Click to listen highlighted text! Powered By GSpeech

Home » Posts tagged 'Justice Gap'

Tag Archives: Justice Gap

Please support the London Legal Walk 2012 today!



 

Today is the big London Legal Walk 2012!

I will be there at the beginning of the walk, doing live tweeting from about 2.30 pm onwards at the Royal Courts of Justice. I hope then to make it somehow to Chancery Lane to witness the finish.  

I am looking forward to participating indirectly today. Doing the walk would be physically impossible for me as I am disabled following meningitis in 2007; however I am passionate about legal aid, having volunteered pro bono in a law centre in London, and I am most concerned about legal aid for welfare benefits falling outside of scope. Sadly it is now clear the system for allocating welfare benefits is poor according to my disabled friends. I am deeply concerned that such disabled citizens are having their benefits discontinued with inadequate explanation, and now without any access to legal aid. This is not a society the UK can be proud of.

The London Legal Support Trust are a wonderful group of people. Their description is as follows:

[It] was established in 2004 as an independent charity to raise funds for free legal advice services in London and the South East.

As part of a network of Legal Support Trusts working with the Access to Justice Foundation we support the provision of specialist legal advice through law centres, advice agencies and citizens advice bureaux by providing them with grant funding alongside other forms of support. We raise funds from fundraising events, including the London Legal Walk. We also receive ad hoc donations from law firms and chambers.

In addition to funding we offer our knowledge, contacts and experience of the sector to help agencies become more sustainable and, working with LawWorks and the Bar Pro Bono Unit, we help to partner agencies with law firms and chambers who want to help them to ensure that the law is fair.

Whilst I will be personally fundraising on an ad hoc basis today, and taking lots of photos, I hope that you can officially support by giving money through these pages.

I am very happy to support the BPP team, which is here, their team consisting of: Carl Lygo, Laura Gerrard, Laura Rowland, Saira Iqbal, Christian Metcalfe, Doltice Grey, James Kilby, Jo-Ann Fisher, Jessica Austen, Yllka Hyseni, Andrew Okola, Eva Dvorakova, Victoria Speed, Veme Patel, Mitali Parekh, Swetang Joshi, Olga Tabenko, Sophie Earnshaw, Ayesha Begg, Naomi Clarke, Alice Kim, Sunjay Thakoor, Amy Fenton, Eric Migliaccio, Shezan Hafeez, Shameerah Peerkhan, Danielle Sugarman, Beth Brookner, Mandeep Bassi, Georgina Sharpley, Aashna Musa, Simon Paul, Bhouneswarsingh Askurn, Anna Corrigan, Hannah Fogg, Adam Curphey, Eleanor Brody, Vanessa Acquag, James Adeleke, Ian, Sashan Thompson-Hamilton, Idanesi Immanuel, Sam Lane, Vanina S. Black, Zeynep Turkoglu, Rob Tolomanoski, Tala Teymoori, Nicole Nash, Faiza Hassan, Emmi Hussain, Negin Zakarova ‘Rizzo’, Ranarii Ahmed, Azfar Ahmed, Sara A-sa, Penelope Green, Alice Pettit, Vic Surdhur, Mishal Dattani, Sarah Dabiri, Arlinda Krasniqi, Thomas Edward Christopher Holt, Casselle Roberts, Sameeha Visram, Diana Kirsch, Shaila Pal, and Junior Stewart.

Their mission statement reads as follows:

We are walking with the Lord Chief Justice and thousands of lawyers to raise funds for the London Legal Support Trust which funds Law Centres and pro bono agencies in and around London.

We know that these agencies do a fantastic job in preventing homelessness, resolving debt problems, gaining care for the elderly and disabled and fighting exploitation.

We also know how short they are of the funds to continue that work.

I am also very happy to support the Justice Gap team, which is heretheir team consisting of:- Jon Robins, Kim Evans, Amanda Bancroft (organsising, not walking), John Cooper QC, Felicity Gerry, Alice Christian, Joanna Goodman, Kristin Heimark, Louise Restell, Julian Norman, Giles Peaker, Rachel MacLeod, Jon Harman, Richard Buchanan, Rosemary Sheppard, Jeremy Hopkins, Cassie Williams, Merry Neal, Gaia Marcus, Paul Bernal, John Austin, Rachel Austin, Jules Carey, Stef, Rob Richmond, Neil Rose, Sehb Hundal, Priyanka Horeesorun, and Raman Kang.

Their mission statement reads as follows:

We are walking with the Lord Chief Justice and thousands of lawyers to raise funds for the London Legal Support Trust which funds Law Centres and pro bono agencies in and around London.

We know that these agencies do a fantastic job in preventing homelessness, resolving debt problems, gaining care for the elderly and disabled and fighting exploitation and discrimination.

We also know how short they are of the funds to continue that work.

Please donate as generously as you are able. Many thanks for your support

This was the good news 5 hours ago!

