Dishonesty and Deceit

I have never been so coldly angry as I am at Lord Young's further suspension of the Scottish judicial review of Palestine Action, now until after the Supreme Court decision in the English case. Subscribe now The grounds given - the public cost of the judicial review and the management of judicial resources - are ludicrous. The costs in Scotland alone of police time in arresting and charging hundreds of people as terrorists for supporting Palestine Action, the costs of the courts that will try them all, and the potential public cost of keeping scores of people in jail as terrorists, will run into many millions. This massively outweigh the costs of a three day judicial review to decide the legality of all this. Lord Young granted the judicial review on the explicit grounds that residents of Scotland whose human rights were being infringed in Scotland were entitled to seek a remedy from a Scottish court in Scotland's separate jurisdiction. He ruled this was irrespective of the existence of proceedings down in London, in another jurisdiction. These were already well underway. Lord Young ruled this... I am satisfied that it is appropriate to grant permission for this judicial review to proceed in Scotland notwithstanding the existence of English proceedings which are at a more advanced stage. As a matter of principle, a petitioner who has standing and whose petition sets out arguments of sufficient merit to satisfy s27B(2)(b) of the 1988 Act should not be refused permission because of the existence of parallel proceedings in another UK jurisdiction. The petitioner claims that his legal rights have been illegally circumscribed by the 2025 Order. He is entitled to look to the courts of his place of residence for a determination of that complaint... Any decision in England could not found a plea of res judicata in Scotland. A Scottish court would not be required by precedent to follow any decision of the High Court in England. There had been a number of recent examples of important constitutional challenges proceeding in parallel in Scotland and England. Since the granted permission for the judicial review in January, I have been five times in court trying to make the review actually happen. It has been postponed again and again in a deliberate delaying tactic. It has been postponed so that secret 'intelligence' evidence might be heard in secret court sessions that I am permitted no information from. It has been postponed by a series of suspensions granted to the UK government by Lord Young pending developments in England. Our petition for the judicial review was submitted last October. The review was granted in January. Dates were set for March. Since then it has been simply delayed and delayed and delayed. At one stage the review was postponed by Lord Young for three weeks so that the Advocate General could appear in person to argue for a suspension - after he had initially refused two motions for suspension. The Advocate General made no new arguments, cited no new precedents, but in a sickening deference to executive authority Lord Young granted the suspension. In which Hell we have been stuck ever since. We have spent over £200,000, raised from over 2,000 individuals, on multiple court appearances to try to get things moving. That is even without counting two costs awards looming over our heads from procedural motions to get things moving, which Lord Young ruled against and in the UK Government's favour. This is not just Lawfare by the government - an effort at constant delay, delay, delay and a deliberate tipping of the review into a procedural morass where no progress is ever made. It is Lawfare in which the judiciary is complicit with the executive. If Lord Young had no intention of allowing a Scottish judicial review before the English case is decided by the Supreme Court, he ought never to have granted permission in the first place. Instead they have exhausted our resources, financial, intellectual and emotional, by enmiring us in a process it is now clear there was never any intention of bringing to a conclusion. Everybody already knew the English proceedings were at the Court of Appeal and