Sunday, May 29, 2011

Supreme Court or ECHR for Scottish Cases on Appeal

There is a debate raging this month about a Scottish criminal law case being heard in the English Supreme Court even with two Scottish judges sitting. The argument is that the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh should be the final appeal court for such cases and thereafter they should go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. I tend to agree.

Earlier in posts I argued against the need for the Supreme Court at all in British society. Most cases should be done properly first time with it being rare for an appeal. Moreover, there should be greater scrutiny of appeals on the premis that the judiciary are deliberately getting cases wrong which is corruption (being a perversion of the course of justice and criminal offence), not a miscarriage of justice which requires a lack of evidence or judicial inadvertence. There needs to be greater accountability as human rights is an "Ivory Tower" making lawyers and barristers wealthy where the system has effectively broken down ie the judiciary are causative necessitating an ECHR appeal. This needs to be monitored more closely and proper training given to the judiciary.

So I am with the Scots on this issue but find the whole issue of Nat Fraser's case somewhat bizarre given Lord Hope of Craighead was presiding in the case and presumably did not have leave to appeal from the High Court of Justiciary - Lord Hope of Craighead refused to sit on my case in the House of Lords, along with Slynn of Hadley and Hobhouse of Woodborough causing a miscarriage of justice as the case before him was premised on a perversion of the course of justice in the Employment Appeal Tribunal - the judgment fails to cite five case precedent, legal arguments and evidence yet bizarrely you can only appeal on a point of law. However Lord Hope of Craighead failed to notify the other judges of his work with the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists and lack of impartiality to Professor Richard Susskind OBE who is also a member and whom I was suing and is the reason for the perversion of the course of justice. Richard Susskind is IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice. I did not have leave to appeal from the Court of Appeal but appealed anyway on the premis the Woolf Reforms were implemented and therefore "Access to Justice" must include the House of Lords making blocking case law Lane v Esdaile obsolete. Prayers were also bizarrely said twice firstly by the Bishop of Derby and then later by the Bishop of Birmingham. Lord Hope of Craighead's stance on my case was also at odds with a website forward he wrote for Glasgow University where he wrote that he believed in access to justice! I did not bother with the European Courts of Justice as there was a four year waiting list, however, the key documents are logged in my current case before a Master of the Royal Courts of Justice in London, so there may yet be an outcome of sorts as minor relevance to that case albeit that case is stayed with a deliberate human rights abuse on it already and should be in the criminal courts on a perversion of the course of justice ticket against the judge. If justice is done properly and objectively then there should be no need for article 6 human rights abuse cases largely caused by the judge and should really go on appeal to a criminal court for perversion of the course of justice rather than be dealt with as a civil action or at least rarely dealt with as a civil action for reason of lack of evidence or inadvertence of the judge.