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Socialist Lawyer issue 45

"My kind of justice is swift, effective and matches the crime" says John Reid. In Reid’s world, justice doesn’t involve that minor and troublesome detail of going to Court. Far better to resolve disputes on a dark night, down a quiet alley, perhaps with a few swift and effective punches.

Tony Blair’s valedictory Queen’s Speech contains everything that a vigilante Home Secretary could desire. The Fraud (Trials Without Jury) Bill does just what it says on the tin: it abolishes those inconvenient creatures called juries. You may have a sense of déjà vu: New Labour has been trying to abolish trial by jury in one form or another since 1997. Until recently, every attempt failed. But, buried away in the Criminal Justice Act 2003, is the abolition of trial by jury in cases of serious fraud. Even then, it was so controversial that Labour could only persuade enough of its backbenchers to vote for it by promising another Parliamentary vote before implementation. This is the implementing vote and, shamefully, its second reading was passed on 29 November with only a handful of Labour rebels lining up with the Opposition to vote against.

Other legislative proposals continue the theme of handing unchecked power to the executive. The immigration service is to have greater powers 'to police borders'. Expect more asylum seekers to be locked up without due process. The police are to have greater powers to police 'serious and organised crime'. Expect those powers to be extended to police the rest of us sooner or later.

And police powers to evict – without the messy business of obtaining a Court order – will be extended from existing closure notices and closure orders (for premises where the police suspect drug dealing or prostitution), to cases of 'noise' and 'anti-social behaviour' in general. This issue of Socialist Lawyer explores the human rights abuses that inevitably occur when power is in the hands of the executive, unchecked by the Courts.

Piers Mostyn, Mike Mansfield QC and Laura Janes write devastating critiques of New Labour’s penal policy: more and heavier prison sentences result in more vulnerable prisoners, more overcrowding, fewer rights, and a higher rate of re-offending at the end.

Yasmin Khan, from the Justice4Jean Campaign, writes of the Menezes family’s difficult struggle to obtain justice, and to bring Jean Charles de Menezes’ murderers to account. And Sadat Sayeed, recently returned from working on the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative, sets out in clinical and distressing detail the inhuman and degrading treatment routinely practised on the inmates of Guantánamo Bay.

The job of progressive lawyers is to use the law to check the power of the executive, to force the Courts to maintain basic standards of human rights and civil liberties. Sometimes we win; sometimes we lose. There are progressive lawyers all over the world – Sadat Sayeed describes working with a number of them in New York – and many give their time and expertise free. In Britain, most progressive lawyers spend their time on publicly funded cases – ranging from the ground-breaking test case to the more routine, but just as significant for the individual involved, criminal defence, housing advice, immigration advice or representation in child care proceedings. Without publicly funded lawyers, there will be more miscarriages of justice, more evictions at whim, more asylum seekers deported to face torture or imprisonment, and more children removed from their parents without proper Court scrutiny.

The Carter proposals 'Legal Aid Reform: the way ahead' threaten that work. The Government makes no bones about it: 'legal aid reform' means cuts in the actual resources available. Fixed fees are about reducing costs. The Government hopes that the public won’t turn out to defend fat cat legal aid lawyers.

Most legal aid lawyers are already thin, under-nourished cats. If the Carter proposals are adopted, very few legal aid solicitors will be able to carry on making a living. And, in the world of criminal defence, housing, parents facing the removal of their children, there isn’t exactly a rich private client group to turn to, to subsidise the loss-making publicly funded cases. The Haldane Society opposes these proposals, not for our own sake, but because ordinary people who can’t afford legal fees will lose the opportunity of specialist legal advice and representation. Kat Craig, from Young Legal Aid Lawyers and the Haldane Society, sets out the Government’s agenda and what we can do to resist it.

Human rights, justice, due process, equal treatment before the law are not some natural phenomenon. In a speech to the Haldane Society’s Annual General Meeting, Tony Benn reminded us that democracy and civil liberties – which we so often take for granted – are the product of centuries of struggle, against feudalism, against Empire and nowadays against the neo-conservatives running America and Britain. For sure, progressive lawyers have been and remain part of those struggles. But human rights will not be defended solely by legal challenges, important though these are. We need the public on our side.

In announcing his proposals, John Reid acknowledged that his idea of justice is not "what a lawyer or legal academic might think" justice is. He claims that his is the voice of common sense, the ordinary chap in the street, and that only out-of-touch lawyers insist on Court proceedings. The Haldane Society thinks John Reid is wrong. We believe that, however much the major political parties and the media attack human rights and civil liberties, however many media storms are whipped up, most people believe that, if arrested for a crime they didn’t commit, they would want to be tried by a jury. If facing eviction, they would prefer a Judge to decide rather than the police turning up at 3am with an immediate eviction notice. If claiming asylum, they would want a fair hearing. If facing devastation of their family life through the removal of a child, they would want to be properly represented. We believe that it is John Reid who is out of touch.

Liz Davies, Chair of the Haldane Society