Tag Archives: Patrick O’Brien

The role of judges in judicial appointments in Ireland

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The Irish government has proposed a bill to reform the method by which the country appoints its judges. Patrick O’Brien discusses the proposals, and argues that several of the criticisms levelled against the bill lack force.

Judicial appointments in Ireland are shortly due to be put on a more formal footing. When the Irish Judicial Appointments Commission Bill 2022 is enacted, it will provide for an appointments commission designed in the image of many similar bodies that have been developed in common law jurisdictions in the last 30 years. The bill has, however, been the subject of recent criticism from the Chief Justice, Donal O’Donnell, who has questioned the composition of the proposed Commission.

Judicial appointments have been something of a saga in Irish politics in the last few years. The current system is widely regarded as inadequate and has been the subject of repeated proposals for reform in the past decade. An independent Judicial Appointments Advisory Board (JAAB), chaired by the Chief Justice, receives and comments on applications for judicial office from outside the judiciary but leaves appointments essentially to the political discretion of the government, which in theory (though all the evidence suggests, not in practice) leaves open the possibility of a more politicised judiciary. Promotions of existing judges are not considered by the JAAB at all. It is generally accepted, therefore, that appointments require reform. The current bill is the second to be put to the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) since 2017. The 2017 bill was demanded as the price of entering coalition government by Shane Ross, a campaigning journalist and then an independent TD. This bill would have created a rather unwieldy body with 13 members and a lay majority and chair, as well as a number of sub-committees which would be called into being depending on the nature of the appointment. For a small jurisdiction which makes only a handful of judicial appointments each year, the system was significantly over-designed.

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The merits of the judicial appointment process to the European Court of Human Rights

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malleson-photo-2010  Patrick Obrien

The selection process for the next UK judges on the European Court of Human Rights is underway. In this post Kate Malleson and Patrick O’Brien discuss the process and argue that elements of it should be adopted for the selection of the senior judiciary in the UK.

The process of selecting the next UK judges on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has begun. The vacancy has arisen because the incumbent, Judge Paul Mahoney, is due to retire in September 2016, when he will reach the court’s retirement age of 70.

The selection exercise for Judge Mahoney’s replacement involves a two-stage process: a UK stage and a European one. The UK stage, currently in train, involves a selection exercise to produce a shortlist of three candidates. This shortlist will be submitted to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). At this second, European, stage, a sub-committee of PACE will interview the shortlisted candidates and make a recommendation on which should be appointed. Following this, in June 2016, one candidate will be selected for election to the ECtHR by majority vote of PACE.

Our primary focus here is on the UK stage of the appointment process. The Lord Chancellor is running the process on behalf of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and the process is being administered by the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC). The Lord Chancellor has convened a seven-member panel, which includes a chair, two judicial members, three lay members and a legal member.

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Judges and select committees: A developing accountability culture

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Patrick Obrien

The specific scenario in which select committees seek evidence from a judge who has chaired an inquiry generates a lot of heat and light. But Patrick O’Brien indicates that the research he conducted with Robert Hazell shows the practice of judges giving evidence to parliamentary committees has been widely accepted as a positive and productive form of engagement. What is more, it creates opportunities for dialogue and for judicial accountability.

When is a judge not a judge? Lady Justice Hallett carried out a public inquiry into the ‘On the runs’ scheme in 2014. In its report on the same issue in March 2015 the Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee commented rather sternly that

‘we chose not to summon Lady Justice Hallett to attend, but we consider it to be a regrettable discourtesy to Parliament that she declined our initial invitation to give evidence to the Committee, especially as she had not acted in a judicial capacity when carrying out her review‘. [at para. 11]

Is a judge who chairs an inquiry acting as a judge, or acting as an inquiry chair? Judges, concerned about the implications of being drawn into disputes that are often highly politically charged, tend to believe that they are acting as judges and that their reports should speak for themselves. Parliamentary committees can find this attitude defensive and frustrating. Several years ago the Commons Cultural, Media and Sport committee ran into a similar conflict with Lord Justice Leveson in relation to evidence he gave as chair of the inquiry into phone hacking.

The specific scenario in which committees seek evidence from a judge who has chaired an inquiry generates a lot of heat and light. However, research I have done with Robert Hazell suggests that such ‘judge-led inquiry’ sessions, despite the problems that may attend them, make up only 5% of all evidence sessions these committees have with judges. The reality is that the vast majority of judicial evidence sessions are uncontroversial. The practice of judges giving evidence to parliamentary committees has been widely accepted as a positive and productive form of engagement by both judges and parliament.

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Inquiring into the office of Lord Chancellor

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Patrick ObrienThe House of Lords Constitution Committee has opened an inquiry on the office of Lord Chancellor. Here, Patrick O’Brien outlines the evolution of the Lord Chancellor’s role. He argues that in an important sense the Lord Chancellor no longer exists and formal abolition of the role could result in positive judicial developments.

On 16 July, Graham Gee and I (as part of the Judicial Independence Project), together with Professor Andrew le Sueur of the University of Essex, gave evidence to the House of Lords Constitution Committee as part of its inquiry into the office of the Lord Chancellor. The inquiry as the call for evidence puts it:

seeks clarity on what the current role is, whether changes to it are needed and what criteria (if any) should apply when appointing future holders of the office.

The pre-2003 Lord Chancellor [LC] was a unique office that combined judicial, parliamentary and executive roles. Occupied by a senior lawyer, generally without any further political ambition, the post was almost apolitical, yet sat at the heart of government. The sacking of the last ‘old’ LC, Lord Irvine, by Tony Blair in 2003 was intended to kick off a series of constitutional reforms that would have included the abolition of the office. Significant resistance in the House of Lords led, however, to a compromise in which the office was retained but in a greatly reduced form. No longer would the LC be a judge or the speaker of the House of Lords. It would now be a purely executive office. The Constitutional Reform Act 2005 sought to preserve two key roles of the LC within the reformed constitutional arrangements: that of ‘minister for courts and the judiciary’ and that of special constitutional guardian of the principles of judicial independence and the rule of law within Cabinet.

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