ABSTRACT
It will be clear from 1.3, above, that Art 8 does not refer solely to marriage based relationships, and the existing Strasbourg case law already indicates that a very slight relationship between a father and his child will be enough to invoke the concept of ‘family’. Those whose sole contact has been to provide sperm for artificial insemination will clearly not be able to show a sufficient connection to establish a familial relationship, but (especially as the Convention is a living, legal organism and not a static body of rules) anything more, however temporary, may well be sufficient to create the necessary relationship. It should be noted that the Court of Appeal has already sounded a warning about using common sense in invoking human rights arguments: in Daniels v Walker (2000) The Times, 17 May, the Master of the Rolls called for a ‘responsible attitude’ from lawyers raising such arguments, so as not to clog the courts with an unnecessary workload generated by meretricious points. Lord Woolf expressed the hope that judges would take a robust attitude with inappropriate arguments, which he categorised as any which take ‘the court down blind alleys’. There has already been some practitioner consideration of whether this might lead to adverse costs orders.
