JUSTICE SHOULD BE SEEN TO BE DONE PRIORITY MUST

Justice should be seen to be done priority must be Lord Chancellor

Justice should be seen to be done priority must be Lord Chancellor

“Justice should be seen to be done. But our priority must be that justice is done.''Lord Chancellor's speech at the Government launch of the consultation on broadcasting and the courts, August 2004. (W100, Block 4, Unit 13)

Introduction

In practice, the rights that are recognised in any given society will depend on the philosophical, religious, ethical, political and social values that underlie each society. No man may be a judge in his own cause. This means that if a judge or magistrate had any personal interest in the outcome of a case, he must play no part in hearing it. So strictly is this rule applied that in Dimes v. Grand Junction Canal Proprietors, for example, a decision of the Lord Chancellor was set aside because it was discovered that he held shares in the canal company.

Lord Chancelor has relatively little to say about what must unquestionably be the most exciting and controversial development of justice over the next quarter of a century - the dematerialisation of the courtroom itself. The only relevant area that he does discuss is the possibility of conducting case management hearings. This means that both parties to a case have a right to be heard, but does not mean that both parties must in fact be heard. In criminal cases, for example, it is for the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, and there is no requirement on the defendant to prove his innocence. The defendant is therefore at liberty to refrain from saying anything if that is what he wishes, and his 'right of silence' is equally as important as his right to be heard. There is not necessarily a right to an oral hearing: written evidence may be acceptable. A person has a right to notice of the case which is to be brought against him and a right to cross-examine witnesses.

There is no inherent right to legal representation, but if a case involves difficult points of law it should be heard before the ordinary courts, rather than, for example, an administrative or domestic tribunal, and legal representation should be allowed.As these values change, the understanding of what is just will change. Where acts or omissions of an approved regulator are likely to have an adverse impact on these regulatory objectives, the LSB is equipped with a range of enforcement powers that it can exercise to address them. Dematerialisation of information, however, amounts to only one aspect of the technological revolution that we are going through. Another aspect is the dematerialisation of physical places. Just as the informational contents of the workplace are increasingly likely to exist in electronic rather than physical form, so too we can observe that workplaces themselves are beginning to dematerialise.

In order to provide the LSB with all of the appropriate tools to ...