Stephen Sedley is a lord justice of appeal for England and Wales and president of the British Institute for Human Rights.
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Vol. 24 No. 18 · 19 September 2002
pages 17-19 | 3181 words
Colonels in Horsehair
Stephen Sedley examines the realtionship between human rights legislation and the judiciary
- Sceptical Essays on Human Rights edited by Tom Campbell and K.D. Ewing
Oxford, 423 pp, £60.00, December 2001, ISBN 0 19 924668 8
The United Kingdom is a good place in which to assemble a book of sceptical essays about human rights, but was 2001 a good year in which to do it? True, by then Scotland and Wales had operative devolution statutes which obliged their Governments to observe the European Convention on Human Rights in all they did; and some interesting decisions had already been thrown up north of the border. But the big one, the UK’s Human Rights Act, although enacted in 1998, had been put on a slow fuse to enable the country to get ready for it, and it was not until October 2000 that it was brought into force.
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Letters
Vol. 24 No. 20 · 17 October 2002
From Chris Purnell
Stephen Sedley (LRB, 19 September) is only partly right to attribute the lack of an ethnically diverse judiciary 'not to fundamental failings in the judicial appointments process … but to deep-seated discrimination within the legal profession'. In fact, it's almost certainly both. At the Employment Tribunals, where I practise, one regularly confronts black and Asian lawyers, but to appear before a non-white tribunal chairman is still very unusual.
The solution is to provide for a proportion of the lowest tiers of the full-time judiciary to be elected. To be a candidate for election, one would have to be a fully qualified lawyer of, say, seven years' standing, to have practised for at least some of that time, and perhaps to be verified by the Lord Chancellor's Department as worthy of judicial office. But after that one could put oneself up for election. In areas with large populations of ethnic minorities there would soon be a fairer proportion of black and Asian members of the judiciary.
Chris Purnell
Orpington, Kent
