President of Supreme Court says equality before the law is at risk of disappearing
The Government is in danger of destroying a 700-year-old right of access to fair and open justice to all, the most senior judge in the land has said.
Challenging plans to cut back dramatically on legal aid for hundreds of thousands of people from April, Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury said: "As one of the three remaining articles of the Magna Carta (1297) says "to no man shall we deny justice", nowadays "to no man and no woman shall we deny justice", and we are at risk of going back on that."
In a week when both the Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, and the Home Secretary, Theresa May, have attacked human rights legislation, proposing a distancing from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), Lord Neuberger added that he was uncomfortable with political attacks on the judiciary and the fact that human rights were gaining an unfair reputation.
The former Master of the Rolls, speaking out for the first time since his appointment as President of the Supreme Court, the highest court in the United Kingdom, said :"The two fundamental roles of Government are to defend the country from invasion and ensure the rule of law at home, and that includes access to justice."
He aired particular fears about the fact that from next month thousands of people will no longer have access to free legal advice for issues such as many family disputes, employment or immigration cases, and debt or housing problems. In an attempt to cut the legal-aid bill by £270m, the Government has withdrawn funding for numerous categories of civil and family law and, by its own estimates, as many as 585,000 people will be affected.
Lord Neuberger said his main worry was that those who could not afford to pay for a legal representative would have to rely on free advice being offered by the Government and charities, which was "second best". In the worst cases, he fears that those frustrated by an inability to seek justice would "take the law into their own hands".
While sympathising with the Government's need to cut costs, he questioned whether slashing legal-aid budgets would eventually prove to be a false saving. "Litigants representing themselves take much more time in court. The danger is that what you save on legal-aid budgets, you lose in terms of court efficiency. It will lead to longer delays in court hearings and spending more money on courts."
The Government has been at loggerheads with Strasbourg over a series of judgments, including blocking the deportation of the radical cleric Abu Qatada and ruling that some prisoners must be given the vote.
Lord Neuberger explained that while he understood some of the objections to ECHR rulings, a system as "broad and far-reaching as human rights" was bound to generate some controversy and some tough decisions.
"The problem is the devil is in the detail in hard cases where it is difficult to balance competing rights," he said. "I can see the argument of sending them [terrorist suspects] back if they are a threat to this country. But if you send somebody back knowing they are going to be tortured, it makes you responsible for torture."
