Shaping the future of Criminal Justice
by John Jackson
From: Human Rights, Equality and Democratic renewal in Northern Ireland edited by Colin Harvey
Hart Publishing 2001
Jackson Shaping the future of Criminal Justice
The exclusion of policing and emergency legislation did more than merely restrict the scope of the criminal justice review. We have seen that the review was charged with prescribing arrangements which would enhance confidence in the criminal justice system. Yet the exclusion of policing and emergency legislation meant that the review was unable to address the very issues which have done more than anything to prevent all sections of Northern Ireland society having confidence in the criminal justice system. The government's own community attitudes survey has consistently shown that catholic confidence in the police lags considerably behind confidence in other areas of the criminal justice system (for example judges) and that catholics have less confidence in the disposal of terrorist cases than ordinary cases.1 In its own consultation exercise the review found that for many the experience and perceptions of the criminal justice system were influenced by views on policing and emergency legislation. Asking the review to address the issue of confidence in the context of future criminal justice arrangements without looking at policing and emergency legislation was therefore rather like asking an architect to design a house without walls and a roof. The review group recognised this limitation when it rather more circumspectly stated that it was conscious of the linkages between the three areas of policing, criminal justice and emergency legislation and that "its efforts to develop proposals for a fair rights-based and effective criminal justice system which inspired the confidence of the community as a whole could not be divorced from the outcome of those separate reviews."2 To look to the recommendations of the review in the expectation that they will by themselves boost the confidence of all parts of the community in the criminal justice system is therefore somewhat misplaced, as the review itself accepted.
1 Community Attitudes Survey Sixth Report, Central Survey Unit, NISRA Occasional Paper No 10, 1999.
2 Supra n. 8 para. 1.22. |
