Justice 2 Committee, 24 Apr 2001

Meeting date: Tuesday, April 24, 2001

Official Report 282KB pdf

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Petition

Item 2 is petition PE306. We are approximately 30 minutes behind schedule, so it would be useful if we could speed things up a wee bit.

Members have in front of them a note on the petition from the clerk. The petition concerns a request that all members of the judiciary declare whether they are freemasons. Members have quite a bit of material from the Public Petitions Committee: the petition, which is from Thomas Minogue; a letter from Jim Wallace's office; and correspondence from the Grand Lodge of Scotland. I hope members have had a chance to read the papers. You will notice at the back the suggestions from the clerks. It is open to members to suggest an option that is not in the paper. Are there any comments or questions on the petition?

The petition raises an interesting point but I am not sure where we want to go with it. We should take further action but we should not launch into a huge inquiry. One of the recommendations from the clerk is that we seek further information from court users groups and the Sheriffs Association. We could write to the Minister for Justice, who has already written to the clerk of the Public Petitions Committee. The final paragraph of the minister's letter says:

"It is of course essential that all who appear before the Courts feel confident that the Sheriff or Judge will act with complete impartiality as required of them by the Judicial oath."

It might be useful to ask Jim Wallace why we are not following the route that the Lord Chancellor is taking in England and Wales of compiling a register. It is not a public register, and it is not much better than what we have, but it might be useful to ask why we are doing something slightly different.

I thought that the Minister for Justice had said why he thinks we do not need such a register. I hope that nobody will be offended, but the Lord Chancellor's response was a result of questions about the quality of justice and the sentences that have been handed down in English courts. I do not think that that has happened in Scotland. If the Lord Chancellor's department had decided seriously to do something about the issue, the register would have been available for public scrutiny or there would have been an open declaration and so on. The register is irrelevant if the Lord Chancellor is the only person who knows that someone is a mason—he might be one himself.

To clarify, the letter from Jim Wallace's office simply states that it is felt that there is no need for steps to be taken at present, although no reasons are given.

I will try to make my questions short, although as you know I am very long-winded. First, as the independent judicial appointments system is about to be put in place, the issue might be raised when sheriffs are being interviewed.

Secondly, it might be useful—although it might be an absolute waste of time, a red herring and impractical—to find out how often sheriffs declare an interest and how often they withdraw from proceedings because they feel that they have an interest. It could be made plain that if a sheriff feels that it would be improper for him to continue with a case, he should make the appropriate declaration in court. It may be that he then withdraws and another sheriff takes over. It would be interesting to know how often that happens. That might come about because the sheriff knows a person who is involved in a case but was not initially aware of the fact. I am not sure whether that is ever recorded. That point could be raised with the minister.

To summarise, I would like to know, first—with regard to the appointments system—whether the issue could be raised at interview, and, secondly, if this is monitored, how often sheriffs have to make a declaration or withdraw from cases because of conflicts of interest, even if they are conflicts of interest only in their own view.

If we want to cut to the chase, we could just ask sheriffs whether they feel that the existing convention and requirement of having to withdraw from a case if there is a conflict of interest encompasses membership of a masonic order or of any other society or club.

We should ask another body whether there is a problem before we go on a fishing trip to everybody else. I think we agree about that. That relates to the options that are set out in the paper. We could write to the court users' organisations—the Scottish Consumer Council—or, as Margo MacDonald suggests, to the Sheriffs Association. Shall we write to both those organisations?

Yes.

That means seeking more information, but the point is that we want to get a handle on whether anyone thinks that the matter raised is a particular problem. Do members still wish to write to the minister at this stage?

It would be quite useful to write to the minister. Then again, perhaps—

I would wait until we have heard from the court users' organisations and from the sheriffs. We could then decide whether we need to go back to the minister, or whether we should go back to Mr Minogue. It may well be that the answers to the questions that we ask will satisfy Mr Minogue.

Is it agreed that, in the first instance, we will seek more information from the Scottish Consumer Council and the Sheriffs Association? To add to a point made by Christine Grahame, I think that, if we embarked on any further inquiry, it would be right for our questions to relate to general issues about what sheriffs are asked to declare and not specifically to this issue. If we felt that further questions needed to be asked, we would ask them.

Is that course of action agreed?

Members indicated agreement.