Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick has issued a multi-pronged attack on various aspects of the legal system he perceives to be holding the country back.
Jenrick enthusiastically endorsed Conversative leader Kemi Badenoch’s pledge to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, telling a fringe event in Manchester today that this process would start immediately.
‘If we’re lucky enough to be in government against after the next general election, day one, we’re handing in our notice, and we’re leaving the ECHR,’ he said.
He also launched a stinging attack on the number of judicial reviews, which he said were ‘mummifying economic growth’.
‘We need to get the courts out of the way of some of these decisions,’ he said. ‘There are far too many judicial reviews – last year there were 3,000 excluding all the immigration decisions. Each of these is a government decision paused – a railway line, a nuclear power station, a prison. We have got to change things so that someone can grip the country and get things moving again.’
Jenrick suggested it was ‘absolutely insane’ that parties bringing judicial review claims had to pay a maximum of £5,000 towards the other side’s costs when the government had spent potentially millions, an imbalance which encouraged vexatious claims.
Jenrick also looked ahead to his keynote conference speech on Tuesday, which is entitled ‘Ending Judicial Activism’. He told delegates today: ‘We are a country of laws and we abide by the law. But I am afraid our own courts have increasingly in recent years been infected by a degree of judicial activism and we have got to change that.
‘There is no point leaving the court in Strasbourg and freeing ourselves from activist judges only to have activist judges here. If you want to enter the political sphere, then stand for parliament. If you are a judge, then be a judge.’ Jenrick said that this issue was most prevalent in the immigration tribunal, alleging that judges are former immigration lawyers with a skewed view towards asylum cases.
But Jenrick also noted that the country’s problems, as he saw them, were not solely caused by judges and the legal system but by parliament passing ‘a series of extremely ill-thought-out laws’. The Newark MP named the Climate Change Act, Human Rights Act and Equality Act as legislation which may need re-examining, although he declined to give details of what changes could be made.
Jenrick attacked Labour for seeking to abolish prison terms of less than six months, adding: ‘We are doing absolutely everything we can to campaign against this. I think it is going to spark a crime wave. If there is a sense of lawlessness and impunity now [among criminals] then imagine what will happen if they are told they are not going to jail for shoplifting or beating someone up.’
This article is now closed for comment.
17 Readers' comments