The Post Office scandal has thrown institutional failings in the justice system into sharp relief—and 'demonstrates pretty clearly that we have lost the plot', writes Theo Huckle QC in this week's NLJ.
As part of the mammoth effort required to bring this David vs Goliath fight to court, the accused postmasters and postmistresses were forced to accept the help of litigation funders—a symptom, Huckle says, of ‘a system in which citizens are required to accept this or else not be able to access the court at all,’ given the catastrophic erosion of legal aid funding.
What this ‘shameful’ scandal shows is how little the enshrined right to a fair trial is adhered to in reality, with serious failings and inaccessibility in both the criminal and civil justice system leading to countless injustices—some large, but many more small.
