Royal Peculiars are an oddity of the Church of England. Churches and chapels that would normally come under the jurisdiction of the local bishop are in fact ‘peculiar’ when they have an ordinary who is not the local bishop but someone appointed by the Crown – and in some cases the Queen herself. In the Channel Islands, the whole deaneries of Jersey and Guernsey rather than individual churches claim to be Royal Peculiars. Whether this claim is valid is not easy to determine. While together with the Isle of Man, but excluding Ireland, they form part of the British Islands, they are not part of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom government is responsible for the defence and international relations of the Channel Islands, but the Crown is ultimately responsible for their good government, and Acts of the British Parliament do not apply to the Channel Islands.

As predicted, the Charities Act 2011, which consolidates the Recreational Charities Act 1958, the Charities Act 1993 and many of the provisions of the Charities Act 2006, received Royal Assent on 14 December and came into force on 14 March 2012, three months after its enactment.

This report covers both the sessions held in November 2010 (the inaugural group of sessions of the new Synod that came into being following the quinquennial elections in the autumn of 2010) and those held in February and July 2011.

As usual, the General Assembly's debates ranged very widely: from a call by the Church's social care organisation, CrossReach, for visitors' centres to be established in all Scottish prisons to a plea for more ministers to consider a career in military chaplaincy. Several specific items may be of interest to readers of this Journal.

Recently, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) returned to the test of individual sincerity for determining whether there has been an infringement of freedom of religion pursuant to section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Charter) in SL c Commission scolaire des Chênes. Sincerity of belief or in practice as necessary for religious expression on the part of a complainant has been accepted from some of the earliest Charter cases as the triggering requirement for a section 2(a) claim, and, in itself, sufficient to establish a claim which a court must then balance against conflicting claims pursuant to section 1 (‘reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society’) or section 15 (equality rights). In SL, the court confirmed that mere sincerity is no longer sufficient and that an objective burden of proof now rests on a claimant to show how a state-sanctioned requirement infringes the fundamental right to freedom of religion before competing claims will be assessed. In SL, the court found that the complainants had failed to show how a religious education course mandated for all students without exception by the Government of Quebec interfered with what they argued was their religious freedom as Roman Catholic parents to pass on their faith to their children. This result has also been interpreted to mean that the state has a right prior to parental rights in the religious formation of their own children, and, on this reading, has been highly controversial. The court's new formulation of a sincerity test may be of interest elsewhere. The earlier formulation in Syndicat Northcrest v Anselem was adopted by the House of Lords in R (Williamson) v Secretary of State for Education and Employment, and the subsequent spread of its use has since been subject to consideration in England.

On 27 March the House of Commons debated the policy guidelines of the Director of Public Prosecutions on prosecutions for encouraging or assisting suicide. The debate, introduced by Richard Ottaway (Conservative) and David Winnick (Labour), was broadly supportive of the guidelines. The motion was amended and the House resolved to welcome the policy guidelines and to encourage ‘further development of specialist palliative care and hospice provision’.

Having met in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin in 2010, in 2011 Synod returned to the less spiritual but rather plusher surroundings of the City Hotel, Armagh. It was comforting to note from the attendance figures that the level of luxury seems to have little effect on the willingness of delegates to attend.

The agenda seemed slight and uncontroversial. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland had been stimulated by the debate on homosexual ministers but nothing in the programme of discussion for Synod seemed likely to spark such feeling and argument. The Anglican Covenant could excite members to threaten schism or lead to a divided Church but it did not look likely.