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Comparative analysis of judicial corruption
up the wider body of common law on the basis of precedent gave them a fierce sense of ownership over the law of the land, while elevating their status and intensifying their solidarity. In today’s United Kingdom the public perceives judges as a closed, apolitical group, detached from everyday life. Judges seem deliberately to cultivate an image of exclusivity through their clothes, wigs and elaborate symbolic rituals. The self-reproducing homogeneity of the group, with its white, upper class, mostly male membership, contributes to its perception as a ‘club’ with strictly restricted access. The effect of this is that a socially constructed gap exists between the judiciary and the rest of society so wide that it seems unimaginable that anyone could step over it with the intention of corrupting a judge. The image of being ‘unreachable’ also works as a psychological barrier, preventing attempts at initiating collusion.6 Ironically, this untouchable exclusivity does not mean that UK judges enjoy the unconditional confidence of the public. A Eurobarometer survey in 2001 found that only half of the UK’s population trusted its judiciary. But the general scepticism is not based on a suspicion of corruption; it stems from the very remoteness that judges in the UK work so hard to cultivate. As the TI Barometer 2005 demonstrates, people in the UK put corruption in the judiciary below the level believed to exist in other powerful institutions, such as political parties, parliament, businesses and the media.7 Even the tabloid press stops short of accusing judges of corruption, for example in instances when the outcome of a public inquiry gives a strong impression of being a whitewash (like the report of the recent Hutton Inquiry that centred on the circumstances of the death of a government weapons scientist and the actions of the government in the Iraq war), the press are more likely to attribute the findings to the conservative mentality of an old judge, rather than dishonesty or political pressure. In the continental tradition, by contrast, legal codes were introduced at the behest of the sovereign to keep society in order. Law came to be seen as an activity of the state bureaucracy, like taxation or conscription, and judges as another class of civil servant. In that tradition, judges never built up a sense of group cohesion comparable with their UK counterparts. Their group boundary is less sharp, and the perception of social distance between them and the public is smaller. In Italy and France, judges are seen to be politically engaged and open to pressure or outright collusion. If the UK is located at one end of a spectrum of judicial distinctiveness and other Western European countries are in the middle, it becomes easier to visualise the situation in countries at the far end of the spectrum where the judiciary has barely succeeded in forming a distinct group. In these societies – mostly developing countries or ones in which radical change has recently occurred – little or no internal judicial culture has evolved. There is no impression of even a slight social distance between those who judge and those who are judged. Under these conditions a judge’s professional self-identity is not a dominant construct for him or her; to be a judge is to have a job and little more. A person’s sense of being a judge is less significant
6 Although it should be added that in public inquiries and matters of public policy, UK judges often display a powerful bias in favour of whichever government happens to have appointed them. 7 See www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/global/gcb