Report for thinktank calls for limits on ability of pressure groups in to intervene

A prominent Conservative barrister has called for restrictions to be imposed on the ability of pressure groups to intervene in litigation.

Anthony Speaight KC - a former chair of research at the Society of Conservative Lawyers - said in a paper for Policy Exchange that such a step would “would help to depoliticise the courts”, where the impression had arisen that judges worked “hand in glove” with pressure groups with which they sympathised.

He called for legislation to specify when judges may grant permission to interveners.

Mr Speaight said the pressure groups most often granted permission to intervene were Liberty, Justice and Amnesty International, who he said: “regularly choose cases that advance highly political causes rather than their original objectives (individual liberty, administration of justice, freedom of conscience). 

“Allowing pressure groups to intervene adds to the time and cost of proceedings, fosters the illusion that the court is the appropriate forum for changing the law, and makes for an uneven playing field.”

In his paper How and Why to Constrain Interveners and Depoliticise Our Courts, Mr Speaight claimed the growth of pressure groups as litigators “has been facilitated by the senior judiciary in conjunction with pressure groups”.

He said this had followed judges taking a more relaxed attitude to whether an applicant has standing to apply for judicial review, and “the readiness of judges to allow such groups to present submissions as an intervener”.

Organisations such as Liberty, Justice and Amnesty International “do not present a neutral review of the law in the manner of an amicus curiae, but rather present an argument for a particular conclusion in cases chosen that seem to have more to do with the causes of one part of the political spectrum than their organisations’ lofty original objects”.

Allowing pressure groups to participate in litigation as interveners is undesirable  because it adds to the time and cost of proceedings and “fosters the illusion that a court is the appropriate forum for decisions for which only a legislature is equipped”, Mr Speaight argued.

The courts’ readiness to allow such interveners had “created the appearance (even if this is not the reality) that the judges have driven the last two decades’ expansion of human rights and public law hand in glove with a coterie of campaigners whose attitudes they share”.

He complained that in one recent Supreme Court case permission to intervene was granted to Justice “but refused to a conservative group”.

Legislation should require the court, if granting permission for one pressure group to intervene, to look sympathetically at allowing an opposing viewpoint from a different pressure group, Mr Speaight concluded

“If a court then decides to hear no intervener rather than two, there should be no loss to the courts’ proper purpose.”

Mark Smulian