What a silly post. If Catholics can’t sit on such tribunals, then we’ll also have to exclude anyone who is a practising homosexual too, since they clearly can’t treat the conservative Christian view impartially. Sound good? Of course not.

The point is that in these situations, people should act in view of the law, not their religious or lifestyle commitments. You’re not going to find people who are personally neutral/indifferent on questions of religion and sexuality. Your post sounds in danger of going down the path of advocating discrimination in public life against those whose religious commitments put them at odds with your own conception of how society should be ordered.

Which is ironic, given the case which brought about the ruling in the first place was about such discrimination.

Given that a number of blogging lawyers have expressed serious reservations as to whether the law has been applied correctly in this specific case, this is a perfectly reasonable question to pose, particularly as the outcome of this case will, when finally resolved, set an important precedent in an area in which there is little current case law to go on.

The ruling was quite stupid, and transparently so. But it cannot be blamed on the fact that a Catholic might have been present. You suggest the disturbingly dangerous policy of cutting religious people out of the legal system because of perceived bias. Only a select number of religious folk a actively homophobic in the way Ms Ladele is, and of those I suggest that most would disagree with this ruling.

Please attack the decision on grounds of reason and sense - there is more than enough ammunition there. But pursuing the religious line is about as sensible as Ms Ladele’s initial case!

I’m with Gerry on this. I also think the attack on her for being a single mother is somewhat distasteful. This case should be appealed and thrown out because it is transparently stupid and against the spirit and letter of the law, not because of any of the personal peccadilloes of the participants.

Rule one of being a Liberal: don’t sink to their level.

[4] I agree. People change over time, and that includes gaining or losing faith.

As to Mr Storr, you don’t even know if you have the right man, and there’s no reason to think that his views prevailed over those of the other two, even if you have.

A more pertinent point might be to ask, why should a representative of industry sit on an employment appeals tribunal dealing with a public sector case? Public authorities have legal duties in the field of equality which private sector companies don’t have. They have to behave, as employers, according to more rigorous standards - of course we can debate whether or not this should be so, but for the present it is. What particular expertise does the private sector bring to bear on such cases?

I disagree, anyone who could be seen to have a vested interest or by biased in any way should recuse themselves, if only for the purpose of ensuring the integrity of the panel. In a court case the same thing would happen, during jury selection potential jurors are weeded out to ensure a fair trial. And yes, if a gay person was sat on the panel in this particular case of course they should also recuse themselves.

Its not a case of cutting anyone out of the legal system because of their religion, this person is an active member of a community which preaches discrimination, on that basis it would be inherently wrong for them to serve on a panel in which the same type of discrimination is an object of contention.

Surely Ms Ladele has undermined her own position:

“she holds the orthodox Christian view that marriage is the union of one man and one woman for life to the exclusion of all others and that marriage is the God-ordained place for sexual relations”

She is a registrar performing civil marraiges. Marriages that are not ordained by god, so unless the couple getting married are also having a seperate religious ceremony, she is allowing/permitting/promoting (whatever the word is) fornication.

Does she not perfom marriages for athiest couple either?

The ruling is perfectly logical and a correct application of current EU employment law. An employer forcing an employee to perform an act which is against their beleifs is in blatant violation of EU employment regulations guranteeing the right to religious/cultural/spiritual belief. Discrimination (direct or indirect) doesn’t need to be proved.
To follow the logic of the alternative scenario (sack the registrar and force anyone in contact withe “the public” to sign a contract to the effect that they will do anything for anyone) would in effect mean that christians (and jews and muslims and many other people) were effectively barred from a large sector of employment, anything involving what law refers to as “personal services”, and quite possibly anything involving the sale of goods.
Should a black registrar be forced to marry 2 BNP supporters, should a muslim be forced to sell pork, should jews be forced to work on saturday, or christians on a sunday ? Unless the requirement is explicitly stated in the employment contract (and even then it’s possible that the legislatrion overrides it) and there are no viable alternatives, no one can be forced to do anything which conflicts with their beleifs.

