a lesson that lands weeks after the protected-belief analysis in University of Bristol v Miller reshaped the same territory from the other direction.
How broad is the pushback on SRA ethics discussions?
Opposition to the SRA’s continuing competence proposals keeps widening. APIL’s response to the consultation, which closed on 15 July, describes the proposed mandatory annual three-hour facilitated ethics discussions as overly burdensome and arbitrary, and suggests solicitors instead certify at renewal that they have undertaken ethics discussions in whatever form their firm deems appropriate. The claimant personal injury body supports mandatory record-keeping and accepts targeted learning where the SRA has a genuine competence concern. It joins Birmingham Law Society, which warned the sessions could cost the profession £100m a year, and the Law Society, which cited one large firm’s £1.2m lost-productivity estimate, in the opposition column recorded in our earlier competence roundup. The breadth of that record will shape whether the SRA Board waters the ethics-hours proposal down.
Afghanistan inquiry: court refuses wider disclosure in closed hearings challenge
Farbey J has decided three preliminary issues in R (Witness IIA126) v Chair of the Independent Inquiry Relating to Afghanistan [2026] EWHC 2143 (Admin), a judicial review by an anonymised former senior military officer challenging his exclusion from the inquiry’s most restricted “Green” closed hearings. The court refused all nineteen disputed disclosure requests, declined a confidentiality ring for the claimant personally and for his lawyers, and held that Special Advocates plus Counsel to the Inquiry’s duties give sufficient protection pending the rolled-up hearing. The transferable ruling concerns method. Where statutory closed material procedure under the Justice and Security Act 2013 meets the Haralambous common law jurisdiction, the court conducts its own independent balancing exercise rather than inheriting the inquiry chair’s section 19 divide, treating the statutory restriction-order factors as guidance only. Practitioners tracking how courts police access to sensitive evidence can pair this with our guide to pre-action disclosure under CPR 31.16 for the mainstream civil counterpart.