The reference to judicial architecture in the title is not to the buildings in which judges sit and decide cases – although if that is your interest, there is a European group for people who share your hobby. There is a European group to cater for nearly every taste.

Instead, the phrase ‘judicial architecture’ is a piece of Euro-speak, meaning the structure of the court system. (Once you start talking in Euro-speak, you forget the proper words in your own language.) I shall be describing how a simple idea, contained in a simple sentence in a treaty - article 6 (2) of the Treaty of the European Union, as amended by the Lisbon Treaty – can cause a series of tricky problems, which are now absorbing some politicians in Brussels.

The treaty article in question provides for the EU to sign up to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). You probably thought that that had happened years ago, but the Lisbon Treaty has just given the EU legal personality, allowing it to undertake exercises like this. Here are some of the complicated consequences.

The ECHR is the creation of the Council of Europe, a body different to the EU and with more members (47), including Russia. All the individual member states of the EU are already members of the Council of Europe, and subject to the ECHR. The EU will not join the Council of Europe as a member, but will join the member states in being subject to the ECHR.

The enforcement of the ECHR takes place through the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. It is the normal practice for each member state of the Council of Europe to appoint a judge to the court. But how does the EU appoint such a judge? There is no procedure for it, unlike in the member states where the appointment of judges is an everyday occurrence. And judges to the Strasbourg court are appointed by the bodies of the Council of Europe – where the EU itself will not be a member. In a current opinion being discussed in the European Parliament, the EU will appoint three judge-candidates, and participate only in those Council of Europe bodies which oversee the work of the court, including the election of judges.

Then there is the relationship between the highest court in the EU, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, and the European Court of Human Rights. Which governs? The same parliamentary opinion thinks that there should be no formal preliminary ruling procedure nor the creation of a body or panel to make decisions when one of the two courts intends to rule on the ECHR in a way different to that already adopted by the other court; there is an existing dialogue between the courts, and that should merely be strengthened. But there will nevertheless be two high-level courts, operating under different systems, pronouncing on the same convention (because the Luxembourg court will interpret the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, which has rights equivalent to the ECHR and which should be interpreted in accordance with the ECHR). I hope that you are following all this …

The Strasbourg court is already over-burdened with casework, to the extent that the system functions at a scandalous snail’s pace. Although the recent introduction of Protocol 14 – after a long delay caused by Russia’s delay in ratifying it – should ease the burden, the question is whether there will now be a rush of cases against the EU based on EU directives. It has been suggested that the EU's directive on working time, and the rights of EU citizens living in other member states, could give rise to cases. Adding a whole new sector of law to an already staggering court is not a recipe for efficiency.

Given these problems, you might wonder why the institutions are going ahead with the initiative. The parliament report lists a number of advantages: it sends a strong signal of solidarity between the EU and wider Europe, and gives credibility to the EU when calling on its neighbours to adhere to the ECHR; it will give citizens of the EU the same protection against actions of the EU as we have against those of the member states, which is all the more important given that substantial powers have been moving towards the EU in recent years; and accession will lead to more harmonious development of the case-law on human rights between the Luxembourg and Strasbourg courts.

Council of Europe officials expect the negotiations with the EU to last into 2011. That will give you enough time to familiarise yourself with the bewildering array of institutional relationships that will form this new court structure. I think I might set up a special group for those with a weakness for discussing this particular meaning of ‘judicial architecture’.

Jonathan Goldsmith is the secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents around a million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies

A year ago, the Chinese human rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, disappeared. Efforts to find out what has happened to him have been brushed off by the Chinese authorities: ‘Honestly speaking, I don’t know where he is. China has 1.3 billion people and I can’t know all of their whereabouts.’

His brother was told last year that he had simply disappeared on a walk. Even though he was named as one of China’s top 10 lawyers by the Ministry of Justice in 2001 for his work defending victims of medical malpractice and farmers whose land had been seized for redevelopment, he fell foul of the government when he began to defend Falun Gong practitioners. After a previous detention in 2006, Gao was allowed to return home after publicly confessing to a number of transgressions. Once out of custody, however, Gao recanted his confession and described the abuse he said he had suffered. He also said his torturers told him he would be killed if he spoke publicly about the matter. Now, after Chinese security agents visited his home at midnight a year ago, he has just disappeared.

The Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE), like the Law Society, writes letters of intervention to foreign governments, when lawyers are harassed or physically attacked in the course of their work, and we have sent three letters over the years in relation to Gao Zhisheng. An analysis of the letters we have sent over the last three years shows that the most letters (nine) have been sent to China, with Iran next (five). A further 19 countries have been sent one or two letters (only Mexico of those 19 has been sent three.)

The CCBE also awards an annual human rights prize to lawyers who have performed outstandingly in the service of human rights. In 2008, we awarded it to another Chinese human rights lawyer, Li Heping, who was subsequently prevented by the Chinese authorities from travelling to Europe to collect it. He has bravely faced harassment and severe obstacles in his work, and has indeed worked with Gao Zhisheng on some cases.

Lest it be thought that Chinese lawyers are the only ones who suffer such horrible problems, I should state that last year we awarded the prize posthumously to a Russian lawyer, Stanislav Markelov. He defended Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist shot down in Moscow in 2006 while she was investigating atrocities committed during the Chechen wars by the Russian military, and several Chechen nationals tortured during those wars. The CCBE had sent a letter on Markelov’s behalf on 21 January 2009 to president Dmitri Medvedev, when we received information that Markelov had been assassinated by a bullet through his head on 19 January 2009 in the centre of Moscow on his return from a press conference. Markelov was in the process of appealing the decision by the court of Dimiitrovgrad to consider the early release of the Russian colonel Budanov, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2003 for the abduction and murder of a Chechen girl, and who was released on 15 January 2009, just a few days before the assassination.

We are not a human rights organisation. We receive requests to help in a wide variety of circumstances, often heartbreaking. Since we do not have the resources to do much, we restrict ourselves, by and large, to writing letters to governments on behalf of lawyers alone, and delivering our annual human rights award to a lawyer or lawyer’s organisation. Other bars – for instance, the Law Society – undertake similar activities.

The lawyers who suffer are our professional colleagues, performing their duties in impossibly difficult circumstances. Over the last three years, we have sent over 40 letters, sometimes in relation to multiple individuals, only rarely in relation to the same person like Gao Zhisheng. That is about one lawyer a month who is being harassed, persecuted or assassinated in the course of his or her work around the world. I have mentioned before that we should not be too complacent in the UK. Although it is of course extremely rare, solicitors in the UK, in Northern Ireland, have also been assassinated in the past as a result of their professional duties.

I end as I began: where is Gao Zhisheng? All lawyers, in a spirit of solidarity for one of their own colleagues, should be asking the same question. Where is he? Where is he?

Jonathan Goldsmith is the secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents around a million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies

There has been no bigger topic during the last week than the consequences of the Iraq war on the image of the legal profession. We have witnessed a succession of lawyers giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, and we have been presented with different models, as follows:

Elizabeth Wilmshurst, former deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Office: she resigned when her and her colleagues’ advice was not followed, and when the government pursued a course which she believed was unlawful – she was applauded by the public when she left the room;

Sir Michael Wood, former legal adviser to the Foreign Office: he maintained his advice that the war was unlawful in the face of hostility from his minister; he did not resign when the government went to war, saying (among other things) that questions of conscience are very individual questions and it would have been more disruptive for the legal advisers in the Foreign Office if there had been a host of resignations;

Lord Goldsmith, former attorney general: initially believed that the war was unlawful, but this was not welcome advice; changed his mind, following a trip to the US, to the effect that there was a reasonable case for going to war on legal grounds; on being pressed to give a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, refined that to the effect that the war was lawful;

Jack Straw, qualified as a lawyer, former foreign secretary, now secretary of state for justice: was reported to have said that he had often been told at the Home Office that things were unlawful but he had gone ahead anyway and won in the courts; wrote on a note from Sir Michael which said that the war was unlawful: ‘I note your advice but I do not accept it’ (although, as Wilmshurst pointed out, he is not an international lawyer).

There could not be more critical questions facing lawyers than the issue of whether to go to war or not. It is not only in hindsight that it was clear that there would be thousands of deaths, which is not the usual result of a lawyer giving the green light to a client. The war would have gone ahead regardless of what UK lawyers said – but without UK involvement, since presumably the UK would not have committed support and troops if the government had concluded that the war was unlawful. Around a million ordinary people marched against the war on just these kinds of grounds.

The models of lawyer behaviour presented by the principals this week will presumably reverberate in the public mind for a long time. It is good that there have been alternatives from which to choose. (I say nothing about the evidence of the other lawyer involved, Tony Blair.)

