Insularity ‘leaves Scots law open to ridicule’

The Lord Advocate (your report, 12 March) has now admitted that the “Crown Office and Foreign Office legal staff failed to recognise the implications for Scots law in the run-up to the European Court of Human Rights’ Salduz judgment in 2008”, thus supporting the contention of many that the Scottish legal fraternity floats in a vapour of intoxicating insularity.

The highest echelons of that fraternity inhaled far too much of the vapour and produced judgments (in the Cadder case) that failed to give due weight to the rights of the accused to timeous access to legal advice subsequent to being arrested. Consequently, “all hell broke loose when their lordships (in the Supreme Court re Cadder) established that the prevailing assumptions in Scotland about the rights of a suspect to legal advice before interrogation were ill-founded”.

“All hell broke loose” because the capacity of Scotland’s “top lawyers” for anticipating the disaster was lost in a swirl of debilitating insularity. The Lord Advocate now tells us that the “Crown Office was pretty depressed…there was a risk that we were facing Armageddon”. What he fails to tell us is that “risk” was the direct and predictable outcome of the legal fraternity’s pompous assumptions about the superiority of Scots law.

Those pompous assumptions have not been deflated by the humiliation or the prospects of “Armageddon” that followed the Cadder fiasco. Far from it. The Lord Advocate now informs us that the “thinking that led to Salduz (and, therefore, to the Supreme Court’s judgment re Cadder) has Scots law in its antecedents”.

Apparently the Lord Advocate “reached back into the 19th century and the evolution of the status of the accused as compellable witness hand in cuff with the developments of modern policing. It turns out the first limits on the use that can be made of admissions made by a suspect as evidence in a trial were in 1887 set out in a Criminal Procedure Act”.

Thus, with the chutzpah that would have embarrassed a platoon of Ponzi schemers, the Lord Advocate makes his risible plea for the exoneration of the Scottish legal fraternity following its humiliation by the Supreme Court.

Clearly, the psychological architecture that sustains the mindset of Scotland’s “top lawyers” is too robust to be particularly embarrassed by the reasoning of the European Court of Human Rights or the judgments of the Supreme Court.

Until the scientific community produces an antidote strong enough to permanently dissipate the delusional consequences of intoxicating insularity, Scotland’s “top lawyers” will retain the power to expose the country to increasingly frequent bouts of utter humiliation.

Thomas Crooks

Dundas Street

Edinburgh