Francis FitzGibbon is a KC. He was chair of the Criminal Bar Association from 2016 to 2017.
Juries decide the outcome of about 1 per cent of criminal cases in England and Wales, and yet the jury system is permanently under threat. The latest threat comes in Sir Brian Leveson’s Independent Review of the Criminal Courts, which the government commissioned to deal with the ever growing backlog of cases in the Crown Court. Leveson suggests replacing the jury with a judge and two...
The plan to ‘off-shore’ asylum seekers to Rwanda was the last straw. In May 2023, I resigned as a (part-time) immigration judge after twenty years in the job. It was less a matter of conscience, more of recognition that the role had become irrevocably tainted by the politics of asylum. For years, people coming to the UK for respite from horrors in their home countries had faced...
On one view, a placard in the street in front of a court building, visible to members of the public who may or may not be jurors, could hardly amount to an interference with anything; it might even give useful information – especially if a decision to acquit based on conscience really is a right that jurors have.
The Illegal Migration Bill (now in force as the Illegal Migration Act) was debated without the usual ministerial statement that it was compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The ‘statement of compatibility’ is a non-compulsory feature of the legislative process introduced by the Human Rights Act from 2000. Governments have dispensed with it only three times since.
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