Page 30 - Judicial Diversity Update report

65
High Court 2 2% 3 3% 3 3%
66
Circuit 24 3.8% 24 4% 24 4%
67
Bench
All senior 28 4% 29 3.6% 29 3.5%
courts
68
All courts 173 7% 171 7% 205 7%
(exc.
Tribunals)

2.28. The proportion of sitting BAME judges in the courts remains low: 7% among
those judges who declared ethnicity (compared with 11% in the tribunals). This
figure is even lower when looking just at senior courts and is significantly
lower than the proportion of BAME people who applied for judicial positions
in these courts in the past few years, as well as their proportion in the legal
profession (see below).

2.29. Since our last report, one visibly BAME judge, Lord Justice Singh, has been
elevated to the Court of Appeal – he is the first BAME person ever to serve at
that level. Whilst the official statistics count two BAME judges in the Court of
Appeal, JUSTICE examination has found that Lord Justice Singh is the only
visibly BAME judge on the Court of Appeal. This puts the proportion of
BAME Court of Appeal judges at 3.5% for 2018 and 2.5% for 2019. There
69
are no BAME Heads of Division in the Court of England and Wales nor have

65 The total BAME number that year was 4, of which 2 were Asian or Asian British, and 2 were ‘other
ethnic group’. The official statistics then count them as 5% of all High Court judges. JUSTICE
however counts them as 2 (2%) for the same reason mentioned above in note 60.
66 The distribution in the High Court is 2 Asian, 1 other
67 Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, ‘Judicial Diversity Statistics 2018’, July 2018, p.6, available online
at https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/judicial-diversity-statistics-2018-1.pdf
68 Note that if the number of reported BAME judges is calculated of the total number of judges in courts
(2978) the percentage of BAME drops to 5.7%.
69 This calculation is a percentage of the total Court of Appeal judges.
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