- Sir Robert Buckland also backs law reform to bring in degrees of murder - but strongly defends trial by jury.
- Urges radical overhaul of Ministry of Justice - with prisons going back to the control of the Home Office.
- Says UK judges sitting in Hong Kong “provide a veneer of respectability” to an anti-democratic society.
- Strongly opposes scrapping short sentences of up to one year.
- The comments come in the latest episode of The Lord Chancellors: Where Politics Meets Justice, by The University of Law (ULaw).
Former Lord Chancellor Sir Robert Buckland condemns the current assisted dying bill as “unworkable”.
He also champions the importance of jury trials, calls for reforms to murder and manslaughter classification to introduce ‘second degree murder’ and urges an overhaul of the Ministry of Justice.
Assisted Dying Bill “unworkable”
Sir Robert Buckland describes the proposed legislation on assisted dying as “unworkable."
He has concerns about the current bill “being the product of a swift process without the checks and balances that I think are needed in order to make good law.”
Buckland says that in Canada recently an autistic person was allowed to go through the assisted suicide path.
“That worries me because we do not have the right to ascribe a value to another person’s life.”
“Are people saying: we can’t, anymore as a society, be burdened by the chronically sick, the very elderly who require a lot of care, disabled people who are in high need? If we are going into that sort of society we would be in a “dystopian nightmare.”
He adds that the bill picked an “arbitrary six-month period” that is "fraught with difficulty”.
The proposed law would put "huge pressure" on medical practitioners to come up with a conclusive view "that very often won't be right."
He also questions whether judges are really “equipped to be the arbiters of such a morally fundamental question”. The role of judges may now be dropped from the bill.
He adds: “This bill seems to be being rushed" and "that I think it is wrong and is something I worry about.”
Buckland’s comments come in the latest episode of the video podcast series The Lord Chancellors: Where Politics Meets Justice launched today, 11 February 2025 by ULaw and can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
In a wide-ranging interview with journalist Frances Gibb, he goes on to urge reclassification of homicide laws which, he argues, will lead to greater justice and nuance in sentencing so that the punishment better fits the crime.
“I am all for looking at different degrees of murder, because I think there is a yawning gulf between the choices for juries, between a conviction for murder and a conviction for manslaughter.”
He believes that the courts have to grapple regularly with manslaughter sentencing which can “never reflect with nuance the type of offending that they have before them.”
He cites the case of PC Harper, as well as gross negligence manslaughter cases involving medical professionals, as examples of the disparity that needs addressing through graduated homicide classifications.
Defending trial by jury
Buckland also staunchly defends the right to trial by jury.
Jury trials are under review for certain middle-ranking offences as a means to cutting the huge backlog in crown court trials.
Instead, technology could be used, he says, to speed up trials by helping juries marshal evidence and boost the numbers of sentencing trials a day.
"Eroding the right to trial by jury is a step we should take very, very slowly, if at all. I'm a great believer in jury trials." He highlights his work in paving the way for remote juries during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sir Robert, who is a barrister and was a part-time judge, says he favours abolishing the demarcation between the magistrates’ court and the Crown Court and having one unified criminal court.
Reform of Ministry of Justice
Sir Robert condemns the 2005 constitutional reforms under Tony Blair which led to a Ministry of Justice overseeing courts and prisons and the dismantling of the role of the Lord Chancellor.
He says that prisons should go back to the Home Office; and the Lord Chancellor be made responsible for constitutional affairs and be “a lawyer of standing.” The Lord Chancellor, he says, should be responsible for the budget and running of the courts - with the judges solely in charge of listing.
UK Judges sitting in Hong Kong
Sir Robert says the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong - where two senior retired UK judges still sit - provides “nothing more than a veneer of respectability.”
He added that if he was one of the judges sitting, he would “pull back: offering a veneer of respectability to a draconian, anti-democratic shocking development in Hong Kong law and justice is not place I’d want to be in.”
It was a “matter of outrage”’ that the Basic Law agreed on the handover of Hong Kong was being ridden roughshod over by the current administration in Hong Kong at the behest of their political masters in Beijing.”
He added it was not for the government to put pressure on judges to decide whether to sit in Hong Kong or not.
Scrapping short-term sentences
Sir Robert, who has sat as a part-time judge, also comes out strongly against scrapping short sentences of up to one year, which is being considered by ministers.
“I think that every judge should have the option of jailing somebody who's persistently
failed to honour community sentences, suspended sentence requirements. I've been there. I've had to do that reluctantly.”
“So abolishing them I think would be wrong. It was done in Scotland and there's no evidence from their change that it reduced reoffending”.
“There've got to be other ways of doing this rather than always resorting to the law as a somehow a quick fix to solve problems.”