Holding the Line Against Tyranny and Anarchy (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Verdirame Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, as the second Member speaking today who did not contribute to this excellent report, I also commend the Constitution Committee. It focuses on the common ground that we have on the rule of law and on practical challenges. I will pick out a few themes.

First, the committee rightly says that judicial review should not be presented as a blocker to government action. The Government, in their response last February, accepted that but pointed out quite fairly that judicial review can cause delays to government projects. They referred to changes they were considering to increase efficiency and certainty. Can the Minister update the House on those plans? This might be quite urgent, because the latest Ministry of Justice figures show some positive trends in the length of civil proceedings—the Government must be commended for that—but also reveal a dramatic increase in judicial review applications in the first quarter of 2026. There were around 1,300 new applications in that quarter, up 98% on the same quarter of 2025, and there was also an increase throughout 2025. Can the Minister tell us more about the reasons for this increase and what the Government are doing to ensure that the courts can cope?

Secondly, as we heard before, attacks on judges undermine the rule of law. The same is true also of attacks on practising lawyers. I am afraid that no political side is immune from those. From one side, there have been attacks on lawyers acting for wealthy clients or sanctioned individuals and, from the other side, there have been attacks on lawyers acting for asylum seekers. All these attacks violate the same basic principle: lawyers should not be associated with their clients. Of course, if there are serious allegations of malpractice, they should be investigated thoroughly and promptly.

There is perhaps another reason why public trust in the profession has been undermined, which has to do with how lawyers engage with the media and on social media. When I was called to the Bar, there were very strict rules on media engagement. We were prohibited from expressing personal opinions to the press in cases in which we were involved and any public commentary that we offered as barristers had to be objective and fair minded. The purpose of these rules was to reassure the public about the independence of the Bar. I am afraid we now see some advocates thinking of advocacy in the American sense, where it means campaigning. In our tradition, the two are not the same; an advocate is not a public campaigner and advocates must maintain their independence. Our right not to be associated with our clients carries a corresponding responsibility, which is to keep a distance from our clients and not to become too closely identifiable with them.

It is also wrong and risks discrediting the legal profession in the eyes of the public for lawyers to describe some legal work—for example, acting for claimants against the Government—as inherently more valuable than other legal work, such as representing the Government in defending those claims. We cannot look to the Government for answers to these challenges because, as the Government say in their response, ethical standards are ultimately a matter for the independent regulators. As the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, pointed out, this is not just about rules or guidelines but about a culture that we are trying to defend. It falls on practising lawyers—many of us speaking today are lawyers—to ensure that standards in that culture do not slip.

The third area I will address briefly is the positive uses of artificial intelligence. One recommendation in the report is that short summaries of judgments be produced in as many cases as possible. This is already the practice of the Supreme Court and a number of other courts do it in high-profile cases. Producing an accurate summary is quite resource intensive. However, high-quality AI summaries can be produced more widely, for example through the “Find Case Law” platform at the National Archives, and some commercial legal databases already do something similar. Does the ministry have any plans in this area? I was pleased to read in the Government’s response about the positive feedback on the new AI capability for generating Keeling schedules. Are there plans to expand the system so that all of us involved in scrutinising legislation can use that kind of facility regularly? Legislative scrutiny is key to the rule of law. We all perform that function here, but we need the help of these very practical tools for assessing legislation quickly.

Finally, there was one footnote in the report with which I disagreed. It stated that some evidence before the committee was sympathetic to including international law within the rule of law, while other evidence, apparently including from myself, advocated the contrary position. That is not quite my position. I agree with everything the report says about our obligation to comply with international law, whether treaties or customary international law, but the question of whether international law in its present state satisfies the conditions of the rule of law is a much more complex one.

I refer to the excellent foreword by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett, to a recent Policy Exchange report in which he says that the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on climate change and the litigation that it may pave the way for risks undermining the legitimacy of international law and the rule of law. Indeed, a recent study has revealed that a very reliable predictor of how ICJ judges will vote in a given case is how their home states vote in the UN General Assembly. Imagine if it could be shown in a domestic court that judges’ decisions could be predicted based on where they come from. We would have a rule of law problem.

We must comply with international obligations, support these institutions and continue to promote the international rule of law, but we have to understand that this remains an intensely political environment. The international legal order is still very much a work in progress and, like much work in progress, it can be set back by an excess of zeal.