Judicial Independence in democracies and autocracies: comparisons

Nauman Reayat

This panel discussion provides a comparative analysis of judicial independence in established and weak democracies.

Are judges in authoritarian states political and/or politicised judges because they are involved in political issues or are they independent because they decide politically salient cases against elites’ interests? If they are political and/or politicised judges just because of their involvement in political issues, are they any different from the judges deciding political issues in the United States and Europe? R (Miller) v Secretary of State (2016), R (Miller) v the Prime Minister (2019), Bush v Gore (2000), State of Texas v Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, et al 2020 are, inter alia, examples of judges deciding political issues in established democracies such as the UK and the US. This panel discussion provides a comparative analysis of judicial independence in established democracies such as the UK and weak democracies such as Pakistan and others. THE ZOOM LINK TO JOIN THE EVENT IS 
https://york-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/97201311557?pwd=RHFVL014SkNoamFzaHNWeTZxQmtRdz09

Passcode: 936127
 Click &quot;access the event&quot; to see papers&#x27; abstracts. Speakers&#x27; bios are given below.DATE: Thursday 9 September 2021TIME: 10:00 AM TO 11:30 AM (90 MINUTES)Venue: Virtual (Online)The event will take place via Zoom and will be recorded. Registration for this event will be understood as indicating consent to the talk being recorded.Joining instructions will be sent 24 hours before the event via email once you have registered. Add the event to your diary after receiving the registration confirmation. All welcome. This is a free event, though registration is required via Eventbrite.The information you provide will be held by the organizer under the University of York&#x27;s Data Protection Policy. We will use this information to provide you with updates relating to the event you have registered to attend and may contact you following the event to request feedback (feedback is optional). Information will be retained until the event has passed unless you request to be kept informed about future events from us.

Ajit Prakash Shah will chair this panel discussion. He is Commissioner, International Commission of Jurists, Former Chief Justice Delhi and Madras High Courts, and Former Chairperson, Law Commission of India. He delivered landmark judgments. Deciding on a twelve-year-long legal battle between Apollo Hospital and a non-government organisation, Justice Shah said that the right to health was a fundamental right and none could deny it. He ruled that one-third of the in-patient beds in Apollo Hospital and 40 per cent of the beds in the outpatient ward should be made available to the poor free of charge. As a judge of Bombay High Court, he pulled up and ned the Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party for imposing a bandh on Mumbai and ruled that no political party had the right to do so under law. He found that their actions violated the constitutionally guaranteed rights of the citizens of Mumbai, and imposed a fine of Rs 20 lakh each on the two parties. What’s more, he ordered that the amount be spent for public purposes in Mumbai.But the most widely debated among all his judgments was the historic one that decriminalised homosexuality by reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. The division bench of which he was part said that this 150-year-old legal impediment to the practice of homosexuality was discriminatory and violated the fundamental rights of the citizens. Through this landmark judgment, Justice Shah affirmed that sexuality was a matter of individual freedom and upheld the fundamental values of democracy. (The above has been copied from Gauri Lankesh's article. Please see her article at https://scroll.in/article/859865/the-peoples-judge-gauri-lankesh-on-the-unmatched-judgments-of-justice-ajit-prakash-shah for details on Justice Ajit Prakash Shah's contributions to Indian legal system)

Professor Roger Masterman is Professor of Constitutional Law at Durham Law School. His recent projects include an essay on Brexit and the United Kingdom’s devolutionary constitution, and a study of the influence of Judicial Committee of the Privy Council decisions on constitutional decision-making in the UK Supreme Court.He is the author of The Separation of Powers in the Contemporary Constitution: Judicial competence and independence in the United Kingdom (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and (with Ian Leigh) Making Rights Real: The Human Rights Act in its First Decade (Hart Publishing, 2008). Alongside Robert Schütze he is editor of the Cambridge Companion to Comparative Constitutional Law (Cambridge University Press, 2019). The second edition of his textbook Constitutional and Administrative Law - written with Colin Murray of Newcastle Law School - was published in the Longman Law Series in 2018. Law-related tweets, and short updates to the latter, can be found by following @mastermanmurray.Roger is a graduate of King’s College London, and has worked previously at the Constitution Unit, University College London. He serves on the Executive Committee of the UK Constitutional Law Association and contributes to the UK Constitutional Law Association blog: http://ukconstitutionallaw.org/blog/.

Dr Patrick O'Brien is a public lawyer with research interests in judicial studies, law and democracy, and constitutional theory. He completed his DPhil on judicial review and democracy at St. John's College Oxford and held posts at University College London and the London School of Economics prior to appointment at Oxford Brookes in 2017. He is an honorary research associate at The Constitution Unit, UCL.Patrick is the co-author of The Politics of Judicial Independence in the UK's Changing Constitution (CUP 2015) and the co-editor of Leading Works in Public Law (Routledge, forthcoming 2021). He has appeared before committees of the UK Parliament to give evidence on the judicial role and judicial appointments.

Dr Moohyung Cho is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Ewha Womans University, South Korea. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science at Duke University in 2020 with a specialization in comparative politics and political institutions. His research interests include comparative political institutions, judicial politics, autocracy and democracy, and political economy of institutions. He has worked as a visiting researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin and Seoul National University.

Dr Nauman Reayat recently completed his PhD on judicial independence in authoritarian and hybrid regimes from Department of Politics, University of York. His findings on online courts in Pakistan for inexpensive and speedy justice were considered by the Judicial Policy Making Committee of Pakistan during the National Judicial Conference 2018.

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Judicial Independence in democracies and autocracies: comparisons

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