There’s some odd jubilation in some quarters about the Attorney General citing the Miller judgment in her statement attempting to justify breaching international law.
Unfortunately, like the statement itself, the reference to Miller is legally meaningless.
Miller confirms the long-established principle that Parliament is sovereign, but that is not in doubt. Nobody disputes that, as a matter of domestic law, Parliament has the power to legislate contrary to international law.
But we would still be in breach of international law.
Miller is wholly irrelevant to that argument. It does not provide a defence nor a justification for breaching international law.
By citing it, the Attorney General is trying to distract and manipulate those who don’t understand the law.
And some of those people are letting her.
Remember the last episode of Friends where Phoebe causes widespread panic on a plane by shouting that there’s a problem with the “left phalange”?
That, in legal terms, is what the Attorney General is doing by citing Miller.
The crowing is embarrassing to watch.
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As the issue of compensation for miscarriages of justice is rightly in the news, it’s timely to note that in 2014, the government changed the law to make it all but impossible for people wrongly convicted and imprisoned to claim compensation.
Chris Grayling and Theresa May led the charge to deprive the wrongly convicted of compensation, changing the rules so that those people had to effectively prove their innocence - an impossible standard to meet.
The details are in Stories of The Law & How It’s Broken.
When this spiteful non-compensation scheme was challenged in the courts, the current crop of politicians - those who are now positioning themselves as champions of the wrongfully convicted - fought all the way to uphold it.
Can highly recommend this piece in today’s Sunday Times if you’re looking for a facile misunderstanding of what a barrister actually does.
If Mr Syed had bothered to speak to a barrister, or indulge in the most cursory research, he would have learned at least two things: 🧵
1. 90% of a barrister’s career is spent on making decisions. Advising on courses of action, of legal risk, future consequences, assessing evidence and making split-second judgement calls (both in and out of court) that can make an irrevocable decision to a person’s life.
2. It’s an obvious one, and an old favourite, but given that it seems to take Mr Syed by surprise:
BARRISTERS ARE NOT THEIR CLIENTS.
We ask questions in court and test evidence, on behalf of whoever instructs us, because that is our job.
Readers are invited to conclude that £100,000 (£100,028, to be precise) is too much to spend on this very serious case, in which an MP was murdered. A “ridiculous amount of money”, we’re reliably told by Conservative MP @nigelmills.
Well let’s see.
The first teeny, tiny point - and I really am being picky - is that, despite @nigelmills confidently asserting that the defendant “admitted the killing”, that’s not actually true. Not really.
Because the same article tells us that he denied murder and had a 7-day trial.
A final (for now) word on my colleagues who don’t and can’t prosecute criminal cases, but are performatively declaring that they *won’t* prosecute certain types of cases.
This second paragraph vividly illustrates the danger to which they are exposing us criminal practitioners.
The whole point of the cab rank rule is that it provides the answer to the question: “How can you represent [X]?”, when X is an unpopular client or cause.
The minute we are perceived to be picking and choosing between “good” and “bad” defendants, it all breaks down.
It means - as the activists explicitly state - that other barristers can be targeted. “Your colleagues refuse to represent X, so why are you?”
It aligns us personally with our clients.
It exposes those of us who defend & prosecute the most dangerous criminals to very real risk