The problem here is that the right of belief clashes with the right of gays to marry. Get used to it - in the rights based culture the left have created this sort of thing will get more and more common, as various minority groups compete for pole position on the hierarchy of victimhood. The only winners will be the lawyers

Why on earth didn’t Islington just use another registrar who didn’t have an issue with same sex marriages instead of wasting a lot of time and public money on this whichhunt, a which hunt which has spectacularly backfired and created what to the left is an unwanted precedent.

Michael:

Thank you - i had thought the significance of a conflict of interest in this case would be obvious but seemingly not.

To clarify, if the only issue here were a possible conflict of interest then the correct remedy at appeal would simply be for the EAT to strike down the ruling and remit the case back to an employment tribunal to be heard by a new panel.

In short, if I’ve got the right CJ Storr, then this adds to Islington’s grounds for appeal but does not,of itself, give cause for the EAT to overturn the ruling without remitting the case back to an ET for it to be reconsidered. If, however, the EAT considers that, irrespective of any conflict of interest, the ET misapplied/misinterpreted the law then it can, and should, issue a revised judgement.

So far as the relevance or otherwise of Ladele’s personal history is concerned, having informed the tribunal of her belief that “sexual relations belong exclusively between a man and a woman within marriage” she becomes fair game for a charge of hypocrisy if - as has happened - it becomes apparent that she hasn’t applied that standard to her own personal life.

The moral here is simply that its unwise to adopt an holier than thou attitude towards others if you cannot live up to that standard yourself , or, as the Bible would have it…

1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

(Matthew 7, 1-2)

Matt:

Sorry, but that is not an accurate description/interpretation of the EU’s equal treatment directive.

If nothing else is disregards this section of the preamble:

(17) This Directive does not require the recruitment, promotion, maintenance in employment or training of an individual who is not competent, capable and available to perform the essential functions of the post concerned or to undergo the relevant training, without prejudice to the obligation to provide reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities.

Assuming that carrying out a legal, secular, ceremony is an essential function of being a registrar, councils would be under no obligation to maintain an individual in post if, for any reason, they make themselves unavailable to perform such a function.

Should a Muslim or Jew be required to handle pork? Yes if its an essential function of the job, as it would be if they sought employment in a pork butchers. That or they look for alternative employment.

Ideally, I think this case needs to go all the way to the Law Lords because, having introduced the general principle of non-discrimination on religious grounds we now need to build up case law on the application of that principle, in particular when it comes to questions of conscience, to which a test of reasonableness needs to be applied before things can settle down satisfactorily.

The simple fact is that civil marriage is a secular act. As #7 above points out, in taking the job, she has already violated her religious principles. She just wants to choose which principles she makes a fuss over.

What is clear however is that the local council have also been pretty stupid. The legislation allows for opt outs and they chose not to use it, so provoking a confrontation. They also designated her as a civil partnerships registrar without telling her. How stupid is that? I still don’t believe she been subjected to discrimination though, since all registrars are required to carry out the same duties. It seems possible however that Islington decided for whatever reason to deliberately generate a confrontation.

The stuff about her being a single mother is really quite out-of-order. That she did something she now claims to disagree with 27 years ago has no bearing on what her present beliefs are, nor would it even if she had done it yesterday: religious believers are not required to be saints in order to be religious believers.

I also think, although I make no claim to be any sort of expert in employment law, that basically a lot of the case seems to turn on the way her terms and conditions were changed, so that she fell under a different set of regulations. The issue doesn’t seem to be one of whether registrars in general are entitled to refuse to perform the civil partnership ceremonies, but of how employers with particular equalities policies should treat staff who are transferred to them from another body which did allow them to not perform parts of their role under certain circumstances. Are liberals now to be happy about changing people’s terms and conditions of employment without their consent?

