A TRANS woman who claimed the Bailiff should not have sat to consider her application for a judicial review has failed in a bid to take her case to the Court of Appeal.
The woman, referred to in a judgment as X, had asked for a judicial review of the Attorney General’s decision not to bring proceedings against a senior officeholder in the JFSC who had forwarded to a junior colleague correspondence, marked private, which referred to her transitioning.
In November, the Bailiff, Sir Timothy Le Cocq, decided that, while a decision not to prosecute might be able to be reviewed judicially, on this occasion X had been too late in filing her application.
But the woman lodged an appeal against that decision, claiming that the Bailiff – when he was Attorney General in 2010 – had failed to raise awareness of the legal implications of the draft Gender Recognition Act in 2008. Sir Timothy should not then have presided over the case, she argued. She also claimed that “extremely close working relationships” between the Bailiff and the Attorney General raised questions about impartiality, and she also referred “without going into details now,[to] another issue, which needs to remain confidential at the moment”.
Sitting alone to hear her application for leave to appeal, Sir Timothy rejected the suggestion that it was the Law Officers’ Department’s responsibility to raise awareness of legislation which, he said, was a matter for the relevant department.
He continued: “Secondly, it is not clear to me what is meant by ‘extremely close working relationships’ in the context of this matter. The Attorney General and the Bailiff fulfil quite distinct constitutional functions and it is far from unusual for a judge to find against the Attorney General in, for example, criminal matters, or indeed any public law matters. The interest of the Attorney General in such matters, and the interest of any presiding judge, are not personal ones and there is no difficulty in a judge finding against the Attorney General in such matters.”
Sir Timothy reiterated the view expressed in his earlier judgment that there were important issues of law in the original application for a judicial review, and that it would easily cross the threshold for leave to appeal if it had been lodged in time. He refused X’s appeal.
