Legal aid cuts deny parents their human rights, says ex-supreme court president
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Exclusive: David Neuberger believes lack of access to state-funded lawyers for family disputes is ‘wrong in principle’. The former president of the supreme court has said parents are being deprived of their human rights by having to fight for contact with their children without lawyers.
David Neuberger said legal aid cuts to family cases were an affront to human rights and that “taking away legal aid from family disputes is wrong in principle”. Since 2013, parents in private child arrangements hearings cannot access a state-funded lawyer, no matter what their means, unless there is an allegation of abuse. Legal aid is still given in public cases where the state is applying to take children into care.
Neuberger, who was president of the UK supreme court until 2017, said in an interview with the Guardian: “In this increasingly complex world where laws are almost always more complicated, particularly to a non-lawyer, you need to give people access to legal advice, you need to give people access to courts with a lawyer to represent them. And that’s equally true when it comes to divorce and children.
“It’s almost disgraceful to give them human rights and then not give them the ability to enforce those rights. Rights aren’t meaningful unless they can be enforced.”. Neuberger said legal aid needed to be better funded again after cuts by successive governments, the deepest of which were implemented by the Conservative-led coalition. The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (Laspo) 2012 abolished all legal aid in private family law cases unless there was an allegation of abuse.