Should a black registrar be forced to marry 2 BNP supporters

Yes, of course she should, and if she refuses she should be fired. It is grotesque to suggest that it is acceptable for a paid representative of the state to deny state-funded services to people solely because she disagrees with their political beliefs. Should a Labour-voting bin man be forced to collect rubbish from a Conservative voter’s house? Should a Conservative leader of Westminster Council be forced to provide council houses for Labour voters?

should a muslim be forced to sell pork, should jews be forced to work on saturday, or christians on a sunday

Yes to all the above, as long as it was made clear when they took the job. If an employer suddenly says to his hitherto Monday-to-Friday Jewish employee “come to work on Saturday or you’re fired”, then, yes, that’s wrong. But if a Jewish bloke takes a job in the knowledge that it involves working on Saturday, well, then, he has to come in to work on Saturday.

Well, I think her single mother status is relevant. She claims to be a devout Christian, and therefore won’t Marry gays. Her unmarried child, and therefore sex outside of marriage rather conflicts with that. Will she refuse to marry divorced couples? Or people who eat fish on Sunday? All against bible teaching. This is once again the fig leaf of religion being used to push forward bigots and their friends.

I see this site has it’s idiotic right wing trolls coming on here to spoil things. Haven’t they got enough of their own media to talk too?

My mother is an example of someone who more or less adheres to the “orthodox Christian view” on marriage, and waddyaknow, she also “…turns out to be a single mother who gave birth to a son, out of wedlock”.

Though in practice she’s entirely gay-friendly. A bit of a fag-hag, actually. And she certainly wouldn’t pull a stunt like this.

Nevertheless I’ll invite anyone else chucking around this hypocrisy-chatter to step outside. It’s simply a question of people falling short of - what they see - as their own high standards. That is well made here, though in a rather different context, admittedly.

Good Lord, look at her mug in that picture! I daren’t criticise in any way, she might set God on me.

And nobody can say anything about her being a single mother - she wasn’t a single mother, she was ‘in a relationship with The Lord.’ aka ‘the one and only, the Almighty’ as I like to refer to it. :-D

If she wants to have a relationship with an imaginary cloud being that is up to her. But this sort of nonsense has to be snuffed out. It is like a cancer invading various institutions. How long before ‘Christian’ nurses won’t look after gays or anyone else their batty preacher tells them to hate?

What is appalling about this case is that she is a minority herself, namely black. Not so long ago her beloved bible was used to discriminate against her very own race. As for the Catholic involvement, I would not rule it out. The head of the Catholic Church in England has said that he would like to see religion getting more involved with politics.

I do not see her bastard child a problem. That happened a long time ago and people, and their beliefs change.
Her child might have been an accident in a loving long term relationship that went wrong, before she was a devout Christian or she might have been a complete slag after a council house. Either way, she is not the same person she was all those years ago.

What she is now is a devout orthodox Christian, by her own admission. She cannot have it both ways, by saying “that marriage is the God-ordained place for sexual relations” (her words) and carry out atheist weddings, thereby contradicting herself. If she had not said the sentence I quote then maybe I could be persuaded to her defence.

Because she is contradicting herself, it just strikes me as being bigotted.

Her being a minority and the fact that her chosen fairytale would’ve discriminated against her not too long ago is neither here or there.

Initially, I thought that the council’s proposal to appeal this case was vindictive, but it is likely to generate further conflict and needs to be resolved. The case sets some very unfortunate precedents.

Could an employee in the housing department decline to assist a same sex couple on religious grounds? Could a social worker or probation officer refuse a client? What would happen if all of the employees in a department held similar religious views and all of them refused to work with people who live an unapproved lifestyle? How do you treat an employee who adopts an illiberal religious/moral code after they have signed a contract of employment? If you have a department of civil registrars, all of whom refuse to marry same sex couples, how do you recruit a liberal one without breaching employment law?

Well, all effective workplaces depend on goodwill and common sense, qualities which appear to be in short supply on both sides in this case.

Mike:

Yes there are grounds for criticising Islington’s handling of this matter but thse do not amount to a justifiable finding of direct discrimination and harrassment.

Rob:

Are liberals now to be happy about changing people’s terms and conditions of employment without their consent?

No, but if Ladele was unhappy with the change in contractual terms then she should have sought an appropriate legal remedy at the time.