 

Ad valorem: What's the purpose of the law in a powerful state?



‘Ad valorem’ is a new feature on ‘Legal Aware’, to act as a fulcrum of challenging intellectual debate, resulting from recent legal and social blogposts. It is loosely based on the ‘LegalAware’ blog survey conducted at the end of February 2012.

 

A ‘powerful state’ is often left undefined by contemporary politicians and lawyers. The problem may not come from determining what lies in scope of the state, perhaps including the judges, the MPs, the police, or their Lordships, but explaining what that power is and how it is manifest. The law relating to whether the UK should intervene in Syria is a different entity to the laws regulating how the UK should intervene with its own citizens, and the general notion of the ‘abuse of power’ is an important one. David Allen Green has done much to highlight its significance, and, in his regular column in the “New Statesman”, David recently considered the relationship between civil disobedience and the rule of law.

It is perhaps the easier option to consider the meaning of the saying ‘everyone is equal in front of the law’, by considering what happens if individuals are not equal in front of the law. It may be possible to obtain a super injunction contra mundum if you’re rich. It may be plausible that the law has to treat invididuals equally to be just, if  one can find readily examples of individuals who have been treated unequally which gives the semblance of injustice. For example, the Justice Gap recently reported that criminals are to be banned from making claims for injuries from a special fund set up to help victims of crime, as originally reported in the Guardian. Ken Clarke, the  justice secretary, is expected to tell MPs that he will prevent prisoners from making claims from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme.

Meanwhile, David posits that:

The key problem with the Rule of Law in this country is not that, from time to time, protesters may stay in certain private and public spaces too long. It is rather that many with power feel — or know — they can get away with far worse abuses, from non-complying with financial regulations to bribing public officials. Indeed, the police officer happily using excessive force is as much a law-breaker as the aggravating trespasser, and his or her culpability is actually much worse because of the coercive force they are abusing.

There is a public perception, from many, that ‘there’s one rule’ for one group of people, and other for another. Did the law fight a battle regarding the tax affairs of Premier League football managers in a disproportionate way to how it had fought the tax affairs of large multinational companies?  David’s point above is a good one, but one which I feel results for the ‘rule of law’ having an emphasis on equality, rather than fairness per se. I am certain whether this distinction is a significant one, but one which I am quite mindful of.

David is, of course, correct to say that E.P. Thompson was a great left-wing historian, but he was also a remarkable socialist often highly critical of English Labour politics. E.P. Thompson may represent himself a reconciliation of liberal and more radical approaches to the ‘rule of law’. The beginning of Thompson’s “Whigs and Hunters” appears to reinforce an argument that the law appears to be an instrument of brute force by which the ruling class exerts its hegemony; however, a significant point is that Thompson does not view the law as having an ideology, but rather that it must have its “own logic, rules and procedures.” The interrelationship between the law, society and economics is clearly one that intrigues Thompson, and  Thompson specifically advances the notion that the law’s partial autonomy from the pure politics of power that renders rulers (unwittingly) “prisoners of their own rhetoric.”. According to Thompson, people in power themselves must not be seen constantly flouting the law or else the general public will not accept and respect law as a legitimate social institution.

The regulatory bodies have as a major concern the perception of the law by the public. It is impossible to divorce the power of the State from the public’s faith in the functioning of the state. The exact operations of the Extradition Act (2003) has raised now the issue of whether one state is more important with another; Christopher Tappin, who has just flown from England to the U.S. (see article by Owen Boycott in the Guardian), has claimed that Abu Qataba has more rights than him. Abu Qataba has brought into sharp focus again the power of the state in protecting its own citizens. The UK Human Rights blog recently reviewed latest developments in the Abu Qataba case in an excellent article by Sam Murrant:

Qatada’s release from prison has sparked a  great deal of commentary, including from Rosalind English, who posted on the case here, and from freemovement, who makes the point that this decision is actually based in British rather than Strasbourg law, here. The Attorney-General Dominic Grieve commented in the Guardian on the tension between concerns over the release of a dangerous suspect such as Qatada and the implications of indefinite detention without trial for the rule of law in this country.

Simon Jenkins writes that Britain should either give Qatada the law’s full protection, relying on ‘British robustness’ to safeguard against his extremism, or deport him, ignoring the ECtHR’s ruling.  Bagehot’s Notebook in The Economist is more guarded on the subject of breaking international obligations, commenting that to do so would harm Britain’s reputation.

Our MPs have recently decided on whether criminals who have (or have not) repeatedly flouted the law should have voting rights. However, likewise, the UK is in tricky territory if it decides to flout the law of European Convention of Human Rights, and perhaps the purpose of the law in a powerful state is tempered by being part of a wider community of powerful states. What the state chooses to do to its own citizens, and whether citizens feel part of a truly liberal society, is however of fundamental importance to all of us.

Click to listen highlighted text! Powered By GSpeech