This morning the
Lord Chancellor trumpeted Magna Carta as one of Britain’s greatest
exports. In one word the failure of the
Global Law Summit (GLS) authentically to celebrate the legacy of that seminal
document was encapsulated. English law
and its attractiveness as a commercial commodity is what this Summit is all
about not the genesis of the Rule of Law and fundamental principles of fairness
before the courts.
If England processed
foreign defendants through its criminal justice system at a price you may be
sure that the GLS would be thronged with criminal lawyers. But of course any and every country’s
conception of sovereignty entails retaining responsibility for administering
its own criminal justice system. And so
criminal lawyers and other publically funded practitioners are not welcome at
this jamboree because we are a cost, a drain; not an asset susceptible to
pricing and selling to the highest foreign bidder.
UK PLC does not
profit from trying French thieves, Spanish swindlers, Belgian burglars or
Russian robbers. Because we can’t flog
our criminal justice system the Government has no interest in celebrating
it. What the Government is
extremely interested in is welcoming the moneyed of the world to litigate in
London at vast expense no matter how unconnected their disputes are to this
jurisdiction.
You may think
though that when you sell something that it is extremely important to know
exactly what you are selling. Of course
oligarchs are intimately interested in the incorruptibility of the judiciary
sitting in the Rolls Building. But it is
short sighted in the extreme to pretend that the integrity of the Bench sitting
at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court and the quality of the justice they
dispense conversely is of no interest.
England is still, mercifully, a country in which people do not randomly
disappear from their streets or their homes.
Defendants are not detained without trial and even now those that
require representation are entitled to it.
None of those things are enshrined by Magna Carta but they are an
important part of the reason why the money of the world has flooded into London
in the last decade.
It would be an
immensely foolish minister or civil servant that assumed that the Commercial
Court matters and the Crown Court does not when foreign litigants engage in
forum shopping. It is lamentable to
characterise the dissemination of the principles of Magna Carta around the
world as an export as though a price can be placed on it like a crate of
bananas or a container full of cars.
Especially because exported commodities and goods are usually fated for
consumption and using up. The day that
the Rule of Law is used up in England is the day that we shall have to export
ourselves.