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Home Affairs and Justice

I wonder whether the right hon. and learned Gentleman is still feeling the pain of the many judgments against the Home Office during the time when he was Home Secretary. In so far as there may be truth in what he says, there is another reason not to have confirmation hearings—to ensure that we continue to have a process of choosing judges for their objectivity, not one in which we seek to place in position judges who might give the result that particular Governments want at particular times. The process that he attributes to the Human Rights Act was always likely to go on anyway, but in Strasbourg rather than in our own courts. I am rather more confident of the ability of our own judges, against the background of our tradition, to be as objective as it is possible to be in the kind of situation that he describes than I am about a mixed panel of judges who come from very many different traditions. Another problem arises from the changes that the Government have made—that we will be plucking from the House of Lords the Law Lords, who without any doubt made extremely valuable contributions to debate, although in the constitutionally difficult situation that, until they resolved that they were not going to do it any more, they were potentially framing legislation on which they might subsequently pass judgment. That has not been the practice in recent years because they decided to absent themselves from issues on which they might give judgment or cases on which they had previously spoken during the passage of the original legislation. We will lose from the House of Lords that ability to learn how things will affect, or have affected, the judiciary. Following discussions that I had with the past and present Lord Chief Justice, my Committee has successfully developed the solution that judges from every level should appear before the Committee, which then reports to the House on the evidence that they have given on issues such as how the judiciary is coping with the pressures on it or the working of particular pieces of legislation. Such questions are divorced from the political process, and we have posed them in an atmosphere that enables judges to give valuable evidence without feeling that their position is compromised in any way.