Unity:

alright, so that was partly rhetorical, and I don’t want to claim that I know anything like enough about employment law to decide whether or not her claim was justified, but I do want to force the point that this doesn’t seem to be about religious people getting to not perform parts of their job they don’t want to on religious grounds. It’s about the way her terms and conditions were changed; there was another person in the office, I gather from the report, who because they were already emloyed by Islington could apparently justifiably be moved jobs under the threat of being fired despite having similar religious objections. Whether or not religious people should be allowed to refuse to do something because it in some way cuts against their religious belief is beside the point, I think.

Rob:

Lets get into this properly.

1, From reading the evidence, Ladele has/had a reasonable claim for breach of contract.

However the nature of that claim is somewhat complicated because of the circumstances in which she became an employee of Islington Council, i.e. by virtue of changes imposed by statute - the Statistics and Registration Act 2007.

Ordinarily, one cannot claim breach of contract on a unilateral variation of terms if that change arises from a change in the law - statute law trumps contractual terms. However, given the nature of the transfer, it could be argued that TUPE should have been applied, preserving the terms and conditions under which she’d worked prior to December 2007. Whether that argument would fly in a court of law, I don’t know, but its seems reasonable, on a reading of the evidence relating to the transfer, to pose the question.

That said, even without the question of whether TUPE should have been applied, it seems to me that Islington conduct falls some way short of treating Ladele with trust and respect, which is accepted in case law as an implied term in all employment contracts, and its on that basis that a claim for breach of contract could be entertained - and I would think she would have a fair shout of winning a case on that basis, albeit that this would lead to a much lower compensatory award that a discrimination case, if made successfully.

2. Whether or not religious people should be allowed to refuse to do something because it in some way cuts against their religious belief is certainly not ‘beside the point’ here because there are two issues that the ET needed to consider, but didn’t, in which this question is central to the outcome of the case.

The first relates to that of designating registrars for carrying out civil partnership. This is not, in law, automatic, i.e. just because you are already registered for births, deaths and marriages it does not follow that conducting civil partnerships becomes part of you job,

What the ET should have considered in this case is what parliament intended in putting in place this process of designation, i.e. is it merely an administrative matter that acknowledges nothing more than the fact that registrars require appropriate training before carrying out work on civil partnerships or does it create legitimate scope for an opt-out on religious or other grounds. That there is evidence that it has been treated as conferring an opt-out in custom and practice does not mean that that was either parliament’s intent or that the law should be legitimately construed in that way. In the absence of statutory or regulatory clarification from parliament it is, ultimately, for a court to interpret whether the designation requirement can be legitimately interpreted as creating scope for an opt-out.

More importantly - and this is the issue that I suspect needs to go to the Law Lords - the introduction of provisions in law prohibiting religious discrimination within a framework of laws intended to provide for equal treatment in law raises a series of major questions as to the legitimate scope and extent of claims founded on religious belief.

The key error of law that the Tribunal made in this case was that it accepted, without question, the validity of a religious objection to homosexuality on the premise that this is an ‘orthodox’ religious position, and then proceeded from there to infer that it is was reasonable for Ladele to seek to opt-out of any involvement in civil partnerships. The correct test in law in not whether something is an orthodox view but whether that view is reasonable at law, which is highly questionable given that the Equality Act’s Sexual Orientation Regulations prohibit discrimination in the provision of goods and services on grounds of sexual orientation other than in very specific circumstances set out in the regulations, all of which relate to explicitly religious practices carried out by religious organisations.

What the Tribunal should have address at the outset - and what Islington’s barrister should have challenged, but didn’t - was whether a refusal to take any part in civil partnerships due to a religious objection is reasonable at law in the context of the role of a registrar, which is civil and secular role. In my view, it isn’t and on that basis, the claim of discrimination on religious grounds falls because any ‘discrimination’ Ladele underwent would have been on the basis of her being a homophobic bigot.

