Judge "not biased" in Palestinian case

A judge who was a member of Jewish association which had expressed extreme views against Palestinian causes was not biased when determining an asylum appeal from a Palestinian applicant.

In Helow v Secretary of State for the Home Department, the House of Lords considered whether natural justice had been breached where a Court of Session judge refused permission to review an application by a Palestinian asylum seeker, who had assisted lawyers investigating the Sabra Shatila massacre in 1982 and was regarded as holding views that were anti-Israeli, anti-Syrian and anti-Lebanese. The judge, Lady Cosgrove, was a member of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists.

Lord Hope of Craighead outlined the test of the “fair minded and informed observer”. He found there was little to associate the judge with partisan material in the association’s magazine, and that a judge could be assumed “by virtue of the office for which she has been selected, to be intelligent and well able to form her own views about anything she reads”. Accordingly, there was “no basis on which the observer would conclude that there was a reasonable possibility that the judge was biased”.