Functioning courts for mediation, a more representative judiciary, and remembering a Holocaust childhood: your letters to the editor

Mediation needs functioning courts

The government’s plan to extend the family mediation voucher scheme (as you reported on 17 January) is welcome news. Mediation can offer clients a more constructive, cheaper and sometimes less stressful process within which to explore the options available to them arising out of their separation. The voucher may not cover the full costs of the mediation process, depending on the mediator’s rate and the number of sessions needed, but by meeting some of the costs, it could encourage more couples to try mediation.

 

However, not all cases are suitable for mediation and even those that are may not be resolved by a mediation process. Cases that still need a final determination need a court process that works. Court delays and backlogs have not been caused by an unwillingness or inability by couples to mediate. Hence it follows that the mediation voucher scheme is not going to solve the court crisis, which involves clients experiencing long delays before their case is dealt with. Years of budget cuts have left us with an insufficient number of judges and court buildings, and legal aid is much less readily available for clients who need it. The management of cases which involve litigants in person can add to court delays.

 

These issues need to be addressed urgently, and our family justice system needs to be properly funded. It is going to take more than an extended mediation voucher scheme to do this. However, the scheme is a good start and families deserve and need initiatives like this to help support them during a separation. I hope that the success of this scheme will encourage the government to do more to support separating couples and those families that need it.

 

Stacey Nevin

Senior associate and family mediator, Kingsley Napley LLP, London EC2

 

Judiciary must be more representative

The days when magistrates were almost entirely picked from local Conservative party activists or from trades union representatives have long passed. The modern magistrate comes from a wider pool which is far better trained than before. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of our judiciary in higher courts, where there is still a preponderance of white, upper-middle class males from the same public schools and universities who are unrepresentative of their wider community.

 

The government’s latest drive to recruit more magistrates from a wide cross-section of society is to be welcomed. The more representative our judges and magistrates are of the society that they serve, the better the cause of justice is served. The training for those who come from diverse backgrounds, whether they are bricklayers or stay-at-home-mums, must be of a high standard, to ensure the fair and uniform delivery of justice.   

 

The legal profession has some reservations about the increase in magistrates’ sentencing powers that the government announced recently. The concern is that this may have the opposite effect to that intended – it may cause more defendants to appeal their sentence and convictions, thereby clogging up the system even more, further up the chain.  

 

Sailesh Mehta

Red Lion Chambers, London EC4

 

War and peace in space

As the new Mr Justice Sweeting can no longer speak out on contentious issues, on his behalf I take issue with your headline calling him a ‘Starship Trooper’ in reference to a quotation from Star Trek (of which Sweeting J and I are both fans) read at his swearing-in (Obiter, 21 January). Not only is Starship Trooper a reference to a radically different work – a militaristic novel by Robert A. Heinlein about a society where citizenship is conditional on military service – the warlike connotations of ‘Starship Trooper’ are antithetical to Star Trek. Since its creation in the 1960s by Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek has always depicted humans in an enlightened future, where violence of any kind, let alone war, is always the last resort. Captain Picard – who was quoted at the swearing-in, and who you misleadingly showed in a rare moment of holding a phaser rifle – is the foremost exponent of this approach of tolerance and mediation, both of which are useful skills for a judge (unlike soldiering). Indeed, Captain Picard famously said that the first duty of a Starfleet officer is to the truth, and this could be a good motto for any judge. We can only hope, for the sake of justice, that Sweeting J follows Picard’s advice rather than modelling himself on the world of Starship Troopers.

 

Elijah Granet

London NW1

 

Holocaust childhood

Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 January) always makes me remember the saddest story I have heard in over 30 years in practice. Some years ago I made a will for a client, Mrs E, who was an elderly lady. In 2020, I was told she had died and was asked to release the will.

 

In passing, the executrix told me that for the last two or three years before her death Mrs E had suffered from acute dementia and in her mind had completely reverted to the world of her childhood. Sad, I know, but not so unusual in this day and age. The problem was that Mrs E had spent her childhood as a young Jewish orphan girl in Auschwitz until she was liberated and sent to England for adoption with a couple of hundred other orphans.

 

From 2018-2020 in the south of England, day by day and night by night, Mrs E relived Auschwitz. RIP Mrs E. You remembered far far too much. We remember too little.

 

Timothy J. Bancroft

John Copland and Son, Sheerness

 

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