Hossain v Secretary of State for Justice: exclusion zone licence conditions survive judicial review

The High Court has dismissed a judicial review challenge brought by a convicted sex offender against the Secretary of State for Justice's decision to expand the exclusion zone attached to her release licence. In R (Hossain) v Secretary of State for Justice [2026] EWHC 862 (Admin), HHJ Karen Walden-Smith, sitting as a Judge of the High Court, rejected all three grounds of challenge — irrationality, Article 8 disproportionality, and procedural unfairness — in a judgement handed down on 14 April 2026.

Syeda Fatinah Hossain had been sentenced in October 2021 to five years and four months for sexual activity with a 14-year-old pupil whilst working as a study supervisor, and a concurrent term for perverting the course of justice. She was released on licence in November 2023 subject to an exclusion zone covering the whole of West Sussex, recalled in February 2024 following SHPO breaches, and subsequently re-released following a Parole Board direction in February 2025. The Board, finding no evidential basis for the county-wide zone, substituted the more limited area of Roffey — mirroring the existing restraining order — whilst expressly permitting a variation if compelling reasons emerged.

Following renewed representations from the victim and his family, who raised heightened concerns about the prospect of a chance encounter given that their home lay approximately 1.3 miles from the claimant's family home in Horsham, the SSJ expanded the exclusion zone to cover Horsham in May 2025. A second, more detailed decision to the same effect followed in October 2025, forming the primary focus of the judicial review.

Irrationality

The court held that the SSJ had fulfilled the Tameside duty of sufficient inquiry. The October 2025 decision had been preceded by multi-agency consultation, a review of extensive documentation including OASys assessments, sentencing remarks, and victim liaison representations, and explicit consideration of the claimant's family circumstances and mental health. A travel corridor had been explored but rejected on the ground that GPS monitoring was unavailable for this category of offender, rendering compliance unverifiable. The Parole Board's own reasoning had anticipated that a variation might be justified by compelling evidence; the victim family's heightened concerns about proximity constituted precisely such a change in circumstances under paragraph 3.92 of the Licence Conditions Policy Framework.

Article 8

The judgement reaffirmed the principles in R (Craven) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2001] EWHC 850 (Admin), that a victim's right to move about without fear or anxiety engages Article 8(2) and can justify restricting an offender's movements. Both sets of competing Convention rights had been weighed. The court noted that the claimant's ability to meet her family outside Horsham, whilst difficult, had not been shown to be impossible, and the restriction was in any event time-limited to the licence expiry date of 26 July 2026, after which only the Roffey restraining order would remain.

Procedural fairness

Following R (Tabbakh) v Staffordshire and West Midlands Probation Trust [2014] EWCA Civ 827, the court found no systemic unfairness. The claimant had made substantive representations throughout the pre-action and judicial review stages, all of which had been considered. Consistent with the Court of Appeal's recent restatement in R (Singaram) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWCA Civ 1375, procedural fairness is context-sensitive: where a claimant has in substance had a full opportunity to place relevant material before the decision-maker, the absence of a further formal invitation to comment does not constitute a material breach.

The case provides a useful consolidation of the legal framework governing licence condition variations where a Parole Board direction has set a lower threshold and subsequent victim representations seek an expansion. It confirms that such a variation does not require evidence of an increased risk of reoffending; harm to a victim's psychological wellbeing and the reasonable fear of a chance encounter are independently capable of justifying a wider exclusion zone, provided the decision-maker undertakes a proportionate balancing exercise across the competing Article 8 interests.