Arguments of judges over register lacking conviction

AS befits Scotland’s most senior judge, Lord Carloway has given serious thought to the demand for judges to publicly disclose their financial interests. “Paranoid” litigants, he said yesterday, might use the disclosures to seek revenge after losing court cases. Lawyers might be deterred in future from applying to join the bench.

To law blogger Peter Cherbi – and, perhaps, others – such arguments were “waffle”. It did not help that Lord Carloway could not identify a single instance of a judge being the victim of an online fraud after declaring his or her financial interests.

The case for judges to declare their interests on a publicly available register, as MPs and MSPs have done for several years, was best put by Moi Ali, a former Judicial Complaints Reviewer, in a letter to The Herald: given judges’ powerful position, it was essential that they be seen to possess absolute integrity and to be beyond reproach.

In 2014 our sister paper, the Sunday Herald, said a number of senior judges, among them the then Lord Justice Clerk Lord Carloway, had had to declare shareholdings as board members of the Scottish Court Service. The question then was, if they could register their interests, why could every other judge and sheriff not do the same? A convincing reply has yet to be furnished. Lord Carloway’s new arguments do little to address that deficiency.