Judges and equality: it gets worse

This is a search for two missing high court judges of ethnic minority origin. I started it a couple of weeks after reading the Equality and Human Rights Commission's report Sex and Power, which said that there were three judges of such ancestry. But I only knew of one - Mrs Justice Dobbs. I asked people who would know these things and they couldn't help.

So who are the other two? A footnote in the report cited the official government statistics. I looked them up and they confirmed that, as at April 1 2008, there were three. But I was sure that the figures for the year before mentioned just one. I checked and, sure enough, the stats told me that as at April 1 2007, Dame Linda Dobbs was alone. So during the 12 months in between, two of the new judges appointed to the high court must have been of ethnic minority origin. Except that they weren't. I made inquiries into all of them, and all of them seemed somewhat white.

It's possible the statistics are just plain wrong. But there's an intriguing alternative explanation.

The official diversity statistics learn about ethnic backgrounds by way of a form which the judges themselves have filled in. They are given various options: mixed, Asian, black, Chinese or "other ethnic". Two high court judges who described themselves as "white" for the April 2007 form (or who refused to disclose what they were) must have changed their minds and outed themselves as minority ethnic before April 2008.

According to their self-assessment, they classified themselves as "other ethnic". So what are they then? More interestingly, who are they? I don't ask the questions out of mere curiosity. There continues to be controversy and debate about the under-representation of the ethnic minorities in the higher judiciary. It is the government's and the Judicial Appointments Commission's often-stated policy to increase the diversity of the judiciary. It matters whether, out of 110 high court judges, the true proportion is 1% or 3%.

The Sex and Power report was mainly concerned with the continuing low proportion of women in the country's top jobs. For some strange reason it presented its findings in terms of gastropods undertaking highly unlikely journeys. So someone calculated on taxpayers' money that a snail could travel round the M25 nine times before there are likely to be as many senior women judges as men. In more common parlance, sex equality in the high court and above would be achieved in 55 years - a wholly artificial, meaningless and irrelevant projection.

Coincidentally, last week five new high court judges were appointed, of whom two were women. There are now 14 women high court judges, in addition to the three on the court of appeal and one law lord, Lady Hale. In the light of these new figures, I am anxious to know what changes will have to be made to Sex and Power's predictions. How far will the snail have to travel? How long will it take her?