Director’s Bulletin, December 2011

Dear Supporters of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law,

The year is ending with much activity at the Bingham Centre and I hope you will be as enthusiastic about our progress as I am.

We were recently asked by the Libyan Progress Initiative to prepare a report for them on Constitutional Options for Libya, with a view to assisting the Libyan people and the Libyan Transitional Council in their efforts towards a democracy and the rule of law. Last week, at a crowded meeting in Whitehall, televised for access in Libya, I presented our detailed Report. The Report has been assisted by Naina Patel, a practising barrister who spent last year in Afghanistan providing rule of law training to officials, police etc. She is now a (part-time) Fellow in the Centre and also participated in an event held this week - in collaboration with Chatham House - on The Rule of Law in Fragile and Conflict-affected States.

Later this week we are putting on a unique event, in collaboration with UCL's Judicial Institute. On December 14 the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, will talk on a subject on which he has not spoken publicly before, namely, his intention behind the Human Rights Act, which he piloted through Parliament in 1998. In particular, he will refer to section 2, which deals with the extent to which the UK courts should defer to Strasbourg jurisprudence.

Our website willl now contain regular announcements of our events and research projects, and summaries of both. Lord Irvine's talk, for example, will be carried on a video (as was the event last March, addressed by US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Bryer, in discussion with Professor Dworkin, Lord Lester and Lord Justice Sedley).

We have some interesting projects which will be produced as working papers: The first (which is now on the website) is by Michael Fordham QC on the subject of Civil Penalties: Cheating the Criminal Law (Michael is also a Fellow in the Centre, working with Justine Stefanelli on the issue of Immigration Detention Centres). Another Working Paper will shortly be put on the web, authored by two other part time Fellows, leading public law barrister and scholar Tom Hickman and Professor Adam Tomkins, on the subject of Justice and Security (secrecy and non-disclosure of sensitive material in trials). A really informative meeting of experts on that subject was held in the Centre a fortnight ago, to consider a draft of that paper, which will constitute our evidence in response to the recent Government Green Paper on that important subject.

See also on the website an account of a recent meeting on the subject of the UK's opt-out of the EU Directive on Asylum, where the opt-out was defended by the Home Office, but questioned by others on rule of law grounds.

There are many other projects which are planned or under way, and we are also about to appoint three excellent Research Fellows and a number of Interns, who will help to build a critical research capacity in the Centre.

You will also see on our website that we have appointed barrister Jonathan Cooper as our Director of Training and Education. Jonathan is immensely experienced in training on rule of law and human rights issues, particularly in new democracies. Our first training project will be in Russia in early 2012, for judges and officials, at the request and with the support of the British Embassy there.

I was delighted last week when, at a meeting at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office , Lord Mcnally, Minster of State for Justice, announced the programme for the UK's forthcoming chairmanship of the Council of Europe. He said that the overriding objective of the UK's Chairmanship will be to reform the procedures of the European Court of Human Rights, so as to eliminate its excessive backlog of cases. However, one of the three events to be held during this period will be a meeting in early March at Lancaster House, in collaboration with the Bingham Centre, on The Rule of Law as a European Concept.

Finally, you may have read that the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution published a recent Report on the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill (HL Paper 222). The Report severely criticised the proposals in the Bill to reduce legal aid. Paragraph 7 of the Report reads:

"In his book, The Rule of Law, the late Lord Bingham forcefully argued that one of the ingredients of the rule of law itself was that "means must be provided for resolving, without prohibitive cost or inordinate delay, bona fide disputes which the parties are unable themselves to resolve". He went on to say that "denial of legal protection to the poor litigant who cannot afford to pay is one enemy of the Rule of Law"

The Committee felt that those principles should inform the House's scrutiny of the Bill and advised that a number of proposals in the Bill failed the Bingham test. Some of those proposals have now been delayed for further consultation, in which the Bingham Centre hopes to participate.

I wish all our supporters a happy Festive Season and a new year in which the rule of law may thrive.

Jeffrey Jowell

December 2011