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Prison book ban ruled unlawful Prison book ban ruled unlawful by High Court
(35 minutes later)
High Court declares the government's ban on sending books to prisoners in England and Wales is unlawful The government's ban on sending books to prisoners in England and Wales is unlawful, the High Court has declared.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version. Under the current rules prisoners are prevented from receiving parcels unless they have "exceptional circumstances", such as a medical condition.
If you want to receive Breaking News alerts via email, or on a smartphone or tablet via the BBC News App then details on how to do so are available on this help page. You can also follow @BBCBreaking on Twitter to get the latest alerts. Mr Justice Collins said he could see "no good reason" to restrict access to books for prisoners.
The legal challenge was brought by Barbara Gordon-Jones, a life sentence prisoner at Send Jail in Surrey.
The book ban was introduced in November last year in England and Wales, as part a scheme which limits what prisoners can receive in parcels.
'No good reason'
The Incentives and Earned Privileges scheme was brought in partly as an attempt to crack down on drugs getting into prisons.
Prisoners had argued that books sent to them in parcels can be key to their rehabilitation.
Prisoners are still able to read books borrowed from a prison library - and last month the Ministry of Justice relaxed restrictions on the number of books they could keep in their cells.
But it's been claimed that prison libraries are often inadequately stocked, and can be hard to access because there is not always staff available to take prisoners to them.
Mr Justice Collins said: "I see no good reason in the light of the importance of books for prisoners to restrict beyond what is required by volumetric control and reasonable measures relating to frequency of parcels and security considerations."
He said that the scheme referred to prisoners earning privileges, and added: "In the light of the statement made about the importance of books... to refer to them as a privilege is strange."