Six months after the lady chief justice told MPs that an equal treatment manual given to judges and magistrates was undergoing a refresh, the judiciary has finally published a ‘concise and user-friendly’ version. However, one of the lead authors of a report on racial bias that called for the Equal Treatment Bench Book to be revised has told the Gazette some of the changes don’t go far enough.
The latest edition of the book, published yesterday, represents the first major revision for three years. An interim version, published in 2023, ran to 571 pages. The latest version has 352 pages. Lady Justice King, chair of the Judicial College, said ‘the slimmed-down version is more focused, user-friendly and, therefore, more relevant’.
Each chapter has been updated, incorporating law changes, newspaper references and new statistics from reliable sources. Out-of-date studies have been removed. Significant revisions have been made to chapters on sex (previously titled ‘gender’), racism, cultural/ethnic differences, antisemitism and islamophobia, sexual orientation, social poverty, vulnerable witnesses and trans people.
Professor Eithne Quinn and Keir Monteith KC, lead authors of a 2022 report on racial bias and the bench, have been waiting to see if the latest version would reflect submissions in a letter they sent to the book’s editors last year. One aspect of Quinn and Monteith’s concerns related to two sentences explaining the differences between people on the basis of their race and ethnicity.
Quinn told the Gazette that the sentences were gone, which she welcomed. But she was still disappointed.
Quinn said: ‘The revised bench book is, to a dismaying degree, similar to the previous iteration in its treatment of bias and racism. The bench book still starts off with a statement about the basic inherent neutrality and fairness of most judges, rather than starting with an acknowledgment that we all possess biases and that judges need to be continually vigilant about their own in order to make sound decisions.
‘The bench book also continues to avoid directly and properly recognising anti-black racism – a term that doesn’t even appear. Chapter 8 deals with racism, and, as with the previous iteration, includes sections titled “Anti-Muslim racism: Islamophobia”, “Antisemitism”, and “Gypsies, Roma and Travellers”. These titles remain strikingly discrepant from the main one dealing with racism towards black people, called “Black perspectives”.
‘The focus on perspectives seems to indicate that, for black people, racism is primarily a perceptual issue for judges to manage and only secondarily a real issue in which judges risk being complicit. This is especially unwarranted given the mountains of data about discrimination targeting black people within and beyond the legal system.’
