Giving her Mansion House speech last week, Baroness Carr said: ‘Judges across many courts and tribunals have been subject to increasing and increasingly unacceptable sensationalist and inaccurate abuse.
‘They—and sometimes their families—have been subject to grave threats and intimidation both inside and outside the courtroom, both online and in the physical world.’
The Lady Chief Justice said judicial security training was helping but more needed to be done about attacks both on individual judges and on the democratic process.
Family judges, in particular, are vulnerable to threats from enraged litigants. Last year, a man was imprisoned for attacking Judge Patrick Perusko, a family court judge, in Milton Keynes County Court. In 2019, a man was imprisoned and given a five-year restraining order at Bristol Crown Court for stalking and harassing family judge Alison Raeside.
