There is creeping capture of the United Kingdom’s judiciary.
Earlier this week at the Court of Appeal hearing of the Shamima Begum case, in which the defendant’s legal team lost its bid to take its challenge to the Supreme Court, Lord Chief Justice Baroness Carr said it could be argued the decision in Miss Begum’s case was harsh.
It could also be argued that Begum is the author of her own misfortune, but it is not for this court to agree or disagree with either point of view.
The only task of the court was to assess whether the deprivation decision was unlawful, since it was not, Miss Begum’s appeal was dismissed.
Jacob Rees-Mogg discusses the ‘creeping capture’ of the British justice system
GB News
Baroness Carr was exactly right – the role of the judiciary is to interpret the law, whether a judge thinks Shamima Begum was treated harshly or not – indeed, I think she was treated harshly – is entirely irrelevant.
Parliament writes and passes the law. The judiciary interprets it in our courts.
But this statement from Lord Chief Justice seemed to contradict the fact that earlier this week, she took an explicitly political position with respect to Garrick Club membership, prompting the four old women we discussed yesterday to resign.
A leaked memo seen by the Guardian said: “I wish to emphasise my commitment to diversity and inclusivity across the judiciary. We must continue our vital work in this area, including delivering on the work outlined in our diversity and inclusion strategy.”
But it doesn’t end here for the Lord Chief Justice. Not only does she seem to want to inject the judiciary with leftist groupthink, she also wants to take away from you one of the most basic of constitutional rights, the right to trial by jury, under the guise of efficiency.
Lord Chief Justice told BBC Radio Four yesterday that as a means of clearing the court backlog, that consideration should be given to recalibrating which offences should be granted the option of being tried by jury or not.
She acknowledged that this would limit the ability of a defendant to decide if they wanted their case to be heard by a jury, that is to say, limiting there are fundamental constitutional rights.
Trial by jury is an ancient right confirmed in Magna Carta over 800 years ago. It is the cornerstone of the British justice system, and justice and efficiency are not necessarily bedfellows in a competition between the two.
Justice must always win. There is a high risk that judges think they know it all, and may become jaundiced by seeing too much evil in human nature.
Juries may be more likely to find not guilty, although it could be that more often innocent people opt for trial by jury, trusting their fellow citizens more than an agent of the state.
The English jurist William Blackstone once said, ‘it is better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent man suffer’.
But it seems the Lord Chief Justice is intent on turning the United Kingdom into a dystopian German-style legal system, where the ancient right of being tried by your peers is sidelined in favour of an elitist approach to justice, with a sprinkling of woke ideology on top.
Source Agencies
