Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick has pledged to abolish immigration tribunals and give the power to the lord chancellor to appoint judges.

In a well-trailed speech to the Conservative Party conference in Manchester today, Jenrick said that dozens of judges with links to open borders charities or who spent their career defending migrants’ right to stay in the UK are continuing to serve on the bench.

Jenrick, who brought a judge’s full-bottom wig on stage to make his point, likened the situation to finding out halfway through a football match that the referee was a supporter of the other side.

'The public is entitled to ask: how independent are they? [These judges] dishonour generations of independent jurists who came before them and they undermine the people’s trust in the law itself. Judges who blur the line between adjudication and activism can have no place in our justice system.’

Jenrick said the party would ‘restore the proper role of our judiciary’ and give ultimate power to parliament and ministers who are accountable to the people. He promised to restore the office of the lord chancellor to its status before Labour's constitutional reforms in the 2000s. ‘The lord chancellor will once again appoint the judges – no more quangos,’ he added. ‘They will be instructed never to permit political activism of any political hue [for those who] don the wig ever again.’

Jenrick, admitted as a solicitor in 2008, also attacked the Sentencing Council as ‘not fit for purpose’ and responsible for ‘two-tier justice’.   

‘We are slipping into a two-tier nightmare under Keir Starmer. All too frequently the law is not applied equally. No more - every single person in this country must be treated exactly the same, regardless of their background.

‘The public are sick of voting for tougher sentences and getting the opposite. So in future the justice secretary, accountable to parliament, will be responsible for setting sentencing policy. No longer will an unaccountable quango be able to subvert the will of the British people for criminals to be properly punished.’

 

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