I wanted to say something about Magna Carta. Eight hundred years ago, on 15th
June 1215, King John agreed to, and signed this landmark document, that began
to codify laws and legal issues for the very first time in UK history. The
start of English Law, some might say.
Quite incredibly, in my opinion,
there will be constitutional festivities being held from 23rd-25th
February to celebrate Magna Carta, in some way to champion how great the Rule
of Law is in Britain today. This summit is supposedly “A unique
collaboration between the UK Government, the Legal sector and the City of
London.” The focus being: how great is our interaction between the law and
business here in the UK.
I don’t doubt that this is true and
wonderful for the Commercial Law Sector, but at what
As if that appalling situation is not
bad enough, the Government is hell bent on watering down protection for people’s
basic human rights as well. I have written recently about the
Conservative Parties proposal to repeal the Human Rights Act, if that is, they are re-elected in
May this year. Cameron and Co want to remove the mechanism for enforcing our
basic Human Rights, the very thing that prevents the abuse of the vulnerable by
the powerful.
However, we don’t have to wait for
the Conservatives to be re-elected for this sorry state of affairs to be
enacted, it is in operation right now. The Government took away Legal Aid funding for so many legal cases by recently slashing the Legal Aid
budget by tens of millions of pounds.
An example of this policy and its
effect upon a vulnerable group of people is that prisoners can no longer obtain funding to enforce
prison rules. The
lives of all prisoners currently in UK prisons, almost ninety thousand of us, are controlled by rules called Prison Service Instructions
(PSI’s) and Prison Service Orders (PSO’s). These are the laws that control
every aspect of how staff can interact with prisoners within the prison system.
Now that Legal Aid funding has been removed for enforcing PSI’s and PSO’s, all
prisoners are vulnerable should any staff member fail to act within the
constraints of the PSI’s and PSO’s in place to protect them.
Similarly, prisoners Human Rights
cannot be protected when there is no funding for a lawyer to mount a Court case
to ask for that legal protection, and prisoners are not alone in this. The poor are also finding it harder and harder to make use of
the UK’s legal system
to seek protection when their Human Rights are being abused. This means that vulnerable
witnesses can face the accused questioning them in the witness box because many
defendants are not entitled to Legal Aid and face defending
themselves in court.
The spirit of Magna Carta can hardly
be celebrated eight hundred years on, when the universal protection of all UK
Citizens in the eyes of the law, is being undermined by a Government determined
to introduce policies that place many millions of it’s citizens open to
exploitation by gang masters, bullies, abusers, the mean and anyone else with
the will and power to do so, and that is wrong on every level.
The sorry state of the UK’s Criminal
and Civil Law Sectors that should protect these citizens makes this ‘Global Law Summit’, in celebration of Magna Carta an insult to what Magna Carta should now
stand for. Accordingly, I’m in total agreement with Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of Liberty, who told the Guardian:
“This event has been
promoted by a Government which had decimated access to justice. As a Human
Rights Campaigner, my place is with the protesters.”
I’m also in agreement with the
protesters, access to justice must be for everyone, just as Human Rights
protection must be for everyone. As we celebrate eight hundred years since the
signing of Magna Carta, at Runnymede, on the banks of the Thames, we should
consider how we’ve allowed David Cameron and his Government to make legal
protection available only to those who can afford it. That to me isn’t in the spirit of
Magna Carta. Surely, the law must be accessible to everyone.
Jeremy
