However, in 2003, in a particularly lightly populated glebe, Andrew and Gail Wallbank received a demand for almost £100,000 to fund repairs of their parish's medieval church at Aston Cantlow in Warwickshire.

[1][2] The House of Lords held the Aston Cantlow parochial church council was not a core public authority under the ECHR and its case law on religious bodies.

Conformably with this purpose, the phrase 'a public authority' in section 6(1) is essentially a reference to a body whose nature is governmental in a broad sense of that expression.

They cannot be regarded as determinative of a body's membership of the class of "core" public authorities: see also Grosz, Beatson, Duffy, Human Rights: The 1998 Act and the European Convention (2000), p 61, para 4-04.

But the domestic case law must be examined in the light of the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg Court as to those bodies which engage the responsibility of the State for the purposes of the Convention.