Lady Carr warns of ‘grave threats’ to safety of judges

The resilience of judges ‘does not extend to toleration’ of ‘grave threats and intimidation both inside and outside the courtroom’, the lady chief justice told guests at last night’s annual dinner for judges hosted by the lord mayor of London.

Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill said: ‘Judges across many courts and tribunals have been subject to increasing and increasingly unacceptable sensationalist and inaccurate abuse. They, and sometimes their families, have been subject to grave threats and intimidation both inside and outside the courtroom, both online and in the physical world.

‘I have spoken on several occasions this year about the importance of judicial resilience in its many guises but an expectation of resilience does not extend to toleration of such behaviour. Judicial security training is helping but more needs to be done to deal with what are not only attacks on individual judges, but attacks on our democratic process.’

Carr said more would need to be done to ensure a ‘cultural shift away from such abuse and back towards the more reasoned scrutiny and debate’.

Speaking of artificial intelligence and recent court cases which saw a barrister and solicitor apparently rely on fake citations, the lady chief justice said with ‘time, training and cautious incrementalism, the use of AI by lawyers and by judges will be as beneficial as it is inevitable’. But she warned that the legal sector ‘needs to be ever-vigilant and robust’ in its approach to the technology. 

She added: ‘That means careful oversight by legal services regulators and more training and support for lawyers, particularly trainees and those in the early years of their careers, to enable them to use AI circumspectly and usefully. I am sure that we can and will learn from recent experiences, and that AI can be used appropriately as a tool to assist lawyers and judges to promote fairer, more efficient and effective access to the law and justice. As I have heard it said, I want AI to do my laundry, so that I can do art.’

Lord chancellor Shabana Mahmood told judges that ‘political choices have eroded justice in this country’. Mahmood said she was ‘appalled’ by the attacks on judges adding: ‘No judge should ever be attacked for doing their job. I will never stand idly by because there is no rule of law in this country without the men and women, many of whom are in this room, who uphold it each and every day.’

She told guests the ‘pursuit of justice and the rule of law…has been harder to uphold in recent years than ever before, despite the dedication of everyone in this room and judges, lawyers and other professionals across the country’.

‘Our prisons, on the point of collapse, have been the most obvious illustration but they are far from the entire story. Many years of chronic underinvestment, across the justice system have led to long delays in our courts, in almost every jurisdiction. This erosion has happened over many years and it will take time to reverse it but this government is committed to restoring justice in this country. I hope you have seen the beginning of this in our sentencing reforms.’

Speaking of the court backlogs, she said that ‘unless we do things differently, backlogs will rise and justice will be delayed for ever longer’.  Sir Brian Leveson’s review, due to report soon, ‘must be bold if we are to reverse the rising backlogs in our courts’.

This article is now closed for comment.