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HomeMedico-Legal AnalysisFormer UK Chief Justice warns of folly and coercion over COVID-19

Former UK Chief Justice warns of folly and coercion over COVID-19

The British government had seized on the coronavirus to "exercise coercive powers over its citizens on a scale never previously attempted,”, said the country's former Chief Justice in a prestigious annual Cambridge University public lecture.

The UK government has deliberately stoked fear over coronavirus while behaving like an authoritarian regime relying on police state tactics. The Guardian reports that this is according to the former supreme court justice Jonathan Sumption – in his most forceful critique to date of the government’s handling of the pandemic, the outspoken lawyer condemned the way “the British state exercised coercive powers over its citizens on a scale never previously attempted”.

Delivering the Cambridge Freshfields annual law lecture, Lord Sumption said: “The ease with which people could be terrorised into surrendering basic freedoms which are fundamental to our existence … came as a shock to me in March 2020.”

In his address Sumption said the emergency measures were “the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country”. He stated: “I do not doubt the seriousness of the epidemic, but I believe that history will look back on the measures taken to contain it as a monument of collective hysteria and governmental folly.”

“Governments hold power in Britain on the sufferance of the elected chamber of the legislature,” Sumption argued. “Without that we are no democracy. The present government has a different approach. It seeks to derive its legitimacy directly from the people, bypassing their elected representatives.”

Sage, the government’s panel of expert scientific advisers, he said, had this year noted: “Citizens should be treated as rational actors, capable of taking decisions for themselves and managing personal risk.” That warning, Sumption said, had been ignored.

Powers under the Public Health Act “were not intended to authorise measures as drastic as those which have been imposed”, Sumption added. The reason that legislation was exploited, he suspected, was that “the degree of scrutiny provided for under the Public Health Act is limited”.

When the law was introduced in the 1980s, he said, its powers were mainly directed at controlling the behaviour of infected people.

The government’s behaviour, Sumption told his audience, was characterised by “a cavalier disregard for the limits of their legal powers”.

 

[link url="https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/oct/27/covid-measures-will-be-seen-as-monument-of-collective-hysteria-and-folly-says-ex-judge"]Full report in The Guardian[/link]

 

[link url="https://resources.law.cam.ac.uk/privatelaw/Freshfields_Lecture_2020_Government_by_Decree.pdf"]Government by decree: Covid-19 and the Constitution – Lord Sumption Cambridge Freshfields Annual Law Lecture[/link]

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