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286. In January 1987, the European Commission of Human Rights heard an application introduced by the Council of Civil Service Unions and Others against the United Kingdom (application No. 11603/85). The applicants' complaint was (inter alia) that the United Kingdom Government had removed the right of individual employees at GCHQ to belong to a trade union and that this action was not necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security within the meaning of article 11, paragraph 2, of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Commission determined that the application was inadmissible.
Article 23
Taxation
287. The 1988 Finance Act introduces a system of independent taxation for husbands and wives from April 1990. A husband and wife will then each receive their own tax allowances and each will be responsible for handling his or her own tax affairs. The wife will be entitled to privacy in her own tax affairs in the same way as her husband and all other taxpayers. A wife's income will no longer effectively bear a higher tax charge than that of a single woman. An associated revision of the personal allowances structure will mean that the tax system will no longer tax a married couple more heavily if the husband is the only breadwinner than if the wife is the breadwinner.
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288. In the application of Lindsay v. the United Kingdom to the European Commission of Human Rights, the applicants a married couple in which only the husband had earned income alleged that the United Kingdom income tax system discriminated against them on a number of grounds. Chiefly, they alleged discrimination on the ground of marriage, in that they were more heavily taxed than if they had been an unmarried couple living together, and on the ground of sex, in that they were more heavily taxed than they would have been if only the wife, not the husband, had had earned income and so had been the main breadwinner. On 11 November 1986, the Commission ruled the application inadmissible, holding that a married couple was not directly analogous to an unmarried couple and that the advantageous position of a married couple in which the wife was the main breadwinner had an objective and reasonable justification. The Commission concluded that in taxation the margin of appreciation allowed to signatory States must be wider than in many other areas.
Divorce
289. The Family Law Act 1986 facilitates the recognition and enforcement of custody orders made in one part of the United Kingdom in another, and provides a simplified jurisdiction which operates in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The Act also makes provision for the recognition in the United Kingdom of decrees of divorce, nullity or legal separation obtained by means of proceedings abroad, if those decrees are effective under the law of the country in which they were obtained.