The government will demonstrate its commitment to the rule of law by empowering its lawyers to give ministers ‘full and frank’ advice, the attorney general has declared.
Delivering the 2024 Bingham Lecture at Gray's Inn last night, Richard Hermer KC revealed that he will shortly be issuing amended guidance for government lawyers on legal risk.
The Attorney General’s Guidance on Legal Risk was written for lawyers advising on lawfulness and legal risk in government.
With the rule of law facing threats domestically and internationally in the current age of populism, Hermer said a culture that builds trust in the law and its institutions was required to ensure the rule of law is resilient enough to withstand these threats. ‘Too often, the starting for debate is that law is part of the problem,’ Hermer said.
Hermer said the importance of the rule of law was embedded in himself and prime minister Keir Starmer. Meanwhile, he said, those who know lord chancellor Shabana Mahmood ‘will know that there will be no repeat of failures to defend attacks on the judiciary under her watch’.
To demonstrate the government’s commitment to the rule of law in ‘real and practical’ ways, Hermer said he will issue revised guidance for assessing legal risk ‘that will seek to raise the standards for calibrating legality’ and empower government lawyers ‘to give their full and frank advice to me and others in government to stand up for the rule of law’.
Earlier in his lecture, Hermer said he was determined to make promotion of the rule of law a project everyone can sign up to irrespective of their political allegiance.
As a lawyer and citizen concerned with the country’s constitutional framework, he ‘watched aghast from the sidelines’ when a secretary of state informed parliament that sections of the UK Internal Market Bill were designed to deliberately breach international law.
He watched ‘with a mixture of fury, disbelief and profound sadness’ as the previous government introduced the Safety of Rwanda Act. Significant were the ‘constitutional heresies contained within the act’.
The act, Hermer told the audience, began with ‘an otiose and therefore crass assertion of parliamentary sovereignty’ and ‘ousted the role of the courts in determining relevant facts’ and ‘to accept as true facts that may well be false’.
Hermer said: ‘I felt not so much we had fallen through the looking glass but rather dived headfirst into it. On the international stage, the UK... has seen its rule of law leadership called into question.'
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