Unity #9

“(17) This Directive does not require the recruitment, promotion, maintenance in employment or training of an individual who is not competent, capable and available to perform the essential functions of the post concerned or to undergo the relevant training, without prejudice to the obligation to provide reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities”.

That refers to comeptence and capability - I don’t have it to hand but the “spiritual beleif/non belief” section is entirely separate, and nothing to do with capability .

“Should a Muslim or Jew be required to handle pork? Yes if its an essential function of the job, as it would be if they sought employment in a pork butchers. That or they look for alternative employment.”

But you could argue that as the number of gays marriages is miniscule it is a requrement of the job, but not necessarily her job, as alternative registrars are avaiable. It’s no different to a muslim NHS doctor refusing to treat alcoholics, or a catholic one refusing to perform abortions - or indeed a female muslim refusing to be seen by a male doctor - all of which have permitted for a number of years on the basis that the public SERVICE, can be acheived by utilising alternative resources.
The fact that somene is a public servant does not negate their right to religious belief - in fact public/private is a red herring, the law applies equally to both viz the “no gays B&B” story of a few months back

“Ideally, I think this case needs to go all the way to the Law Lords because, having introduced the general principle of non-discrimination on religious grounds…”

You’ve contradicted your own argument - application of the above means all registrars would have to be non christian (ie illegal religious discrimination in job selection)

Ajay #12

“should a muslim be forced to sell pork, should jews be forced to work on saturday, or christians on a sunday”

“Yes to all the above, as long as it was made clear when they took the job. If an employer suddenly says to his hitherto Monday-to-Friday Jewish employee “come to work on Saturday or you’re fired”, then, yes, that’s wrong. But if a Jewish bloke takes a job in the knowledge that it involves working on Saturday, well, then, he has to come in to work on Saturday”.

But how do you know she wasn’t hired before same sex marriages were legalised ? My understanding is that Islington attempted to discipline her on grounds of homophobia - suggesting that in terms of employment law, they knew they were on dodgy ground, if it was a condition of the job when she started she would have had no grounds for appeal.

[23] Matt talks of a muslim NHS doctor refusing to treat alcoholics - I can’t think of any reason why a muslim doctor wouldn’t treat them given that treatment involves the promotion of abstinence from alcohol! Do you actually know of such a case?

24. I think he is just giving a hypothetical example but, Mike, you do realise that alcoholics go to see a doctor for things besides their alcoholism!

But how do you know she wasn’t hired before same sex marriages were legalised ?

She was hired before that. That’s part of the case, that Islington unilaterally changed the terms of her employment.

Registrars were employed on a freelance and then were brought under direct control of the council.

Isn’t that like an employer deciding to stop employing agency staff and to use only it’s own employees? Isn’t that slightly different to just being handed a new contract?

Unity,

that doesn’t seem to me to satisfactorily explain why the tribunal had no problem with Islington disciplining another member of staff with exactly the same objection to officiating at civil partnerships as Ladele, where the difference between the two was that Ladele was not initially employed by Islington. But I’m not an expert in employment law, and am also disposed to think that efforts should be made to accommodate religious believers in cases like this. Even in law, unless the law applies directly to the employees of the service provider rather than the service provider itself, I can’t see why, unless it impacted seriously on the ability of the provider to provide the service, there would be a problem: ex hypothesi, it wouldn’t impact on the provision of the service.

Registrars were employed on a freelance and then were brought under direct control of the council.

Isn’t that like an employer deciding to stop employing agency staff and to use only it’s own employees? Isn’t that slightly different to just being handed a new contract?

I’m not sure they were ‘freelance’ by any commonly understood use of the word. They were salaried officers, paid and appointed by the local authority, holding office “during the pleasure of the Registrar General” (Registration Service Act 1953). Ladele became an employee of Islington because of the Statistics and Registration Act 2007. Not much Ladele can do about that, it seems.

But Islington “designated all of its existing registrars as civil partnership arrangement registrars” without, it seems, their consent. That means they did change the terms of employment.

If Ms Ladele have refused to marry mixed-race couples, would her case have received the same outcome?