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No 10 attack on top judge is mindless nonsense

    • The Guardian,
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I expect exaggerated, misleading and sometimes deliberately false responses to just about any comment the lord chief justice makes about sentencing policy. Successive home secretaries and certain newspapers can be relied on to react in Pavlovian fashion. But I was disappointed to see Downing Street joining in the mindless attacks. Lord Phillips had suggested some killers in prison under life sentence spend too long in jail. No 10's "official spokesman" responded: "We believe people should be kept in prison as long as they are judged to be a danger to society." Had Lord Phillips said anything to the contrary? No. Had he even hinted that people who were a "danger to society" should be released? No. Had the spokesman actually read the speech? I doubt it. There's a machinery to ensure life prisoners don't get out if they are considered a danger. All Lord Philips was suggesting was that sometimes those minimums are set too high and that some killers, no longer dangerous, don't need to spend quite so long in prison. So why is No 10 so stupidly stirring things up?

Do not think only the big national issues - like sentencing - cause friction between the judiciary and the government. They can bicker about many other things too. For instance, at the moment, the judges are accusing the lord chancellor of usurping their functions by making a decision which was, they claim, in their territory. The issue is whether judges ought to be allowed to return to private practice as barristers when they retire or no longer want to judge. At present, coming back is forbidden. But Lord Falconer said a few months ago he would lift that restriction. It's not yours to lift, says Lord Phillips in a waspish letter to him, it's none of your business, and anyway the way you want to do it is rubbish, and we judges are dead against it. Falconer believes more good candidates - especially women and lawyers from the ethnic minorities - would become judges if they knew their decision was not irreversible. The judges fear yo-yoing between bench and bar would "diminish the standing of the judiciary and seriously weaken its independence."

Should Britain have its own bill of rights? Does the UK want or need a written constitution? Both questions are currently under lively discussion, but I've already discovered much public confusion about the link between the two. Are a constitution and a bill of rights inextricably interwoven? No, explains a consultation paper A Bill of Rights for Britain by the organisation Justice, published today; a number of countries have one and not the other. I suspect the question most asked will be: "Why do we need a separate bill of rights when we have the Human Rights Act and the European convention on human rights?"

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