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Jolyon Maugham: Boris Johnson’s attack on the Privileges Committee [1]
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Date: 2023-06
Thirty years ago, Stephen Sedley wrote of the events leading up to the assassination by loyalist paramilitaries of Patrick Finucane, a solicitor for a number of IRA hunger strikers.
A month before Finucane was murdered, junior Conservative minister Douglas Hogg – now Viscount Hailsham – claimed in front of a parliamentary committee that solicitors in Northern Ireland were “unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA”.
MP Seamus Mallon responded that he “had no doubt that there are lawyers walking the streets or driving on the roads of the North of Ireland who have become targets for assassins’ bullets as a result of the statement that has been made tonight”. Tragically, for Finucane, he could not have been more right.
But lessons from history have not stopped prime minister Rishi Sunak, or his home secretary Suella Braverman.
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They have continued publicly to point the finger at “lefty lawyers” when asked about immigration statistics – not to mention at migrants themselves, with far right-inspired rhetoric about “invasions”.
Sunak issued a press release last summer that mentioned me ten times by name and led a national newspaper to caption my photo: “Rishi’s Public Enemy Number One”. I had previously given an interview describing how I had been advised to wear a stab vest following death threats.
Little better was Sunak’s predecessor Liz Truss, who ignored her oath to defend the judiciary after the notorious Daily Mail front page that described the Divisional Court as ‘Enemies of the People’ and obliged the Lord Chief Justice to seek police protection. Indeed, her promise to appeal their decision might be read as tacitly endorsing the attacks.
So when Boris Johnson attacked the Parliamentary Privileges Committee last week, in the wake of reports that it would find he had intentionally misled Parliament, he was following a well-trodden path.
For past and present prime ministers, attacks on judges or lawyers are a display of contempt for the rule of law and the constraint it represents to their power. And, more consequentially, a desire to be free of it, whether it punishes them for lying to the House or prevents them from breaching the basic rights of refugees.
The evidence suggests they are getting their way.
Judicial review is the only legal procedure by which civil society can try to keep ministers within the laws made by Parliament. But the proportion of judicial review challenges that succeed in the High Court slumped by 50% in 2021. An analysis of recent decisions of the Supreme Court by Oxford academic Lewis Graham also revealed an increased tendency by the Supreme Court to reject human rights claims and to side with public authorities.
This is exactly what those attacking judges and lawyers seek.
In his press release, Rishi Sunak threatened to change the law on ‘standing’ – the rules that say who can bring legal challenges – if judges continued allowing my organisation, Good Law Project, to do so. He would not even need the consent of Parliament, he boasted, for that law change.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/jolyon-maugham-boris-johnson-privileges-committee-rule-of-law/
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