It was easily missed, amidst all the other news that this Government has generated over the past week, but the Court of Appeal yesterday afforded an important victory to Suella Braverman.
As Attorney General, she asked it to review the judgement in the ‘Colston Four’ trial, which saw four vandals acquitted on the grounds that tearing down a public artwork was protected under human rights legislation. This was a worrying finding; as Yuan Yi Zhu notes elsewhere, the defendants themselves had no problem extending the logic to other crimes, such as theft or assault.
In the wake of the ruling, Braverman used powers conferred on the Attorney General by Parliament to refer the case to the Court of Appeal. Not to overturn the actual judgement, but to clarify the law.
This move was widely ridiculed by legal Twitter, which rarely passed over an opportunity to discredit itself where Braverman was concerned. One legal luminary compared her to a cleaner; Jolyon Maugham went so far as to compare her legal acumen to that of a dog.
Several dismissed any allegation that the law was unclear. The All Party Parliamentary Group on Democracy & the Constitution went so far as to single out the referral as an example of the Government undermining judicial independence.
Now that the judgment has been handed down in the AG’s Reference has been handed down establishing that the jury had been improperly directed it’s important to point out those figures who jumped on the AG.
They were playing politics. They were not interested in the law.
— Tony Dowson (@TonyDowson5) September 28, 2022
Yet the Court of Appeal agreed with Braverman; convicting someone for public vandalism would not, in fact, constitute an unacceptable breach of their right to protest. (For a more detailed look at the argument, try this blog).
This case has been a useful reminder both of how skewed against the Government the legal commentariat generally is, and that it is nonetheless worth the effort of taking them on. Let’s hope Brandon Lewis keeps fighting the good fight.
