This is in response to tliii's question (in his response to me-judice's post) about the Human Rights Act 98. As I posted near the start of this thread, the Act is unlikely to be relevant to the enforceability of a bond. It does not deal with socio-economic rights. There is, for example, no protected right to work.
I would disagree slightly with me-judice on two points:-
(1) EU law might, just conceivably, allow an argument based on free movement of workers (this was the argument used to bust the football transfer system), but in order to make this argument good you would have to show that bonding has a measurable, adverse and disproportionate impact on the EU pilot job market. Not easy.
(2) Although me-judice is right to say that substantive law hasn't changed much since the BALPA opinion was written, judicial approaches to restraint of trade arguments do fluctuate, and if agreements do not keep up with the state of the art on drafting appropriately limited restraints they can come a cropper.
FNG
(employment) lawyer and (private) pilot