Regardless of the model of lawyer on show, the question of the meaning of legal advice has itself been presented in various models, too. We were told, for instance, that all the lawyers in the Foreign Office were of one mind that the war was unlawful. Yet the attorney general, who initially shared their view, came back from America with the view that there was a reasonable case to be made for the other side, which a few days later had hardened into the opinion that the war was lawful. Of course, there are often two or more sides to a legal argument, but will the public conclude that the law is something solid and protective, or a flexible instrument to allow, say, the most powerful to get their way?

I do not envy the participants in this decision, who were required to give advice in just the kind of circumstances which calls on the lawyer’s deepest core principles. I do not know how I would have behaved (and I fear the worst about myself). But I imagine that the legal profession will have to live with the consequences, in terms of the image of lawyers and the image of what legal advice means, for a long time.

Jonathan Goldsmith is the secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents around a million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies

Here is one of the big issues facing the EU: how do you successfully communicate laws and policies to more than 500 million citizens in 23 official languages?

I shall take as my example alternative dispute resolution (ADR). It is particularly topical this week given the recommendations on the subject by Lord Justice Jackson’s civil litigation costs review. The EU undertakes a huge amount of work in ADR, probably nearly all unknown to most solicitors. This is true of so much of Europe’s work, and represents the great disjuncture between the institutions and the citizens they are trying to serve. (In this particular example, the matter is not helped by the fact that ADR is bundled along with other so-called consumer affairs in the directorate that deals with health. It is therefore difficult to find for the average citizen, who could be forgiven for thinking that ADR would be dealt with along with justice matters.) I was interested to see that Lord Justice Jackson finds that even UK schemes appear to be not well known to UK judges and lawyers, and recommends a serious campaign and authoritative handbook on ADR.

My attention was drawn to a very interesting report published recently by the European Commission on the use of ADR in the EU. Only aficionados will read all 500 pages, but there is fascinating data along the way: Germany is the country with the most ADR schemes (247), followed by Italy (129) and Spain (76). The UK comes fourth with 43. However, the data on the number of schemes need to be properly interpreted, because some countries, for instance Germany, have decentralised their schemes, whereas the Netherlands has 44 different consumer schemes gathered up into one body. It appears that the UK’s Financial Ombudsman Scheme is by far the largest ADR scheme in the EU, with more than 100,000 cases dealt with on average per year.

The vast majority of the ADR procedures are free of charge for the consumer, or of moderate costs below €50, and are mostly decided within 90 days. The number of cases in the EU has increased over recent years: from about 410,000 in 2006, to 473,000 in 2007, to an estimated 530,000 in 2008.

The European Commission has published two sets of recommendations in relation to ADR: one in 1998 for those schemes where a third party proposes or imposes a decision to resolve the dispute (such as arbitration), and one in 2001 for those schemes which involve consensual settlement procedures where the third party facilitates the resolution of a consumer dispute by bringing the parties together and assisting them in reaching a solution by common consent (such as mediation). The commission has also supported the development of a code for mediators.

So keen is the commission on ADR that it has set up, together with the member states, a network of European Consumer Centres (ECC-Net) as a tool to have better informed and educated consumers, and to help them get the appropriate redress in case of a violation of their rights as consumers in cross-border transactions. They advertise themselves as being able to solve questions like ‘who can you turn to if you have a problem with a product you bought in another European country?’ The member organisation for the UK is the UK European Consumer Centre, run by the Trading Standards Institute.

Maybe you knew all this already, but I didn’t. Our tax pounds are going on a series of very worthwhile schemes to help citizens. But almost no one knows about them. I come back to the question I raised at the start: how do you successfully communicate laws and policies to more than 500 million citizens in 23 official languages? In particular, how do you do so through the haze of a political discourse where the EU is being blamed and ridiculed on a daily basis? Of course, the EU could do a million times better in selling itself, and journalists could occasionally change the lens through which they view the EU from ‘there go the lunatics again’ to ‘this is rather interesting and worthwhile’. But I believe that it is our governments (and I am referring to all of them, not just the UK’s) that are not serving us well. They are contributing a gigantic amount of our money and energy to promote many good things at EU level, including access to justice. But because they want to distance themselves from the EU to serve their own immediate interests, they are effectively wasting the money, because they see no advantage in boldly advertising EU initiatives which may help us.

My plea is that when the government considers and implements Lord Justice Jackson’s proposals, they at least include the EU’s ADR initiatives in any future proposals for a serious information campaign and authoritative handbook as recommended by him.

Jonathan Goldsmith is the secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents more than 700,000 European lawyers through its member bars and law societies