Legal regulation? Not at the Bar Council
According to today’s Guardian:
The Bar Council has thrown out several complaints of professional misconduct against the attorney general over his Iraq war advice, saying it has no power to investigate the provision of legal opinions to ministers by the government’s law officers.
Perhaps this was misreported. Perhaps there was much more to their decision than that. There’s nothing more on the Bar Council’s website. Indeed, I can find this reported nowhere except as above — not on the BBC, the Telegraph, the fiercely anti-war and search-free Independent (I used Google for that), or elsewhere on Google News.
But if it’s as stated this strikes me as loopy and irresponsible. They say they do not deal with complaints against judges, solicitors, barristers’ extra-curricular conduct, or alleged negligence by barristers.
But here we’re talking about the professional work of a fully fledged barrister. Yet the Bar Council has apparently decided there is no merit to the case. It’s not that they found the charges were unproven, but more fundamentally that they couldn’t even consider them.
The article continues:
A spokesman for Lord Goldsmith said he was “very pleased” with the Bar Council’s decision. “He thinks it’s come to the right conclusion.”
He has every right to be very pleased, because far from finding that he didn’t do anything wrong, they’ve found that he can do what the hell he likes with complete impunity.
