To Liverpool, where our attorney general has found a way to stop critics of the European Court of Human Rights grumbling about judgments imposed by a ‘foreign court’. The solution, says Lord Hermer (Richard Hermer KC) lies in language. 

For a start, it seems, the phrase ‘execution of judgments’ has to go. ‘Execution is a lawyer’s term,’ Hermer told the Council of Europe’s summer school in Liverpool. ‘The public’s understanding of execution is that it has something to do with capital punishment.’ And this, he asserted, is exactly not what happens when a state such as the UK is caught bang to wrongs by the European Court of Human Rights. 

Portrait of Richard Hermer KC

Hermer: Phrase 'execution of judgments' has to go

Source: Michael Cross

‘Implementation of judgments’ would be a better phrase, Hermer suggests, though even that ‘downplays the scope for democratic debate and political choice when a state considers how it should respond to an adverse judgment against it’. 

Perhaps Gazette readers can think of a better one? Phagocytosis, maybe?

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