Courts in Britain

Main article: UK

Chronicle

2025: Reform to reduce the list of jury cases

In December 2025, Justice Secretary David Lammy announced a massive reform of the system. The goal is to deal with the crisis in the courts: tens of thousands of cases have been accumulating for years, the victims are waiting for justice, and the mechanism itself is on the verge of collapse.

What will change?

• A jury will make decisions only when considering trials of murder, rape and in particularly significant cases.

• Judges will hand down sentences on their own in cases involving theft, drugs, violence and fraud.

• Magistrates will have the right to imprisonment for up to 2 years - previously the maximum was up to 12 months.

At this time, about 78 thousand cases in the country are pending. By 2028, at the current rate, this figure will reach 100 thousand. Thanks to the reform, the Minister of Justice promises to speed up the consideration of cases by 20 percent.

The key change is to reduce the list of cases that the jury will consider. This mechanism allowed the accused in some cases to drag out the process or get away with it altogether. Now more people will be sent to jail.

2023

Rising inheritance disputes

Courts in England have seen an increase in inheritance disputes. A boom in asset prices and rising prevalence of dementia are leading to costly family conflicts over wills, the [1] FT reported.

Large volume of cases in which evidence is collected by hackers for money

In mid-January 2023, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism Great Britain published a report on investigative journalism, which said that many cases in the country's courts revolve around data and evidence obtained by leading law firms through the services of hackers for hire.

This is evidenced by a multimillion-dollar court case between an authoritarian Gulf emirate and an Iranian-American businessman. The case includes allegations that a former Metropolitan Police officer hired Indian hackers, and lawyers for one of City's leading firms conducted a secret "perjury school" in the Swiss Alps to prepare false testimonies about how they took possession of illegally obtained information, the report said.

Researchers, together with Sunday Times journalists, back in November 2022 talked about Aditya Jain, a computer security expert who organized a hacker operation from. India The Jain gang was used by private detectives linked to the City of London and the Metropolitan Police to attack British businesses, officials governmental and journalists. The findings were then used in court cases and used as evidence. Some of the hacker's clients were contracted to major law firms with bases in the City, the report said.

A unique feature of the UK legal system is that a judge will in most cases accept hacked emails as evidence in court in the interest of justice, unless he finds reasons to rule them out. This means that the illegality of the evidence is not really an important factor in the court because judges prefer to see any evidence that will help them establish the truth in the case.^[1]