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, no doubt, many others - such arguments are mere “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 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 these pages on Tuesday: given judges’ powerful position, it is 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.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here