United Kingdom Judiciary Speeches

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You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> United Kingdom Judiciary Speeches >> Lord Bingham of Cornhill, Lord Chief Justice of England & Wales : Speech at the launch of The Judicial Studies Board's Equal Treatment Benchbook [1999] UKSpeech 6PAF1 (28 September 1999)
URL: http://www.bailii.org/uk/other/speeches/1999/6PAF1.html
Cite as: [1999] UKSpeech 6PAF1

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Lord Bingham of Cornhill
Lord Chief Justice of England

Speech at the launch of
The Judicial Studies Board's Equal Treatment Benchbook

London

28 September 1999

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Lord Chancellor, Chairman, ladies and gentlemen,

I echo the Lord Chancellor in extending the warmest possible welcome to the new and updated version of the 1993 Bench Book on ethnic minority issues. I do so the more enthusiastically since over the next year new sections of this Bench Book are to be addressed to wider issues of gender, sexual orientation, disability (whether physical or mental), the treatment of litigants in person and children.

But today the focus is on ethnic minority issues. These are no less important than they were five or six years ago. If anything, they are even more so.

We tend, I think, to suppose that we in the United Kingdom were until recently a homogeneous people, the only relevant distinctions being the cherished differences between Englishmen, Welshmen, Irishmen and Scots. This is a highly unhistorical view. Over the centuries we have absorbed successive waves of foreign immigrants, beginning with the Romans and continuing with Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings through Normans, Jews, Huguenots to, in more recent times, refugees from pogroms and oppression in Eastern Europe and refugees from Nazi Germany.

With hindsight, we can see that all these waves of immigrants have contributed immeasurably to the richness and diversity of our national and cultural life. But that is not of course to say that these incursions did not at the time arouse resentment, hostility and misunderstanding. One recalls that three chapters of Magna Carta were devoted to the protection of Welshmen against overbearing Anglo-Normans, and one to the protection of the Scots, who nowadays do not appear to lack champions. One also recalls the Punch cartoon of 1854 in which two navvies, discussing their response to a gentleman of foreign appearance, hit on a solution which has a distinctly late twentieth century ring to it.

So immigration is not a new thing. But the numbers involved in these immigrations were relatively small, the incomers were white, they came from other European countries and they mostly came from societies not wholly unlike our own. The passage of time allowed a process of assimilation to ease points of tension, misunderstanding and conflict. None of these things is true of immigration from the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent over the last half century.

The numbers have not been small. The incomers were not white. They came from societies which differed in many ways from our own. And in historical terms the immigration is relatively recent.

It is not at all surprising, therefore, that there should have been tensions, misunderstanding, resentment and hostility on grounds of race - which, lamentably, some extremist politicians have sought to promote for their own ends.

To understand the source of racial prejudice is not of course to excuse it, in any area of our national life or in any personal relationship. But if there is any public activity in which, above all, any hint of racial prejudice is utterly impermissible and abhorrent, it must be in the administration of justice.

I say that for the most obvious and the most important of all reasons: that the just resolution of any case, whether civil or criminal, can never turn on any prejudicial inference based on the ethnic origin of any party. That is not, of course, to say that a racial motive may not exacerbate a crime, as it has long been recognised to do, since such a motive adds a new element of viciousness to the crime itself. There is in truth no principle more fundamental to the administration of justice than that all citizens should be equal before the law - equally entitled to its protection, equally entitled to assert the rights which it confers.

This paramount obligation is recognised by the judicial oath, by which judges very solemnly undertake to do right to all manner of people, without fear or favour, affection or ill-will, that is, without prejudice and without partiality. If there were any room for doubt, which there is not, the position is made even clearer by Article 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights which guarantees enjoyment of Convention rights "without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion".

These are duties which judges take very seriously.

They conscientiously try to honour them to the full. I simply do not believe that there are on the bench men and women holding the sort of racist views which have been acceptable in other countries at other times. Over years of practice within the legal profession it will become known that anyone holding such views does so, and no Lord Chancellor, at least in the last 50 years, would dream of appointing such a person to judicial office. So there is not among the judges, as I confidently believe, any problem of overt, conscious, card-carrying bias or prejudice. But, as the JSB Bench Book correctly recognises, it is possible for those free of any overt, conscious, card-carrying bias to be ignorant of or insensitive to the cultural traditions, habits, practices or mores of societies other than their own; to use language and make assumptions which betray ignorance and cause offence although not intended to do so; and perhaps even to accept unwarranted stereotypical generalisations and, as a result, to treat as equal things which should be treated as unequal or as unequal things which should be treated as equal.

But who will protect the judges themselves against these sources of error?

It is the question Juvenal posed almost 2 millennia ago: but who will guard the guards themselves? Happily, we have an answer: the Judicial Studies Board, of which I am proud and privileged to be the President. The judges are, of course, only part of our system of justice. But they are a crucially important part, not least because they perform their important duties in public, and the example which they set, good or bad, will be followed by others. I repeat that in my judgment these issues were never more important than they are today.

The work done by the JSB in producing this updated Bench Book is invaluable, and I offer my respectful congratulations to all members of the Equal Treatment Advisory Committee, particularly its Chairman and Vice-Chairman, Sir David Keene and Mr Karamjit Singh. It is now up to all judges, full-time and part-time, at all levels, and in all courts and tribunals, to "read, mark, learn and inwardly digest" the contents of this excellent publication, and, having done so to bear in mind an even more important scriptural injunction: "Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only". If these goals are fully achieved we shall have taken another step towards the fair, just, equal, plural and multicultural Britain which, I am sure, we all wish to see.

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