News

The Bribery Act 2010 came into force on 1 July 2011. This is a UK-wide statute which I have discussed on the IFTTAwebsite before. It replaces the current common law and ancient statutory provisions regarding bribery and corruption. The Act creates offences of bribing another person and of being bribed, and creates a separate offence […]

The Procurator Fiscal, Aberdeen v Thomas Scott Forrester, [2011] HCJAC 71The respondent, a police chief Inspector, was charged with dangerous driving after allegedly instructing a police constable driving a police car, in which he was travelling to catch a plane, to put the sirens on and move to the wrong side of the road. When

The German court “Amtsgericht Geldern” has referred the following questions to the ECJ:Does the right to compensation laid down in Article 7 of the Air Passenger Rights Regulation constitute a claim for damages which is subject to the limits of liability set out in the Montreal Convention, by virtue of the first sentence of Article

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected a constitutional challenge to the government’s use of body-imaging scanners at the nation’s airports, ruling that the need to detect hidden explosives outweighs the privacy rights of travelers. The judgement noted that passengers may avoid the scans by opting to undergo a pat-down by

The Czech court Nejvyšší Správní Soud referred the following questions to the ECJ:Does Article 306 of Council Directive 2006/112/EC of 28 November 2006 on the common system of value added tax refer only to supplies made by travel agents to end users of a travel service (travellers) or also to supplies made to other persons

In its recently published Annual Safety Review, EASA confirms that 2010 is “the first year that no fatal accident in commercial air transport operations occurred in the history of aviation in Europe both for helicopter and aeroplane operations”. In global terms, the accident rate in aviation has been declining steadily ever since the 1950s.Source: EuroControl

According to proposals adopted by the Civil Liberties Committee of the EU Parliament, anyone guilty of child abuse or who watches child pornography online could face from 1 to 10 years behind bars. The legislation calls for all web pages containing child pornography to be removed at source, meaning member states should cooperate with third

Upon request of two consumers, the Defendant (an Austrian travel agent) offered them a package consisting of a tiger shark scuba diving trip to the Bahamas organized by a Florida based scuba diving company and the flights from/to Austria. The concept of the diving trip was based on watching tiger sharks while diving without a

In its reference for preliminary ruling of March 4, 2011, the OLG Köln referred the follwoing question to the ECJ:Does Article 23(1) of the Regulation (EC) No 1008/2008 on common rules for the operation of air services in the Community, according to which optional price supplements are to be communicated in a clear, transparent and

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has put passenger travel companies on notice to change misleading debit and credit card surcharging practices or face enforcement action under consumer protection laws.Publishing its findings on these surcharges, following a super-complaint from U.K. Consumer Rights Association Which?, the OFT also calls for the law to be updated to