For those of you who wish to believe the law serves society, here is a piece from the Scotsman.
For most, the reality is that the law serves itself, and not the society it is written to serve ...
The Scotsman reports :
Public law must serve our society
Public law must serve our society
By GERRY MOYNIHAN QC
SCOTLAND has a vibrant public law, which is undergoing rapid change through a number of influences unique to our country – change to which practitioners can contribute if they recognise the full scope for innovation that these influences present.
The first stimulus was the introduction of the procedure of Judicial Review, but that was a case of the tail wagging the dog – a change in procedure influencing the development of substantive law.
Nonetheless, it has opened the courts to participation in the principled development of public law that arrived with the New Labour agenda of constitutional reform in the shape of the Scotland Act 1998, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002. Their interaction has given potential for a peculiarly Scots dimension to public law.
The essence of the constitutional change effected by the Scotland Act is that it brings more of a legal content to the control of legislative and executive power in Scotland.
Subject to the exception of EU Law, English law remains grounded in the principle of parliamentary (that is, Westminster) sovereignty. Scotland is different because the Scottish Parliament is not sovereign and it is expressly provided by the Scotland Act that an Act of the Scottish Parliament "is not law so far as any provision of the Act is outside the legislative competence of the parliament", which embraces any incompatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Courts can accordingly go beyond the political act of issuing an advisory opinion that legislation is incompatible with the convention (which is all that English courts can do relative to Westminster legislation), right up to the ultimate legal remedy of quashing legislation enacted by the Scottish Parliament.
In Scotland, this fundamental shift from the supremacy of legislation goes further and affects even the implementation of Westminster legislation. The Scottish Government does not have the power to infringe human rights, irrespective of whether the infringement is based on Holyrood or Westminster legislation.
These arrangements are not, however, undemocratic, because the rule of law does not mean rule by lawyers. In the litigation concerning the validity of the ban on fox-hunting, the courts did not ask whether the ban was a good or a bad idea.
Rather, the courts scrutinised whether, in enacting the ban, the Scottish Parliament took proper account of the human rights involved and struck a fair balance between the rights of the individuals who participate in hunting and the interests of the community. To date the ban has been upheld by the courts on the view that a fair balance was struck by the democratically elected legislature whose task it is to resolve controversial questions.
The need for a fair balance between the rights of the individual and the needs of the community runs through the ECHR and now lies at the heart of Scots public law.
There has been a suspicion in some quarters that Scottish judges went too far in deciding that a person charged with a criminal offence should be automatically acquitted in the event of an unreasonable delay in being brought to trial. That result seemed to give undue precedence to the rights of accused persons over the rights of victims of crime and the general public, who under the convention are entitled to the protection of an effective criminal justice system.
That imbalance has now been corrected by the Privy Council, which recently decided that an unreasonable delay does not necessarily require an acquittal.
The objective of an efficient public law is that public authorities should be regulated in their conduct of public affairs. Freedom of information makes a valuable contribution to the attainment of this objective because unless there is openness in decision-making it is all but impossible to scrutinise whether any public body has proper reasons for the decisions taken.
Freedom of information gives the public access to background papers shedding light on the factors that have in fact been taken into account and the weight attached to them, facilitating challenge to unlawful, arbitrary decisions.
We are at the start of a dynamic process that could lead to a distinctive public law built on a fusion of the new constitutional arrangements for Scotland, human rights and freedom of information.
The task we have is to formulate a constructive public law that is responsive to the key objective of producing a tolerant and broad-minded society which is respectful of the rights of the individual while attending to the needs of society as a whole.
• Gerry Moynihan QC is a member of Axiom Advocates. He gave last week's Third Thursday Lecture on public law.
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