Lammy’s assault on juries exposes the futility of the ECHR

There is a grim irony to David Lammy’s plan to restrict jury trials. This week, the UK justice secretary confirmed that juries would be abolished for all criminal trials where the maximum penalty faced by defendants is less than three years’ jail time. He claims that a court backlog of 80,000 cases, and a consequent delay in bringing matters to trial, had made this necessary. Yet in doing so, Lammy is undermining a significant chunk of his own life’s work.

As the MP for Tottenham and, before that, a lawyer, Lammy has consistently expressed concerns about the justice system’s alleged racial biases. His own 2017 review into racial disparities, commissioned by the then Conservative government, found that adult BAME (black, Asian or mixed ethnic) men whose cases proceed to a magistrates’ court are about eight per cent more likely to be convicted than white men facing similar charges. BAME women are 24 per cent more likely to be convicted than white women facing similar charges.

However, according to Lammy, there is a bulwark against this injustice – namely, trial by jury. His review said that juries were ‘consistent in their decision-making, irrespective of the ethnicity of the defendant’. It went on to state:

‘Juries deliberate as a group through open discussion. This both deters and exposes prejudice or unintended bias: judgements must be justified to others. Successive studies have shown the juries deliver equitable results, regardless of the ethnic make-up of the jury, or of the defendant in question.’

Yet now Lammy is set to do more damage to jury trials than any of his predecessors in hundreds of years, eliminating them for all but the most serious criminal cases.

When Lammy’s plans were first leaked to the press last week, there was one remark that stood out. According to a Ministry of Justice briefing he authored, there is no ‘right’ to trial by jury in England and Wales. He said that courts cannot cling to jury trials merely to respect ‘tradition’. Supposedly, this is just something we happen to have been doing for a long time – that is, for around 800 years.

Lammy is wrong, of course. There really is a ‘right’ to trial by jury. It is a right established by Magna Carta in 1215 and reinforced by the 1689 Bill of Rights.

Lammy has both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in law, and was called to the bar in the 1990s. It is inconceivable that he is entirely ignorant of this history. When he says there’s no ‘right’ to a jury trial, he must surely be referring to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Indeed, Article 5, which protects a right to a ‘fair hearing’, does not specify how someone should be tried.

It would make sense for this to be the framework Lammy is referring to. After all, Labour has proved time and again that adhering to the dictates of the ECHR and foreign judges is far more important than the traditions of English law, valued by the British people.

Trial by jury is just one of the many rights we have in our own constitution that goes well beyond anything guaranteed by Strasbourg. We have a right not to be arbitrarily detained, dating back to the 13th century. Our rights of religious freedom and free speech date back to 1689. The ECHR is, in many respects, far weaker than our own constitutional statutes (which, in many cases, also predate the convention rights by hundreds of years).

Limiting trial by jury is easily the most authoritarian proposal by a British government in living memory, short perhaps of the Covid lockdowns. It would curtail the influence of the public on our justice system. It would shield prosecutors and police from democratic accountability. It would create a system in which the prosecutors, judiciary and the police were effectively judge, jury and executioner. It would reverse the clauses of Magna Carta that guarantee no citizen can be ‘imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any other way ruined… except by the lawful judgment of his peers’.

Not only is there a ‘right’ to be tried by a jury, this right has also been the founding principle of our justice system for hundreds of years. Lammy’s claim to the contrary no doubt reflects the views of the other lawyers in government. His boss, Keir Starmer, was a famous human-rights lawyer at a leading human-rights chambers. The same is true for the attorney general, Lord Hermer. Yet while all of them wax lyrical about the supposed importance of the ECHR, they seem more than happy to gut our own constitution.

Lammy and his colleague’s contempt for juries teaches us that their understanding of ‘rights’ is very different from ours. Real ‘rights’ aren’t handed down by judges in Strasbourg. They are won over centuries by ordinary people. And they will only be preserved if we are prepared to fight for them.

We must resist Labour’s assault on juries with everything we have.

Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author. His most recent book is Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, which is published by Zero Books. Order it here.